Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spent time over the past month in the hospital treating prostate cancer, a condition known by nobody in the White House, including President Biden. In December, he received surgery for the condition, and then in January was back in the hospital for complications including nausea, severe pain, and a urinary tract infection.
South Carolina Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley spoke out about this during the January 10 Republican debate. She said that Biden has been slow to respond to “over 130 strikes on our men and women in Iraq and Syria,” and that the breakdown in communications between Austin and the White House is evidence of that. you can’t strike back, she said, “when you have a Secretary of Defense that is in ICU and the president doesn't even know about it. What bothers me is how does Biden not talk to his Secretary of Defense every single day, knowing that we have a war in Europe, a war in the Middle East.” The fact that the Secretary of Defense would be so uncommunicative was, she said, “unforgivable.”
