Former US president Joe Biden is going through agonising days with cancer, his younger son Hunter Biden has said in a recent interview, giving new details of his father’s illness. In the interview, Hunter also raised some controversial episodes from Biden’s presidency, according to a report by the Qatar-based outlet Al Jazeera.
Speaking to presenter Paddy O’Connell on the BBC’s “Newsnight” on Friday night, Hunter Biden said his father’s current physical condition was very poor and that cancer was weakening him. “It’s really very hard. It’s truly sad to see him suffer like this,” he said.
“About my father’s condition I will only say this — it would be better if he complained a little more about his suffering, because things are not good. His cancer has spread. It has spread to the bone and other parts of the body. It is extremely painful,” Hunter said.
Joe Biden disclosed his cancer diagnosis publicly in May 2025, saying doctors had detected a fast-spreading prostate cancer during a routine physical examination that had by then spread to his bones. The diagnosis became public about 10 months after he withdrew from the 2024 presidential election. As the sitting president, Biden had all but secured the Democratic nomination, winning big in the primaries, though concerns about his age were growing.
A key turning point came on 27 June 2024, when Biden faced Republican candidate Donald Trump in the first presidential debate of the season. Though the age gap between them was not large, Biden looked notably stiff on stage that day, walking to his podium in short, uncertain steps and losing his train of thought mid-sentence. At one point, answering a question on the national debt, the 81-year-old’s words became tangled and he suddenly said, “We finally beat Medicare.”
His wife, Jill Biden, later said she had feared her husband had suffered a stroke, and that she had never seen him behave that way before or since. Trump seized on the persistent questions about Biden’s health to sow public doubt about the legitimacy of his policy decisions. Trump ultimately won the 2024 election and returned to the White House for a second term, having lost to Biden in 2020.
Among Democrats, the question remains whether the result might have been different had Biden withdrawn earlier or not run at all, an issue that has caused internal divisions. Asked whether he had watched his father’s much-discussed debate, Hunter said he watched it alone at his home in California. “Like everyone else, I was stunned. The moment my father came on stage I understood something was wrong. I had never seen such a vacant look in his eyes,” he said, calling the episode an exception, as his stepmother Jill Biden had. “It was all the more shocking because it had never happened before and did not happen again.”
The stage-4 prostate cancer diagnosed the following year may have affected Biden’s debate performance, Hunter suggested. “Nine months later he was found to have stage-4 prostate cancer and stage-4 metastatic bone cancer, neither of which we knew about,” he said.
Hunter Biden was himself at the centre of many controversies during his father’s presidency, with Republicans long alleging he used his father’s political position for his own business interests. He also struggled with drug addiction; in June 2024 he was convicted on three felony charges related to possessing a firearm while a drug user, including giving false information by concealing his addiction on a firearm application — a rare conviction on such charges. The same year he pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion over 1.4 million dollars in unpaid taxes from 2016 to 2019.
Although Joe Biden had promised during his campaign that he would not pardon his son for his crimes, he abruptly reversed his decision in the final weeks of his presidency. On 1 December 2024, with less than two months left in his term, Biden wrote that he had said from his first day in office that he would not interfere in Justice Department decisions, and had kept his word “even when my son was selectively and unfairly prosecuted.” Saying his son could be a victim of political vengeance, he granted Hunter a “full and unconditional pardon” for any actions taken from 2014 to that point, and also pardoned his own brother, James Biden.
Asked about this in the interview, Hunter acknowledged the pardon was controversial. “Was it good for our constitution? Good for the American people? Good for my father’s image? In no way. It is easy to criticise, and with good reason. I cannot pretend to deny that,” he said. But he added that his father’s fears about Trump had proved true: “I think Donald Trump has proved himself to be exactly what my father thought he was when it comes to taking revenge and vengeance on political enemies.”
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report