Joe Biden Says He Would Have Resigned as President If He’d Known He Had Cancer
by Sari Moon · Thought CatalogBy Sari Moon
Updated 51 minutes ago, November 12, 2026
Joe Biden says he would have resigned as president and dropped his reelection bid if he’d known he had cancer.
Biden framed it as a hypothetical in a People interview published Wednesday, tied to his new memoir, Promise Me, America, out November 17. His exact words: “What I can’t say, because there’s no evidence of it, if I had known that I was feeling lousy because I had cancer, I would have resigned. I would’ve not gone forward, because I don’t think an 80-year-old man with cancer should be running for [president]. But that wasn’t the case.”
That answer carries a built-in denial. He makes neither claim about his time in office or the 2024 campaign: his opening qualification declines to assert that cancer was present then or that it explained how he felt. He still insists he did not know.
The diagnosis came later. He left the White House on January 20, 2025, and about four months after that, worsening urinary symptoms led doctors to a prostate nodule. He was diagnosed May 16, 2025, and his office announced it two days later: metastatic prostate cancer, a Gleason score of 9, spread to the bone.
That is stage 4, in the most aggressive grade group. A spokesperson said his last known PSA test was in 2014, back when he was still vice president.
His explanation for the gap is the screening guidance. Standard practice stops routine prostate testing after 70, and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends against it for men that age. In the book he writes that he wishes it had been caught sooner, but that he “was treated no differently from any other eighty-two-year-old man in America.”
Critics, Trump among them, questioned the timing almost as soon as the diagnosis went public. Biden calls that a “cynical twist” and told People, “I wasn’t hiding it at all.”
His own quote leaves the question open. An earlier cancer could have gone undetected, and no public medical record documents a cancer diagnosis during his presidency.
Even now he defends the campaign. He still calls his June 2024 debate against Trump “not very consequential” and says that “on an objective basis” he believes he “was the best-equipped person to do the job.” He dropped out that July and endorsed Kamala Harris, who lost.
He finished a course of radiation in October 2025 and has stayed on hormone therapy, with the disease still present. He turns 84 on November 20, takes eight pills a day, and says recent tests show the cancer has not spread beyond what was already found. He is scaling back his book tour because some days are harder than others.
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