A Democratic congressman said on Wednesday that a trip he took with former President Joe Biden during his term reminded him of his own ailing father.
“We just had this moment where he met the president of Ireland and the whole tour was going extremely well, and the president was in great, great spirits,” Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., told CNN’s Jake Tapper of his trip to the Emerald Isle in April 2023.
“And it reminded me, this is my father who was suffering from Parkinson’s later in life, we‘d have a family reunion and he‘d be all charged up. And, you know, he had that energy and you could hear his voice. And then when it was over, the air came out of the balloon.”
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On Sunday, the former president’s prostate cancer diagnosis was announced, with his spokesperson telling Fox News that the last time he received a blood test that screens for prostate cancer was in 2014.
“Right after all of these events, when you saw the president, it was unfortunately, the air going out of the balloon,” Quigley said. “It was a whole different person. You could hardly hear him speak. He was, you know, breathy… and very frail.”
Quigley was one of over 200 interviews conducted for Tapper’s new book, “Original Sin,” co-authored with Axios journalist Alex Thompson.
The book looks in part at the efforts made by top Biden aides and allies to hide the truth about Biden’s mental and physical health, providing a depiction of a president who was routinely addled during his term.
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Quigley said that he told his former colleague, Brian Higgins, a Democrat from New York, that they also saw similarities between Higgins’ father and Biden.
“His father passed from a neurodegenerative disease,” Quigley said. “We actually felt the same thing in watching what the president was going through… This was a tragedy that we saw not just with our family but with the president that we liked and respected. It‘s hard to watch.”
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