Biden left office in January this year as the oldest serving US president in history, and was dogged by questions, including from Democratic voters, over his health and age for much of his term — and whether he could handle the office’s demands.

His response was a brisk: “Watch me.”

In July last year, he was forced to drop his reelection bid after a disastrous debate against Trump in which fears about his decline and cognitive abilities came surging to the fore.

Support rocketed for Harris as she stepped up to the plate, but she eventually lost to Trump.

Biden, who beat Trump at the polls in 2020, maintains that he could have won the 2024 election too, but questions have long swirled over the responses of staff and key Democrats to his decline.

They have flared with the upcoming release of a new book on his “disastrous” choice to run again, and the publication last week of a recording of him speaking hesitantly and struggling to recall key events and dates.

Biden’s life has been marked by personal tragedy. In 1972, his first wife and baby daughter were killed in a car crash.

His son Beau Biden died aged 46 of an aggressive form of brain cancer in 2015, a loss which touched many Americans.

In the wake of Beau Biden’s death, then-president Barack Obama launched a “cancer moonshot” bid to corral the disease in the United States, tasking Biden, then his vice president, with leading the effort.

“It’s personal for me,” Biden said at the time.

“But it’s also personal for nearly every American, and millions of people around the world. We all know someone who has had cancer, or is fighting to beat it.”

“Nobody has done more to find breakthrough treatments for cancer in all its forms than Joe,” Obama said Sunday.

“I am certain he will fight this challenge with his trademark resolve and grace,” he added in a statement on X.

Trump’s administration cut cancer research funding by 31 percent in the first three months of 2025 compared to the same period last year, a Senate report showed earlier this month.

Americans in the capital Washington lamented the diagnosis Sunday.

Ariale Booker, a Washington resident who said her mother and grandmother had both died of cancer, described it as “heartbreaking.”

“I think that’s just really sad,” she told AFP.

“His last years, his life’s going to be really hard.”

© 2025 AFP