Appearing with a fresh bandage on his head, former US President Joe Biden told Nebraska Democrats on Friday that his late son Beau Biden should have been elected commander in chief in 2020.
Speaking at the Nebraska Democratic Party’s Ben Nelson Gala, Biden remembered Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015, and criticized President Donald Trump. He accused him of cutting federal funding for cancer research after previously declaring it a priority.
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“Folks, I know what cancer research means,” Biden said. “Cancer hits every family. It hit my family hard.”
“When the love of my life, my oldest son, the attorney general of the state of Delaware, who was supposed to be president, not me, volunteered for a year in Iraq, he didn’t have to, he came back with stage four glioblastoma because he was living in a burn pit just like those people on 9/11, and he died,” Biden said, as reported by the New York Post.
It was Biden’s second public appearance in the past week and his second since completing a round of radiation therapy in October for an aggressive form of prostate cancer diagnosed after he left office.
Although he didn’t mention his health when talking about cancer, it wasn’t about himself, but about his late son Beau, who died in 2015.
Friday’s event also marked Biden’s first purely political appearance since Labor Day 2024, when he joined Vice President Kamala Harris at a labor rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, two months before the November 5, 2024, election.
Biden calls for a political comeback
Biden called for a political comeback, if not for himself, but for an audience hungry for a fight.
“You know what it’s like to be outnumbered,” he told Democrats in Nebraska, where Republicans have carried the state in every presidential election since 1968. “But every election, you put up signs in your backyard and make your voices heard. The country needs you.”
It was the kind of pep talk that sells in a place where Democrats are losing across the state, but they ran winning races in the Omaha-area 2nd District, elected a Democratic mayor for the first time since 2009 and feel primed to take the 2nd District seat in 2026.
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Biden has been encouraging, but has repeatedly returned to his view of the highlights of his lone period, curbing COVID-19 and starting an economic recovery from the epidemic.
He didn’t touch on the struggles he had last year or the year of debate Democrats had about how they lost the presidency to Republican Donald Trump.
In the summer of 2024, Biden waited more than three weeks after a disastrous June debate with Donald Trump, a delay that caused panic among Democrats, before announcing in July that he would not seek another term. He went on to endorse then-Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor on the Democratic nomination.
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In a book published in September, Harris wrote that she and others in Biden’s inner circle should have been more forceful in urging him to consider stepping down sooner, the AP reported.
During his speech on Friday, Biden admitted that the difficulty of the decision was through an oblique joke.
“I have a dubious distinction. I’m the youngest man ever elected to the US Senate and I’m the oldest damn president,” he joked.
(With input from agencies)
