By Katherine Tinsley
11:59am PDT, May 21, 2025
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CNN's
Kaitlan Collins fact-checked
Donald Trump after the president claimed
Joe Biden was diagnosed with stage 9 cancer. (There are just four stages of cancer.)
Keep reading for the details…
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Donald Trump implied in a Monday, May 19, press conference that Joe Biden knew about his condition during the 2024 election.
"Do you want to respond to President Biden being diagnosed with cancer? Are you going to call your predecessor?" Kaitlan Collins asked Trump.
"I think it's very sad, actually. I'm surprised that it wasn't, you know, the public wasn't notified a long time ago," Trump said.
He then dropped some false information about Biden's health: "To get to stage nine, [that takes] a long time," he said. "I just had my physical. You saw that. You saw the results of that particular test. I think that test is standard to pretty much anybody getting a physical."
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U.S. presidents are given the best medical care during their terms, and Donald Trump continued to speculate over the timeline of Joe Biden's diagnosis due to the treatment that was available to him.
"I think people should try and find out what happened," he said, adding that he wasn't sure if the murkiness around the timeline of Biden's diagnosis "had anything to do with the hospital."
"Walter Reed is really good. They're some of the best doctors I've ever seen," Trump continued, referring to the Washington, D.C., medical center. "I don't even know if they were involved. But a doctor was involved in each case, maybe it was the same doctor, and somebody is not telling the facts. That's a big — that's a big problem."
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Back in the CNN studio, Kaitlan Collins noted that stage nine cancer doesn't exist.
"Now, I should note, there is no stage nine for cancer," the journalist said. "There is the Gleason Score, which is a scale used to measure prostate cancers for their aggressiveness, on a scale of six to 10."
"President Biden's cancer is at a Gleason score of nine, according to the statement his office put out yesterday," she explained. "And that means his diagnosis is one of the most aggressive forms of cancer that is now spread to the 82-year-old former president's bones."
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Kaitlan Collins invited Dr. Curtiland Deville on air to discuss Donald Trump's allegations about Joe Biden's diagnosis.
"To the president's point there, as president, you do get access to the best doctors in the world, and you do undergo pretty rigorous screenings because of the nature of your job," Collins acknowledged. "So my question was, is there a possibility that [Biden] had this and they didn't see it during those physical exams?"
"It's quite possible and likely, I would say," Deville replied. "Prostate cancer may avoid the threshold of detection."
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Despite the speculation, a source close to Joe Biden has insisted that the former president learned about his condition shortly before announcing he had cancer on Sunday, May 18, as his last prostate-specific antigen test (PSA) was more than a decade ago.
"President Biden's last known PSA was in 2014. Prior to Friday, President Biden had never been diagnosed with prostate cancer,"
his spokesperson said.
