President Biden has tested positive for Covid-19, the White House announced Thursday.
Biden, who is fully vaccinated and double-boosted, has been experiencing mild symptoms, the White House said. At 79 years old, Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history. After Biden recently took a tumble off his bicycle, his mental state and capacities came under heightened scrutiny. Besides the occasions in which he’s stumbled or tripped on camera, Biden has also delivered some embarrassing gaffes and stuttered during speeches, which some have attributed to cognitive decline.
Biden tweeted a health update Thursday afternoon, saying “Folks, I’m doing great. Thanks for your concern. Just called Senator Casey, Congressman Cartwright, and Mayor Cognetti (and my Scranton cousins!) to send my regrets for missing our event today. Keeping busy!”
The press had started to question the president’s curious reticence and absence from the public podium over the last few days. On Monday, multiple reporters probed White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Biden’s recent activities, to which she responded by claiming he’s been busy attending frequent meetings. Biden has overall enjoyed a light schedule, traveling home to Delaware most weekends and rarely doing sit-down interviews and more than one public event a day, our Jim Geraghty has noted.
Amid record crippling inflation, an ongoing border crisis, and other domestic problems, now is not the time to pull disappearing acts on the American people, Biden’s critics have argued.
Biden’s diagnosis comes as his approval rating approaches basement level, polling at 38 percent according to a RealClearPolitics poll average from early July. Moreover, the vast majority of Hispanics, a formerly reliable Democratic voter base, are dissatisfied with Biden’s overall job performance, giving him only 19 percent approval. Respondents, and Hispanics particularly, are most concerned about the economy, the poll found.
On Wednesday, in a speech at the former Brayton Point power plant in Somerset, Mass., Biden, in a misstatement, said, “that’s why I have cancer,” in reference to the effects of pollution; the Internet was sent into an uproar, but the president was referring to minor localized skin cancers removed prior to taking office.