The Joe Biden cancer story that matters most | Will Bunch Newsletter

It still feels like the glorious blue-skied fall day when a plurality of American voters chose tyranny over democracy was just last week, but if you live in Pennsylvania you do get another crack at that whole voting thing today (Tuesday). A Democratic primary in Philadelphia is essentially a referendum on the eight-year record of progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner, but voters across the Keystone State will be picking mayors or school board members in a year when everything is up for grabs. If you are eligible to vote today, please don’t blow this one off.

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Sunday’s news flash that 82-year-old ex-president Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that’s already spread to surrounding bones sparked strong reactions. They ranged from sadness among the millions with warm feelings toward his former First Family to a new wave of conspiracy mongering on the hostile political right.

But I’m a little surprised more attention wasn’t paid to a bitter irony that makes the Biden story more poignant but also infuriating.

Nothing symbolized the bold ambitions of Biden’s one-term presidency more than his push — first launched nearly a decade ago after his son Beau died from brain cancer at age 46 — for a “cancer moonshot” that would show how America can still achieve great things, and how good government can help make it happen.

In a 2016 speech heralding the idea, Biden invoked John F. Kennedy’s epic defense of the ambitious 1960s’ space program — that the United States chases big goals “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

It’s sad to think that Biden’s dream of a cancer cure, which he rekindled with a 2022 push that funneled hundreds of millions of new dollars into critical research, didn’t happen quickly enough to better improve the prognosis for the form of the disease that eventually came for him.

But what’s truly outrageous is that Biden’s small-handed and even smaller-minded successor — in doing the exact opposite of his huckster pitch to “Make America Great Again” — has launched the equivalent of a neutron bomb toward Biden’s “moonshot” that would devastate the entire U.S. infrastructure that’s seeking to end cancer as we know it.

I get why Biden’s illness is big news, but I’d argue that the much more important story is about the millions of Americans like this 43-year-old colorectal cancer patient who was quoted anonymously in a recent U.S. Senate report on the state of research in 2025. The woman — having already tried surgery, radiation, and 48 rounds of chemotherapy — had placed her hopes on a T-cell therapy experiment that abruptly ended because of the steep staffing cuts at the National Institutes of Health pulled off by Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE.

“The reality is that by reducing money and staff, the NIH [National Institutes of Health] will not be able to produce my treatment — and it might cost me my life,” the cancer patient said.

She was quoted in a report finding that, less than four months into second coming of Trump, government spending on cancer research has already plunged a whopping 31% from the same period last year, back down to levels below 2016 when Biden launched the “moonshot” bid. A big loser was the National Cancer Institute, the initiative’s epicenter, which lost $300 million during the period.

But the Sen. Bernie Sanders-led investigation also noted this was just part of a more sweeping anti-science agenda that has slashed billions for related agencies including the cancer program’s parent, the NIH, forced the layoffs of thousands of researchers and experts, and terminated at least 1,660 grants.

“Cancer is an awful disease, and we need to continue pushing to find preventions and cures for it,” said Selma Masri, associate professor of biological chemistry at the UC Irvine School of Medicine, in an article published by the university. Masri had received substantial NIH backing for her groundbreaking research into fast-rising rates of colorectal cancer among younger Americans — vital work that might grind to a halt because of the Trump cutbacks.

If you polled Masri’s statement that cancer is awful, it’s a safe bet that about 99% of Americans would agree. So why are the president of the United States and his minions fighting for Team Cancer?

His Health and Human Services Department insists we can kill more malignant cells with less. It posted on Elon Musk’s X that the Trump regime “is streamlining programs, eliminating redundancies, and — above all else — prioritizing gold standard science.”

OK, sure, whatever. The more complicated reality is that it’s happening partly thanks to the nihilism — and slashing government spending to free up more dollars for billionaire tax cuts — that is Musk’s DOGE agenda, but mainly this: Trump wants to undo everything done by Biden, no matter how nonsensical and politically counterproductive that might be. It’s stunningly shortsighted when POTUS 47 pushes to kill funding for clean-energy plants that would have created thousands of jobs in Trump-voting red states,

But the cruelty of going all Apollo 13 on the Biden cancer moonshot is a new level of evil.

You’d think the media would play up Trump’s cancer cutbacks, given how almost every American family has been cursed by the disease. Or, more urgently, hype Sunday’s dead-of-night passage by a House committee of a federal budget scheme that, to free up even more money for those tax breaks for the wealthy, sharply cuts Medicaid. That means fewer Americans with health insurance, and thus fewer people getting screenings that would find prostate cancer before it spreads. That means dooming thousands of patients who now might end up in the same boat as Biden, thanks to the unraveling of his dream.

But the mainstream media has pushed back news of the looming Medicaid cuts, let alone any discussion about DOGE’s devastating impact on cancer research, to the end of the hour. Instead, TV and a lot of other news orgs have focused intensely on the human interest of the Biden family drama and his personal history of tragedy, or wallowed in the political gossip over whether there was an effort — consciously or unconsciously — to keep voters in the dark about the president’s health when he’d hoped to run in 2024.

The decision by TV producers to make one man’s medical drama a bigger story than an authoritarian, cruelty-is-the-point drive to cut health coverage and delay cancer cures for millions flowed directly from a warped obsession over the previous week about that new Biden book. It charges there was already an inner-circle-coverup around the 46th president’s rapid aging and decline. But when the 47th president is busy plunging America headlong into fascism, the former guy should be a Page 17 story. It never belonged on Page 1.

The irony is that there is a Biden cancer story that matters, that belongs on the front page over the fold. But it’s the story of how a budding dictator, hellbent on retribution, is trashing not only the political legacy of his predecessor for sport, but creating cynicism about government by ending a program which was saving lives.

Trump does these cruel things not because they are hard, but because they are easy. We need to at least make sure that the American family of cancer survivors knows what is being done in their name.

Question: Two new books on AI released today (Empire of AI and The Optimist)…[your] thoughts on either trending toward AI in general and/or resisting the barreling train? —Anna West (@[email protected]) via Bluesky

Answer: Anna, the short (but qualified) answer to your question is “resist.” There are two massive stories in the 2020s; the threats to democracy posed by right-wing populism, and the ways that artificial intelligence — in an age when digital communication has already radically changed society — might upend what it means to be human. These two developments are not unrelated. It’s problematic because not only are strict curbs on AI not practical, but because we don’t want to kill some potential good uses for the technology, like diagnosing or curing diseases. But as a devastating new piece in New York magazine makes clear, AI is devouring education in America, threatening to produce a generation of grads who have not learned how to think for themselves — and who may vote accordingly. The fight to keep AI out of the classroom is the battle for humankind.

Last week’s query about the elevation of the first American pontiff, Pope Leo XIV, brought a mix of optimism that Villanova alum Robert Prevost can continue advocating for peace and against poverty in the mode of his predecessor Pope Francis — and cynicism over how much the Catholic Church, and society, can truly change. “I don’t know if I could say that this all has changed my views about the Catholic Church which needs more Pope Francises than Cardinal Timothy Dolans in my view, but this has given me hope,” Dennis Wall wrote. But 77-year-old former Catholic Til Klem fretted that too many of his pro-Trump relatives saw Francis as wrongheaded or even “evil.” He wrote: “I’m afraid the divide in my beloved country may be irreconcilable for at least one generation.”

📮 This week’s question: Four months after leaving the White House, Joe Biden is back in the news, first over questions about the extent of his aging while in office, now because of his prostate cancer diagnosis. Do you agree with the pundits who insist that Democrats need to answer for the lack of public information about his decline, or is this a ridiculous sideshow when the only story is President Trump’s power grab? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Biden media” in the subject line.

Last fall, Arizona voters were bombarded with millions of dollars in ads touting the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, then Congressman Ruben Gallego, and his military background and support for enhanced border security. Those ads helped Gallego eke out a narrow victory even as Republican Donald Trump was winning on the top of the ticket, but they weren’t paid for by veterans or immigration groups. They were actually funded with a whopping $10 million from the cryptocurrency industry’s political-action committees, part of an unprecedented push by America’s scammiest industry to buy influence.

It may be the best and safest investment Big Crypto has ever made.

Monday night, Gallego spearheaded a Democratic insurgency as 16 Dem senators gave the chamber’s GOP majority the votes it needed to ward off a filibuster and advance the pro-crypto legislation known as the GENIUS Act that’s actually the dumbest thing to come down the pike in a while. The bill ensures the survival of the digital currency known as stablecoins right at the moment that a firm tied to Trump and his family pulls off a $2 billion stablecoin deal with the United Arab Emirates, a thoroughly corrupt bargain. The Senate’s 66-32 cloture vote on the crypto bill all but ensures that the president will soon get to sign legislation that enriches himself and his heirs.

This vote should break the outrage meter. At a moment when millions of everyday Americans are taking to the streets to protest Trump’s corruption, we have a big chunk of the Democratic Party on Capitol Hill voting to enable it. Not all of the pro-crypto, pro-corruption Dems are as blatantly conflicted as Gallego, who in February held a major fundraising event with Silicon Valley’s Marc Andreessen, a billionaire crypto investor. But several other senators are thinking more about big money than the little people who elected them.

The Democrats’ list of 16 crypto sellouts included newly elected Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who like Gallego benefitted from a $10 million push by the industry’s PAC known as Protect Progress. Another key vote to advance the GENIUS Act came from a third freshman, California Sen. Adam Schiff, who won a heavily contested 2024 primary after the crypto industry spent an additional $10 million to take down his top rival, the pro-regulation Rep. Katie Porter.

Other Democrats who advanced the GENIUS Act — including Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman — haven’t feasted on carrots of crypto cash but may have feared the lucrative (for now) industry’s stick if they defied it. Their former colleague, onetime Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, a top crypto critic, lost his seat in 2024 when pro-crypto PACs spent an obscene $40 million to elect his GOP opponent. That’s a tough situation, but the job of Democratic senator isn’t worth $1 when party leaders are throwing their already tarnished brand in the trash can, all for a pile of eventually worthless coins.

It was the aftermath of another Primary Day in Philadelphia one decade ago, and the winds of potential change swept across the city much as they’d done in the bigger American jet stream. I wrote on May 20, 2015, that a landslide win for future mayor Jim Kenney on a progressive platform, and other victories on the left, signaled an end to the ghost of Frank Rizzo haunting Philly politics. I wrote that the racially fearful law-and-order politics of the 20th century “has finally gone the way of pay phones, 8-tracks and rabbit-ear antennas.” But did it? Read: “Philadelphia finds that bridge to the 21st century.”

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