Over the weekend, the Biden family announced that former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer. The statement said that the cancer was characterized by a Gleason score of 9 out of 10, indicating it is highly aggressive, and that it has already spread to the bone.

Well-wishes poured in from both the former president’s allies and political opponents as the Bidens reportedly reviewed treatment options. But it didn’t take long for people to note a few questionable details about the nature and timing of this announcement.

First, it happened to come a little over thirty hours before the release of a highly-anticipated book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson that detailed Joe Biden’s mental decline while in office and the effort by people around him to cover it up and deny it was happening at all. While other books have already come out claiming to tell this story, none have come from journalists as highly respected by the political establishment as Tapper and Thompson.

Also, the day before the announcement, Axios released the full recording of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur, where the president’s difficulty answering straightforward questions was on full display at the same time his allies in the media were trying to claim he was “as sharp as a tack.”

That convenient timing and speed at which some Biden allies, like David Axelrod, came out and said that talk of the former president’s decline should now be set aside because of this diagnosis led to some skepticism about the claim that the cancer was discovered only a few days ago. …

The political class is still struggling to run damage control. The most promising strategy—seemingly embodied by Tapper and Thompson’s new book—is to try to pin the blame on a handful of staffers, claiming they hid the truth from media figures like Tapper who then unintentionally spread the lie to the rest of the world. But that would be a much easier sell if millions of Americans had not spent years openly talking about the very thing that was apparently being hidden from them. Still, the establishment will throw as many staffers under the bus as they need to avoid admitting they lied. They do not want the takeaway from this episode to be that they need to lie less.

And beyond that, if the establishment admitted they knowingly supported an increasingly cognitively impaired man, not only to remain in office but to serve an entire second term, it would shatter the illusion that our government is truly run by a president who embodies the wishes of the voting public, like we learned in elementary school. It would reveal the fact that, as long as they don’t actively speak out against or draw attention to all the ways the political class is ripping the American public off, the person sitting in the Oval Office is essentially irrelevant.

Whether the timing of Biden’s cancer announcement is a particularly disgusting part of the scheme to cover all this up or truly a complete coincidence, the last few days have made it clear that the damage the political class did to its credibility with its attempted cover-up of Joe Biden’s condition has not gone away. And that is duly deserved.