What Biden’s prostate cancer reveals about Trumpworld | Opinion
Editor’s note: Welcome to Double Take, a regular conversation from opinion writers Melinda Henneberger and David Mastio tackling news with differing perspectives and respectful debate. Read what the writers have to say about launching this new column.
MELINDA: My family was in New York this past weekend, honoring the memory of my brother-in-law, and while we were walking in Central Park, talking about Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis, my husband asked me why I had always been so pro-Joe, anyway.
I started talking about some of the things Biden had done in office and he stopped me, and said he thought there had to be more to it than his infrastructure bill or even that he got millions more low-income kids fed over the summer.
He wasn’t wrong: What really made me stick, I think, has been Biden’s long record of personal kindness — of reaching out to the grieving and the abused and the ill. Sure, doing so helped heal his own terrible losses. But without not just his ambition but also this care for others, his life, too, would have been over a long time ago, even if he had kept right on walking around.
DAVID: Did all that kindness blur some of the other things about him?
MELINDA: Did my respect for his compassion blind me to his infirmity? Yes, it did.
I continue to believe he was the best president of my lifetime. But at one point, I watched White House reporters screaming at him about his age and acuity and did exactly what I believe Trump voters do, which is feel even more protective of him as a result, no matter how justified the attack.
So am I steaming now about Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book about Biden’s decline? No; let it all come out. That’s never the wrong answer no matter who we’re talking about.
DAVID: I agree with you there. The cover-up from the top of the White House down, aided and abetted by members of the Cabinet and Congress has to go up there in the firmament of all-time worst abuses of power, don’t you think?
MELINDA: No. People never stopped yammering about his age and how he was hiding in his basement. He should not have tried to run again, but those around him, while I’m sure loving proximity to power, also loved his elderly behind. Look at the contrast between how Biden has spent his life and how this current crowd spends theirs. Just like Elon Musk, they see empathy as weakness. That’s why it’s no surprise at all that the response to Biden’s diagnosis among many in Trumpworld has been anything but gracious.
Donald Trump, Jr. posted this on X: “What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another coverup???”
There are only four stages of prostate cancer, but I quibble.
At the memorial for my gentle brother-in-law, Chris Turque, every one of us told stories about his kindnesses — large, small, and most of all consistent. A woman Zooming in from a train in France said how much his respect for women in the newsroom and inquiries about her well-being after terror attacks in Paris meant to her.
A former classmate dialing in from Israel said that when he was the new kid and feeling out of place at their junior high, it was Chris who had become his first friend. I honestly couldn’t hear what the Australian who’d gotten up in the middle of the night to be part of remembering Chris said, but here’s what I say:
We tend to think of changing the world as curing cancer, and Joe’s cancer moonshot program tried to do that, too. But never let anybody tell you that “simple” acts of humanity aren’t a legacy to be proud of, because they are.
DAVID: I, too, have been looking to the past and thinking about kindness this week. Today I am putting down my 12-year-old boxer, Metaxa. Those who know have showered me and my family with kindness.
The wonderfulness of a family dog is indescribable. My 10-year-old son has never come into our house without being told by a bouncing ball of fur that his arrival is the single best moment of the day. Now the best thing I can do is reward those years of slobbery, stupid love and kindness with a lethal injection. I am broken apart.
MELINDA: That is terrible about your Metaxa, and I am so sorry. If anything happened to my handsome and valiant grandpup Joey — a rescue not named for Biden, by the way — I would not be OK.
DAVID: With a politician, even one as humane as Biden surely is, there is a bigger package. The kindness, as authentic as it may be, comes with an eye to how history will remember President Joe. And recall, that Biden has seen himself as a man of history for my whole life. I was in onesies when he was elected to the Senate and not far out of middle school when he first ran for president.
MELINDA: Does his longevity and the ambition that every one of our presidents has got to have to get to the White House somehow negate the good he did along the way?
DAVID: No, but all the years of kindness to families facing cancer, to the widows of American soldiers coming to receive remains at Delaware’s Dover, to victims of hurricanes, floods and earthquakes need an asterisk.
It is Biden’s kindness, bent by ambition, that led him to look the other way when his drug-addled son Hunter launched a multimillion-dollar career selling access to Joe. The country paid a price, even if Hunter was absolved.
Later, it was kindness, bent by ambition, that led those around Joe to hide his infirmities from the nation. No one set out to do something wrong. Nobody thought, “Boy, the rubes in flyover country will never know the truth.” They were trying to protect Joe first, but also, maybe more than a little, their own power and careers.
Kindness is wonderful, but it can also be powerful bad when mixed with other, less positive, aspects of humanity.
Kindness or not, I don’t think it is wrong to look at Joe’s cancer and smell another cover-up. It is only natural.
MELINDA: Would I be thunderstruck to learn that the timing of the cancer announcement might have something to do with batting down Tapper and Thompson’s book? No, I would not. But the disrespect is still both sexist and ghoulish — Dr. Jill, hahaha. I can hardly breathe from the hilarity.
It’s no different than when Paul Pelosi had his head beaten in by an intruder in 2022 and the reprehensible response from so many on the right was to laugh and invent an imaginary gay assignation. On that sad occasion, Junior retweeted a photo of underwear and a hammer, captioned, “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”
A lot of things are “natural” that we could do without, like revenge, blood lust, greed, grabbing women, lying just to keep your skills up, and the big, beautiful corruption that you yourself have written about so well, David.
What comes naturally to this president is not the impulse to for whatever reason try to make someone else’s day better, but the “come and sit by me” affinity for every reprobate from Pete Rose, who acknowledged having sex with a minor he said he believed to be 16 at the time, to the J6 rioters who beat Capitol Police officers, to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi to be cut into little pieces.
In Riyadh last week, Trump called this miserable assassin an “incredible man,” a “gentleman,” and said, “I like him too much, that’s why we give so much, you know? Too much. I like you too much!” On this we agree.
That Donald Trump does not even want to come across as a decent person is new for an American president, and there is no doubt that this contrast has heightened my appreciation for Joe Biden.
That does not mean we should grant immunity to everyone who is not weirdly praising the world’s most repressive dictators, and then eagerly taking lessons from them. For a long time, Trump has been trying to get us to grade what right and wrong look like on a curve, and he’s succeeding.
DAVID: You are so right about the grading on a curve. Trump’s misdeeds far outclass — let me rephrase because Trump is the opposite of “class.” Most of the time Trump’s misdeeds dwarf the sins of his Democratic predecessors, but, as I have written about the Clintons: More often than not, where Trump lays down a four-lane highway of sin, a Clinton, a Biden or an Obama blazed the trail.
For earth-shatteringly consequential lies, Trump knows no equal, but Barack Obama’s lie that you could keep your insurance after Obamacare was passed was pretty darn big.
For family-focused corruption, Jared Kushner’s $2 billion investment deal with the Saudi’s that you described so well, has to be a record but it is clearly the louder echo of Hunter Biden’s millions from Ukrainian and Chinese businessmen.
For sleazy gifts, Trump’s $400 million plane has to set a new standard, but I doubt he would have been creative enough to come up with the scam without Hillary Clinton’s term as secretary of state. She set new records padding the coffers of the Clinton Foundation with foreign money.
MELINDA: David, you know that no previous bad behavior justifies the betrayals of who we are as a country by Trump and someone who thinks that habeas corpus means “Trump can do whatever he wants” in Latin. When do we start holding the people we personally have voted for to account?
DAVID. Trump has certainly gone further than anything Democrats have done and now he has produced a supporting cast that magnify his worst instincts while he gives license to their own. That’s new, for sure.
You’re right, somehow we have to find a way to stop looking back and demand better from our own politicians. But in 2028 when a Democrat is elected president and in 2029 when the first scandal breaks out, I doubt Democrats will fail to note that Trump did worse. I think the decent majority of Americans agree with you, but the unfortunate fact is that it is the most partisan among us who have the loudest voices in politics.
This story was originally published May 22, 2025 at 6:08 AM with the headline "What Biden’s prostate cancer reveals about Trumpworld | Opinion."
