It is a well-worn joke on the left that in the wake of a mass shooting such as Sandy Hook or the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh or the El Paso Walmart, Republicans will do nothing but offer their thoughts and prayers. Consider limiting gun sales? No, but we’ll offer you our thoughts and prayers. How about banning extra-large magazines or bump stocks that allow semi-automatic weapons to be fired faster? Meh, that’s a lot of work that the gun lobby and the feral raccoons that comprise our party’s base voters don’t want us to do, but we’ll offer you our thoughts and prayers!
It’s no different than with Donald Trump’s reaction to Joe Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has metastasized to his bones. Trump allowed one of his minions to post a note on his Truth Social account claiming that his and Melania’s thoughts are with the Biden family, they wish Joe a thorough recovery, blah blah blah blah.
We’d guess the sentiment is about as honest and sincere as Lyle Lanley, which is why we’re ignoring it. Lord knows that by the time we publish this post, Trump could have added something like Drrrr Sleepy Joe where are your thoughts and prayers for our great patriot Ashli Babbitt or some equally dumb crap. So best to not bother.
Because while Trump is extending his faux sympathy to Joe Biden and his family, his administration has also spent the last few months slashing billions of dollars for cancer research. Much like the normal Republican desire to ignore gun violence when people are bleeding out on the floor of a bowling alley or nightclub, sympathizing with a cancer patient while killing funding working towards cures is one of those neat little contradictions that won’t make the GOP so much as blink.
How much funding is being slashed in this area? The National Institute of Health is seeing its budget slashed almost in half, from $48 billion to $27 billion in the budget proposal the White House released a couple of weeks ago. The NIH contributes about $8 billion a year to cancer research at universities and medical facilities.
Meanwhile, Congress took a chainsaw to the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP), a program within the Defense Department that provides money for cancer research to better understand how the disease affects the military, veterans, and the public at large. Congress cut the fiscal year allotment to cancer programs by $185 million. This includes $35 million specifically aimed at research into prostate cancer.
On the plus side, Trump’s giant military parade on his birthday is probably going to cost north of $45 million, so he now has a large chunk of dough he can put towards paying for it. Too bad about all the people hoping to find treatment or even a cure for prostate cancer, but hey, military parade!
It is a particularly cruel irony that this funding is all being slashed just as the news about Biden’s cancer diagnosis hits. The former president famously lost his oldest son to cancer in 2015. In 2016, President Obama put Biden in charge of the “Cancer Moonshot,” a program to accelerate research into the causes and potential treatments for cancer. The program lapsed in Trump’s first term, but Biden revived it in 2022. He has expressed many times his hopes for the program.
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In short, if anyone at the highest levels of government was ever an advocate for finding cancer cures, it was Joe Biden. For Donald Trump to offer only thoughts and prayers while gutting the work Biden did on the issue is so grotesque that we’re finding it hard to avoid reaching for the bourbon well before lunch.
In another cruel irony, this news hits just as the House of Representatives is rushing its budget resolution (the One Big Beautiful bill, a name we hate calling it, because what are we, four?) through various committees with zero public input or visibility. The bill slashes Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars.
How many Medicaid recipients who need cancer treatments will find themselves without coverage? How many hospitals and medical facilities that treat cancer patients will be severely reduced if not closed altogether?
Some of the same congressional Republicans currently offering their thoughts and prayers to Joe Biden are the same ones trying to sneak these cuts through before their constituents notice.
Even more disgusting, though, are the Republicans, including some in Congress, who are using this news as an excuse to relitigate any questions they can think of about the state of Biden’s mental and physical health over the last year of his presidency.
For example, here is Rep. Ronny Jackson, the former White House pill-pusher of a physician who a few years ago kept assuring everyone that the walking cholesterol bomb Donald Trump was actually the healthiest human specimen he’d ever seen:
Ronny Jackson is allegedly a medical doctor. He is perfectly well aware that aggressive forms of prostate cancer can appear and metastasize very quickly, before a patient has serious warning symptoms. Biden’s cancer has reportedly been scored at nine on the Gleason scale, which indicates it will keep spreading quickly.
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It is entirely possible Biden didn’t have this cancer when he left office in January. Jackson just can’t help himself.
Then there is JD Vance, who on the vice presidential popularity and basic human decency scale will never be close to Biden’s level. Vance said this, ironically as he was on his way home from meeting with the Pope:
Or you can just offer Biden your best wishes and then shut the fuck up. That is also a choice a human being can make.
But possibly no one was more hideous than Donald Trump Jr., one of the worst human beings any woman has ever pushed out of her birth canal since Eve started having kids. Junior needed all of three hours on Sunday to go from We should offer only our sympathies to How did DOCTOR Jill Biden miss her husband’s stage five cancer and what else were they hiding, thus proving that he knows absolutely nothing about cancer or doctorates.
This is where we add the obligatory reminder that Robert Mueller didn’t charge Junior with any crimes in the Russia investigation because he concluded the younger Trump was too stupid to have known he was doing anything illegal.
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At least Biden himself seems to be handling the diagnosis with grace.
We may be reading too much into it, but the former president looks tired, and Dr. Jill looks like she’s having a rough time of it. The cat looks like a cat.
But it’s the Republican cuts to cancer research, to access to medical care, to education to train future doctors and researchers that have us spending Monday grinding our teeth into a fine powder. The hell with your thoughts and prayers. Joe Biden will have the best medical care available. Go make sure everyone else in this country unfortunate enough to be struck by cancer can have it too.
[NBC News]
There are quite a few organizations dedicated to studying prostate cancer and advocating for its patients that you can support.
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