Former President Joe Biden said he would have resigned and abandoned his 2024 reelection bid had he known he had cancer while in office, in an interview with People magazine released Wednesday.
"If I had known that I was feeling lousy because I had cancer," Biden said, he would have stepped down, according to the Associated Press. He added that he did not believe "an 80-year-old man with cancer should be running" for president, CNN reported.
The interview comes ahead of the November 17 release of Biden's White House memoir, Promise Me, America, published by Little, Brown and Company.
Biden, now 83, said he did not know about the illness at the time. He maintained that "on an objective basis, I was the best-equipped person to do the job," HuffPost reported. According to the AP, he argued that his age was not disqualifying and gave him experience and deep personal relationships with world leaders.
Biden also rejected claims that he concealed his illness during his presidency. He said White House doctors followed standard medical guidelines, which do not call for routine prostate cancer screening in men over 70. In the memoir, he writes that he "was treated no differently from any other 82-year-old man in America," adding that perhaps he should have been, according to People.
Biden's office announced in May 2025, less than four months after he left office, that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. His office later confirmed that his last known PSA screening was in 2014, when he was vice president. He has since completed radiation and is undergoing hormone therapy, according to People.
In the same interview, Biden played down his June 2024 debate against President Donald Trump, calling it "not very consequential," NewsNation reported. That performance triggered the pressure from fellow Democrats that led him to exit the race weeks later and endorse then Vice President Kamala Harris.
Biden said earlier this week that his illness will limit how much he can promote the book. The memoir's first excerpt, published Monday by The Atlantic, describes an Oval Office meeting after the 2024 election in which Biden briefed Trump on the world's major challenges, including Israel and Gaza, the AP reported.
