Former President Joe Biden was seen in public for the first time since announcing he had prostate cancer.
WTNH, New Haven, Connecticut’s ABC affiliate reported Friday that Biden was was spotted at the Woodland Restaurant in Lakeville the night before.
As he arrived in the state, a crowd cheered for the former president as he walked through Bradley International Airport, the station also shared.
The former president expressed his affection for Connecticut, stating he ‘loves’ the state and is ‘feeling great’ after being diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer, a condition that was made public on Sunday.
The Woodland restaurant’s Instagram page shared their gratitude for the visit from Joe and Jill Biden, saying, ‘Great to have Joe & Jill Biden at The Woodland last night. He was so gracious and thoughtful in conversations with staff and guests. We very much enjoyed such decency and humility from our President. You made our evening very special. All the best.’
The restaurant also added, ‘Congratulations to his grandson on his graduation.’
On Friday, former first daughter Ashley Biden posted photos from grandson Hunter’s high school graduation.
That Hunter is the son of the late Beau Biden.
His sister Natalie was also in the picture, as was former first lady Jill Biden.
On Sunday, a statement from the former president’s office confirmed that the 82-year-old, who concluded his term in office in January, had been diagnosed with an ‘aggressive’ type of prostate cancer, which has metastasized to his bones.
‘Last week, President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms. On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone,’ a statement from his office said.
The announcement led to an outpouring support for the former commander-in-chief, though also launched conspiracy theories about how long he had cancer.
After Biden bombed his late June debate against Trump, questions about his fitness for office got even louder.
Then-White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre initially bungled a response when asked why a Parkinson’s disease expert had visited the White House multiple times.
Additionally, Biden’s White House physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, never took questions from the press, unlike Trump’s original White House physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, now a MAGA-aligned Republican representing Texas in Congress.
Trump’s second White House doctor, Dr. Sean Conley, addressed the press when Trump contracted COVID-19 just weeks before the 2020 election.
Conley was criticized, however, for painting a much-too-rosy picture of Trump’s battle with the disease, which could have turned deadly.
Throughout Biden’s term, O’Connor stayed away from the cameras.
Biden’s health had already been in the news due to a slew of books being released on the 2024 presidential race.
This week CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson’s book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, was released.
It chronicled how Biden’s inner circle of aides kept the octogenarian president away from his Cabinet, members of Congress and other Democratic Party members.
The president was largely kept in the dark, they reported, on how bad his 2024 polling was and how he had quickly lost the support of his party in the aftermath of the bungled.
In an excerpt of the book aides discussed putting Biden in a wheelchair after the election, because his physical deterioration, ‘most apparent in his halting walk,’ had become so severe.
In Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote that Biden needed fluorescent tape to guide him through a fundraiser.
Author Chris Whipple, who wrote Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, said on CNN last month that ‘this was different from a cover-up.’
‘It wasn’t a Watergate-style cover-up. It wasn’t a grand conspiracy as Karl Rove has described it,’ Whipple said.
‘The closest advisers to Biden believed, despite all the evidence, that Joe Biden was capable of running for reelection, of winning and of serving another four years,’ Whipple said. ‘Now it was really delusional.’
