“I guarantee you,” Joe Biden told CNN’s Jake Tapper two months before winning the 2020 US presidential election, “I will be totally transparent in terms of my health and all aspects of my health.”

Even as we’ve continued to learn more about the Biden administration’s desperate attempts to hide his severe cognitive decline over the last couple of years of his administration, his personal post-presidency office issued a statement on May 18 announcing that the 82-year-old was diagnosed, on May 16, with stage 5 prostate cancer that has metastasized to his bones. Thoughts, prayers, etc.

Various medical experts seem inclined to argue the matter, but I’m just not buying the “just now diagnosed” story.

Joe Biden, like other presidents, belongs to a special class of people, also including e.g. “super-athletes,” whose health and physical conditions are subject to near-constant monitoring and analysis by medical professionals.

The public, naturally, wants to know everything about a president’s health. So does that president and his inner circle. But that doesn’t mean the latter group wants or intends to disclose bad news to the former group.

The president’s perceived health affects everything from markets to foreign relations to, yes, voting inclinations. Therefore, the line from the White House — not just Biden’s White House, any White House — will always be that the president is in excellent health. He’s vigorous! He’s in great shape! No worries!

The claim that Joe Biden’s “aggressive” prostate cancer went from “undetected” to “stage 5 metastatic” in the four months since he left office is risible.

He and his doctors almost certainly knew about the cancer while he was still president.

They probably knew about it before he dropped out of the 2024 presidential race last July.

They just didn’t want YOU to know about it until he was well out of office and merely a sympathetic old man whose health situation affected only himself and his loved ones, rather than the so-called “leader of the free world” whose admission of a serious health problem might cost him, or his party, votes in an upcoming election.

“Totally transparent,” in Bidenese,  means “people look right through me and seeing nothing I don’t want them to see.”

It’s not just Biden. It’s not just serious medical conditions. It’s government, and the political class, from top to bottom.

Politicians love to squawk about “transparency,” but in reality they spend much of their time hiding anything they don’t want known and punishing anyone who dares reveal it. If you don’t believe me, ask Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Reality Winner,  or any of the other whistleblowers prosecuted for telling the public the truth.

The secrecy cancer inherent in politics is much more aggressive and deadly than one man’s medical diagnosis.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“8647.”

Those numbers are spelled out — in seashells — in a May 15 Instagram photo posted by former FBI director James Comey.

The meaning doesn’t seem unclear. To “86” someone, as I recall from my brief late-1980s career in nightclub security, means to remove and ban someone from a bar or club for bad behavior. “47,” of course, refers to Donald Trump, 47th president of the United States.

Cute? I guess. Comey doesn’t like Trump, Trump doesn’t like Comey, and neither of them ever skips an opportunity to tell us so. Big whoop. Any serious editor would classify a story on the seashell photo as “dog bites man.” It’s just not “news” by any traditional definition.

Trump, however, has mastered the art of creating fake “news” as a distraction whenever the real news (for example, billions of dollars in Qatari bribes, failure to make any progress, after more than 100 days, in ending a war he said would be over within 24 hours of his inauguration, a congressional stall on his “big beautiful [spending] bill,” etc.) makes him look bad.

Thus “86”  suddenly and magically became code — to Trump and his MAGA cultists, anyway — for “assassination,” and Comey got called in, with full “news cycle” fanfare, to explain himself to the Secret Service.

There are at least three ways, other than the assassination that the number in no way implies, to “86” a sitting president. One is impeachment and conviction. Another is invocation of the 25th Amendment by the vice president and a majority of the cabinet (or other congressionally defined body) to declare him unable to serve. The third is resignation under pressure from a credible threat of one of the first two.

Comey’s “8647” was neither a call to assassinate, nor a threat to assassinate, Trump. Period.

“The Constitution and the rule of law are not partisan political tools,” Comey writes in A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. “Lady Justice wears a blindfold. She is not supposed to peek out to see how her political master wishes her to weigh a matter.”

It’s hard to dredge up much sympathy for Comey. He arrived at that sentiment long after he should have. Long after, for example, his announcement that an FBI investigation into illegal use of a private email server to transmit and store classified information had established the commission of the crimes, but that the perpetrator wouldn’t be prosecuted because, and only because, that perpetrator’s name was “Hillary Clinton.”

No blindfold there. Comey peeked, saw that his political masters didn’t want a Democratic presidential candidate charged with crimes she had provably committed, then “weighed” the matter as ordered.

Comey’s past failure to charge real criminals with real crimes does not, however, mean that he should be accused of a fake one.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“WELCOME TO QATAR-A-LAGO.”

Thus read a sky banner dragged behind a small plane over US president Donald Trump’s Palm Beach resort/home on May 14 as Trump toured the Middle East and spent some media time defending his $3 billion golf resort deal with, and planned acceptance of a $400 million luxury 747 (to use as Air Force One for the remainder of his term, then deed to his presidential library) from, the Qatari regime.

Public furor (to the extent such exists) over Trump’s business ties with, and acceptance of constitutionally prohibited “emoluments” from, the Qataris centers around the notion that what we’re dealing here with is “corruption.”

I disagree.

To “corrupt” a person or thing (per the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary) is to “draw aside from the path of rectitude and duty … debase or render impure by alterations or innovations.”

In order for the Qataris to “corrupt” Trump, he’d necessarily have displayed some semblance of “rectitude” prior to their interactions.

Americans knew that was far from the case before they elected him to the presidency the first time in 2016, and gathered eight more years of demonstration proofs to the contrary before electing him a second time in 2024.

The golf resort deal and the 747 “donation” may be immoral and illegal, but that’s just the story of Trump’s entire adult life in business, entertainment, and politics. There’s nothing honest or dutiful there for the Qataris TO corrupt. They’re just cashing in on his best-known character trait.

Nor is Trump an outlier in American politics.

Mark Twain once noted in Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar, “it could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” He should have included the entire political class.

When members of Congress aren’t getting caught with  bribe cash  in their freezers (William Jefferson of Louisiana) or their boots (Robert Menendez of New Jersey), they’re getting suspiciously wealthy versus their government salaries by e.g. trading stocks affected by the legislation they consider.

When members of the Supreme Court get caught accepting bribes … er, gifts … from billionaires with business before the Court, it’s just a “paperwork error,” but we know better, don’t we?

If there’s a difference between Trump and other politicians, it’s that Trump just smirks his way through the “scandals” instead of denying what he’s up to with anything resembling seeming sincerity.

Are you trying to show contempt for this court?” a judge asked Mae West in her 1927 obscenity trial.

“On the contrary, your honor,” she replied. “I was doin’ my best to conceal it.”

Trump is a modern Mae West minus the entertainment value. We know when he’s lying. He knows we know when he’s lying. His superpower is just not caring.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY