The President Needs Medical Attention

This piece was first published in our news digest, The Front Page. To get our latest scoops, investigations, and columns in your inbox every morning, Monday through Thursday, become a Free Press subscriber today:

Subscribe now

It is time for Joe Biden, the president of the United States, to submit to a medical assessment performed by a group of independent doctors, doctors who are given carte blanche to release their findings. After Biden’s alarming performance at last week’s presidential debate, his stumbling over words, his inability to form a coherent argument, his slack jaw and blank stare, it became undeniable that something drastic had happened to the 81-year-old leader of the free world. It is time for the public to know what is wrong—and what isn’t wrong—with him.

Instead of taking medically necessary action, Biden’s White House and campaign staff are floating their own diagnoses. The president suffered from a new malady now known as One Bad Night syndrome, or he had a late-breaking cold, or—as per the vice president—he experienced “a slow start,” or, as per the House minority leader, “a setback.” Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison acknowledged Biden has a condition that afflicts us all: an inability to get younger. 

But you don’t have to be a doctor, or even a Google doctor like most of us, to conclude that these explanations sound like cover-ups. The people around Biden have also decided to turn the tables on the growing number of commentators and others who have concluded, based on recent observation, that Biden is unfit to have a second term. They have diagnosed those calling for Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race as being “bed-wetters.” It does seem to be a bad idea to inject the notion of incontinence into this discussion.

There is a long history in the U.S. of suppressing knowledge of presidential maladies, from First Lady Edith Wilson secretly being de facto president after her husband Woodrow suffered a disabling stroke, to hiding that Franklin Roosevelt used a wheelchair as a result of polio. As Bari Weiss described in The Free Press on Friday, the Biden White House’s own cover-up has entailed going on the offensive against journalists and others who have dared bring to light the increasing evidence of the octogenarian leader’s decline.

In the absence of actual medical scrutiny, serious diagnoses are being floated: Alzheimer’s, Lewy body dementia, stroke, and Parkinson’s. The Parkinson’s diagnosis seems to be leading the pack. 

It should be noted that in February the physician to the president, Kevin C. O’Connor, released the results of Biden’s annual physical and stated there were “no findings which would be consistent” with Parkinson’s. O’Connor’s overall conclusion was that Biden “remains fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency.” It is not reassuring that this conclusion rings so false to so many in such a short time.

The day after his debate fiasco Biden was back on the campaign trail, and back to reading from a teleprompter. He said that unlike his opponent Donald Trump, “I know how to tell the truth.” So please, Joe, gather the doctors, and let them tell us the truth about how you really are.

Emily Yoffe is a senior editor at The Free Press. You can follow her on X at @emilyyoffe. Read Bari Weiss’s reaction to last week’s debate, “They Knew.”