East Bay cartoonist Scott Adams, the creator of the iconic “Dilbert” comic strip, announced Monday that he is dying from the same aggressive form of prostate cancer that former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with.
Adams, 67, revealed his battle with prostate cancer on a Rumble stream Monday and said that his disease — like Biden’s — has metastasized to his bones, the Daily Beast reported.
“My life expectancy is maybe this summer. I expect to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer,” the cartoonist said. For him, the disease “is already intolerable. I can tell you I don’t have good days.”
“I’m in pain, and I’m always in pain, and the pain moves around to different parts of my body,” Adams continued. “I’ve been using a walker or months now.” However, he said, he remains tough mentally. “The mental part, you know, I got that under control.”
Biden’s office announced Sunday that the 82-year-old former president had been having increasing urinary symptoms. Biden’s doctors found a prostate nodule and told him Friday that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and that cancer cells had spread to his bones. His office said that he and his family were reviewing his treatment options, with medical experts telling the Associated Press that his form of cancer is treatable, but not curable.
Adams didn’t specify when he was diagnosed but the vocal supporter of Donald Trump appeared to go along with some of the speculation, especially among the president’s supporters, that Biden knew about his cancer diagnosis before he says he learned about it on Friday.
Adams said he’s had his cancer “longer than (Biden) has had it. … Well, longer than he’s admitted to having it.”
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., is among the leading MAGA figures who have been pushing the theory that Biden and the people around him engaged in a cover-up to hide his prostate cancer before the 2024 election in a bid to stay in power, the Daily Beast also reported.
But Adams wouldn’t go that far, conceding that it is “possible” Biden didn’t show signs of the disease until recently. He also said he didn’t publicly reveal his diagnosis until Monday because he’s seen the “cruel” way people have reacted to Biden’s news.
Adams said he expected that people online — especially his enemies, who he said tend to be Democrats — would be “cruel” to him as well.
“People are going to say it’s something I brought on myself,” Adams said. “They’re going to say it’s because I lived a bad life. People are going to be really, really terrible. So I wanted to reduce the number of months or weeks … reduce the time people are going to be terrible to me online.”
In acknowledging his grim prognosis, Adams said he could soon reach a point where he would take advantage of California’s End of Life Option Act (EOLOA), which allows terminally ill adults with a life expectancy of six months or less to end their life with a medication prescribed by a physician.
“I was actually an activist when California was considering this,” Adams said. “Once you get to the point where you’re definitely going to die, there is a very civilized process where you can get some juice that you drink that makes you fall asleep and then you pass away.”
The past several years have been a challenge for Adams in other ways. His famous comic strip, long one of the most popular in the country and appearing in more than 2,000 newspapers at its peak, was dropped by hundreds of newspapers in 2023 after he called Black Americans a “hate group.”
Adams had been engaging in an incendiary diatribe on race relations in America. True to his vision of himself as a renegade truth teller, Adams said his “cancellation” was “predictable” while claiming his explosive remarks were meant to hold up “the mirror” to what Americans really think. He argued that his critics failed to put his comments on race into “context” or to recognize that he was using “hyperbole” to make an important point about U.S. culture.
At the time, Adams also said that the publisher of his books on career and life advice had canceled his upcoming and backlisted works, as well. But he scoffed at the idea that he had lost “all his money,” as one person on social media said. During the “Dilbert” heyday, Adams became a multimillionaire by penning not only the comic strip but by marketing related books and merchandise and launching a short-lived Dilbert TV show.
