MAGA Calls for the Head of Biden's White House Doctor
The MAGA faithful are accusing Joe Biden's White House physician of concealing the former president's prostate cancer diagnosis, and they are demanding that he be subpoenaed.
Dr. Kevin O'Connor, an osteopath, attested to Biden's health for more than a decade as his physician. He said in February 2024 that the then-president was a 'healthy, active, robust 81-year-old male who remains fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.'
Biden, now 82, is now fighting for his life with Stage 4 prostate cancer that has spread to his bones. The former president's office said he was diagnosed after a small nodule was found in his prostate during a routine physical exam this month. His late-stage prognosis, as well as a spate of mental lapses in his final year in office, has led MAGA to allege that O'Connor intentionally concealed Biden's health concerns.
President Donald Trump's ex-national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, said Tuesday that House Speaker Mike Johnson should 'immediately subpoena' O'Connor.
'Ask if he ever did a cancer screening,' Flynn posted on X. 'When he pleads the 5th or mentions 'executive privilege'—that's all you need to know.'
MAGA commentator Benny Johnson described the situation as the 'most dangerous cover-up in the history of the presidency.'
'You're telling me that the best doctors and testing on earth did not *find* Biden's cancer in all these years of testing?' he questioned on X. 'Was every medical report a lie? For how long? Bulls--t... They knew. They lied. They hid it. For power. People need to be held accountable for this. Evil.'
A spokesperson for the Biden family did not respond to emailed questions sent by the Daily Beast.
O'Connor is a retired U.S. Army colonel who joined the White House's medical team during the Bush administration. He was appointed to be Biden's physician in 2009, when he was vice president, and O'Connor worked with the Biden family during Beau Biden's battle with brain cancer. He is a doctor of osteopathic medicine, meaning he is not an MD. Osteopaths have a full scope of practice in the United States but cannot prescribe medication or perform surgery in Australia or the United Kingdom.
Both Trump's current and former White House physicians are osteopaths. Trump's first-term physician, now-Rep. Ronny Jackson, was criticized by Democrats for fawning over the president in medical assessments, including stating in 2018 that Trump had 'incredibly good genes' and could live to 200 if he had a better diet.
Jackson did not hold back when criticizing his successor this week.
'This is either outright MEDICAL MALPRACTICE or a COVER-UP—plain and simple!' he posted to X. 'The White House medical team is the BEST in the world, and the blame lies squarely on Joe Biden's personal doctor—a known liar: Dr. Kevin O'Connor.'
On Fox News, Jackson told Sean Hannity, 'I want to know, Sean, did he get diagnosed years ago, and have they been treating this behind the scenes without us knowing about this? That's a distinct possibility.'
Jackson, 58, was demoted from being a real admiral to a captain in the U.S. Navy in 2022 after a Department of Defense probe found substantiated evidence of misconduct during his tenure as Trump's physician, which included allegations he made sexual comments about a subordinate and inappropriately drank alcohol with subordinates. He no longer has an active civilian medical license, but he still delivered care to Trump after he survived an assassination attempt last summer.
Republican skepticism of O'Connor goes back years, partly because he has been described as a longtime friend of the Biden family. Even before Biden revealed his cancer diagnosis, there had been growing attention on his health after excerpts of Original Sin, a book that went on sale Tuesday, alleged his cognitive abilities had slipped significantly by 2024 and that the media failed to cover it adequately.
The latest questioning of O'Connor's professionalism came from the very top of MAGA.
'I think that if you take a look, it's the same doctor that said that Joe was cognitively fine, there was nothing wrong with him,' Trump said Monday. 'If it's the same doctor, he said there was nothing wrong there. That's been proven to be a sad situation.'
The president added, 'I think the doctor said he's just fine, and it's turned out that's not so. It's very dangerous. This is dangerous for our country. Look at the mess we are in.'
Trump said he doubts Biden's cancer snuck past the doctors at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Instead, he suggested it was O'Connor's negligence or sneakiness.
'Why did it take so long? I mean, this takes a long time. It can take years to get to this level of danger,' Trump said of Biden's late-stage prognosis. 'It's a very, very sad situation. I feel very badly about it. And I think people should try and find out what happened.'
Other conservatives have been more explicit in saying they want a head to roll for how Biden's health was managed in the White House.
'He needs to be brought in, he needs to be subpoenaed, and he needs to answer some of these questions,' Fox News pundit Jesse Watters said of O'Connor during his show Monday. 'Who knows if [Biden] even got tested. He was supposed to have had a full test a year ago, and they said there was no cancer detected. Well, we need to know exactly what tests they did.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
26 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Harvey Weinstein still deciding whether he'll testify in NYC sex assault retrial
Harvey Weinstein is still on the fence about whether he'll take the stand in his own defense in his Manhattan sex assault retrial, his lawyer said Thursday. As Weinstein's Manhattan Supreme Court trial inches to a close, the former Hollywood producer will have to make his decision before the defense rests its case in the coming days. 'It's usually, but not always, the most difficult defense decision to make,' defense lawyer Arthur Aidala said. 'We're gonna make a gametime, more or less, decision.' Aidala said the defense team spent the Memorial Day weekend with Weinstein, who's being held in Bellevue Hospital, to discuss whether he'll testify. 'He thinks that the evidence at this trial has been challenged very forcefully, and many of [the accusers'] stories have been torn apart,' Aidala said. Still, he said, 'There is a part of him that is seriously contemplating whether in a he-said-she-said case, human beings feel obligated to hear the other side of the story. … There's no easy answer.' The trial has featured testimony from three accusers — one-time actress Jessica Mann, former TV production assistant Miriam Haley, and Polish model and aspiring actress Kaja Sokola. Mann and Haley testified at Weinstein's 2020 Manhattan Supreme Court trial, which ended in a guilty verdict and a 23-year prison term. The state's highest court overturned the jury's guilty verdict in that case last year, ruling 4-3 that the trial court judge shouldn't have allowed testimony of 'uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes.' On Thursday, the defense called Helga Samuelsen, who was Sokola's roommate in fall 2005. Sokola testified that when she was a 16-year-old model, Weinstein rubbed her vagina under her pants and underwear in 2002, and two years later, he grabbed her breast in a limo. In 2006, she alleged, he forcibly performed oral sex on her in the Tribeca Grand hotel, while her sister waited at a restaurant table downstairs. Samuelsen testified that Weinstein visited Sokola's apartment in 2005, and Sokola led her to a bedroom, where they stayed behind closed doors for about a half-hour. Prosecutors tried to cast doubt on Samuelsen's credibility, pointing out that she sent a text to Sokola saying she felt 'forced' to sign an affidavit for the defense, and bringing up her connections and friendships in Weinstein's circle. With News Wire Services
31 minutes ago
Can Trump fix the national debt? Republican senators, many investors and even Elon Musk have doubts
WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump faces the challenge of convincing Republican senators, global investors, voters and even Elon Musk that he won't bury the federal government in debt with his multitrillion-dollar tax breaks package. The response so far from financial markets has been skeptical as Trump seems unable to trim deficits as promised. 'All of this rhetoric about cutting trillions of dollars of spending has come to nothing — and the tax bill codifies that,' said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. 'There is a level of concern about the competence of Congress and this administration and that makes adding a whole bunch of money to the deficit riskier.' The White House has viciously lashed out at anyone who has voiced concern about the debt snowballing under Trump, even though it did exactly that in his first term after his 2017 tax cuts. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt opened her briefing Thursday by saying she wanted 'to debunk some false claims" about his tax cuts. Leavitt said that the "blatantly wrong claim that the 'One, Big, Beautiful Bill' increases the deficit is based on the Congressional Budget Office and other scorekeepers who use shoddy assumptions and have historically been terrible at forecasting across Democrat and Republican administrations alike.' But Trump himself has suggested that the lack of sufficient spending cuts to offset his tax reductions came out of the need to hold the Republican congressional coalition together. 'We have to get a lot of votes,' Trump said last week. 'We can't be cutting.' That has left the administration betting on the hope that economic growth can do the trick, a belief that few outside of Trump's orbit think is viable. Tech billionaire Musk, who was until recently part of Trump's inner sanctum as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, told CBS News: 'I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing." The tax and spending cuts that passed the House last month would add more than $5 trillion to the national debt in the coming decade if all of them are allowed to continue, according to the Committee for a Responsible Financial Budget, a fiscal watchdog group. To make the bill's price tag appear lower, various parts of the legislation are set to expire. This same tactic was used with Trump's 2017 tax cuts and it set up this year's dilemma, in which many of the tax cuts in that earlier package will sunset next year unless Congress renews them. But the debt is a much bigger problem now than it was eight years ago. Investors are demanding the government pay a higher premium to keep borrowing as the total debt has crossed $36.1 trillion. The interest rate on a 10-year Treasury Note is around 4.5%, up dramatically from the roughly 2.5% rate being charged when the 2017 tax cuts became law. The White House Council of Economic Advisers argues that its policies will unleash so much rapid growth that the annual budget deficits will shrink in size relative to the overall economy, putting the U.S. government on a fiscally sustainable path. The council argues the economy would expand over the next four years at an annual average of about 3.2%, instead of the Congressional Budget Office's expected 1.9%, and as many as 7.4 million jobs would be created or saved. Council chair Stephen Miran told reporters that when that growth is coupled with expected revenues from tariffs, the expected budget deficits will fall. The tax cuts will increase the supply of money for investment, the supply of workers and the supply of domestically produced goods — all of which, by Miran's logic, would cause faster growth without creating new inflationary pressures. 'I do want to assure everyone that the deficit is a very significant concern for this administration,' Miran told reporters recently. White House budget director Russell Vought told reporters the idea that the bill is 'in any way harmful to debt and deficits is fundamentally untrue.' Most outside economists expect additional debt would keep interest rates higher and slow overall economic growth as the cost of borrowing for homes, cars, businesses and even college educations would increase. 'This just adds to the problem future policymakers are going to face,' said Brendan Duke, a former Biden administration aide now at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. Duke said that with the tax cuts in the bill set to expire in 2028, lawmakers would be 'dealing with Social Security, Medicare and expiring tax cuts at the same time.' Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, said the growth projections from Trump's economic team are 'a work of fiction.' He said the bill would lead some workers to choose to work fewer hours in order to qualify for Medicaid. 'I don't know of any serious forecaster that has meaningfully raised their growth forecast because of this legislation,' said Harvard University professor Jason Furman, who was the Council of Economic Advisers chair under the Obama administration. 'These are mostly not growth- and competitiveness-oriented tax cuts. And, in fact, the higher long-term interest rates will go the other way and hurt growth.' The White House's inability so far to calm deficit concerns is stirring up political blowback for Trump as the tax and spending cuts approved by the House now move to the Senate. Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky have both expressed concerns about the likely deficit increases, with Johnson saying there are enough senators to stall the bill until deficits are addressed. 'I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about the spending reduction and reducing the deficit,' Johnson said on CNN. The White House is also banking that tariff revenues will help cover the additional deficits, even though recent court rulings cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump declaring an economic emergency to impose sweeping taxes on imports. When Trump announced his near-universal tariffs in April, he specifically said his policies would generate enough new revenues to start paying down the national debt. His comments dovetailed with remarks by aides, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, that yearly budget deficits could be more than halved. 'It's our turn to prosper and in so doing, use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt, and it'll all happen very quickly,' Trump said two months ago as he talked up his import taxes and encouraged lawmakers to pass the separate tax and spending cuts. The Trump administration is correct that growth can help reduce deficit pressures, but it's not enough on its own to accomplish the task, according to new research by economists Douglas Elmendorf, Glenn Hubbard and Zachary Liscow. Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Budget Lab at Yale University, said additional 'growth doesn't even get us close to where we need to be.' The government would need $10 trillion of deficit reduction over the next 10 years just to stabilize the debt, Tedeschi said. And even though the White House says the tax cuts would add to growth, most of the cost goes to preserve existing tax breaks, so that's unlikely to boost the economy meaningfully. 'It's treading water,' Tedeschi said.
New York Times
31 minutes ago
- New York Times
Get Creative
Last May, my father-in-law showed up at my house with a child-size drum set in his trunk. That might make some parents shudder, but I was thrilled. I was a drummer when I was younger, with a set just like this one, and now my 7-year-old son could follow in my footsteps. I've learned two things in the year since. First, you can't force your kids to like the things you like; my son has probably played those drums for 15 minutes total. More important, though, I learned that I wasn't a former drummer. I'm still a drummer. Even though I hadn't engaged that part of my brain in years, my trips downstairs to do laundry now usually include a few minutes bashing on that little drum set. I'm not making beautiful music — just ask my neighbors — but I'm having a great time. Every little session leaves me feeling energized. That spark of creativity is something my colleagues at Well, The Times's personal health and wellness section, think everyone could use more of. Starting tomorrow, they've got a five-day challenge that aims to help readers nurture their creative side. I spoke with Elizabeth Passarella, the writer behind the project, to learn more. After years away from the drums, I've been shocked by how good it feels to make music. Why is that? What you feel is what many of us feel when we do something creative: giddy and inspired. Whether you do something more traditionally creative, like draw or play music, or riff on a recipe because you were out of an ingredient, it gives you a little boost. And there is plenty of research that links creativity to happiness and better moods. Some people reading this are gifted painters and musicians, I'm sure. But others would probably say that they don't have much artistic talent. What would you say to them? You are all creative in some way. There's a definition of creativity that researchers use: generating something novel that is also useful. That could be the score to a movie. It could also be, as one expert told me, a brilliant solution to keeping your dog out of a certain area of your house. Or making up a weird game to play with your toddler. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
