The Great Unraveling

From Biden’s cancer to Gaza’s siege, Ukraine’s trauma, and America’s crumbling college towns, the cost of cruelty and neglect is coming due

This morning, we woke to grief layered atop dread. President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with aggressive metastatic prostate cancer. In a time of relentless political cruelty and global fracture, this news cuts differently, deeper. Biden, whose age and stamina have been ceaselessly scrutinized, now faces a fight that has nothing to do with approval ratings or polling margins. It is the raw human battle of illness, private, brutal, and all too real, even as the machinery of empire and election grinds forward around him.

And the world continues to unravel.

Overnight, Russia launched its largest drone assault on Ukraine since the war began, obliterating homes, terrorizing civilians, and signaling its utter disregard for the “ceasefire” talks Trump claims he can deliver. A beloved animal rescue volunteer, her son, and many of the displaced pets they cared for died. Intelligence officials in Kyiv believe Moscow may test-fire an ICBM this week, to remind the West how little its diplomatic overtures matter. Meanwhile, Trump is more concerned with whether Putin will take his calls.

In Gaza, the horror has become ceaseless. Israel’s military continues its bombardment with surgical precision and zero accountability. Hospitals operate without power. Parents dig their children from the rubble with bare hands. The international community, led by the U.S., shrugs. Under mounting international pressure, Israel has announced it will permit a "basic quantity" of food into Gaza to avert a starvation crisis following an 11-week blockade that halted all humanitarian aid. However, aid organizations and U.N. officials have criticized the limited scope of this measure, warning that it falls far short of addressing the catastrophic hunger affecting nearly half a million people in the territory.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met privately at the Vatican with Pope Leo XIV following the pontiff's inaugural Mass, marking a deeply emotional and symbolic moment. Zelenskyy presented the Pope with a unique icon of the Holy Mother and Child, painted on a fragment of a munitions crate from the war-torn region near Izium. This gift served as a powerful reminder of the children affected by the conflict, many of whom have been forcibly deported by Russia and are still awaiting reunification with their families. Pope Leo expressed his commitment to peace and reiterated the Vatican's offer to host negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. Zelenskyy, in turn, thanked the Pope for his unwavering support and clear moral stance in defense of a just and lasting peace.

Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio posed with Pope Leo XIV, America’s first pontiff, for photos and what the Trump administration hopes will be a “reset” in Holy See relations. It’s a peculiar diplomatic ballet: Vance, a Catholic convert with a gift for medieval justifications of cruelty, offering the pope a Chicago Bears jersey while quietly trying to sell him on mass deportations. Meanwhile, Leo, who spent years ministering to migrants in Peru and once retweeted critiques of Trump’s “bad hombres” rhetoric, called for peace in Gaza, Myanmar, and Ukraine at his inaugural Mass, naming hunger and civilian suffering without euphemism.

Trump, of course, has declared himself a peacemaker, just ignore the two-month bombing campaign in Yemen, the record arms shipments to Israel, and the stalled ceasefire negotiations in Ukraine. Behind closed doors, the administration sees Leo as more pliable than Pope Francis, who once openly questioned Trump’s Christianity. But Leo’s past words and present poise suggest otherwise: his papacy may yet become a moral mirror held up to the nativist zealotry now emanating from Washington.

And while the world mourns and burns, Republicans in Congress have stitched together a legislative monstrosity known, in the most grotesque Trumpian flourish, as the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” It’s a bill that slashes Medicaid, expands deportation programs, and hands trillions in tax cuts to corporations and the ultra-wealthy. An honest subtitle might be: "Billionaires Get a Yacht; You Get an Audit."

Its central premise? That trickle-down economics isn’t dead, just not cruel enough yet. The bill will cost anywhere from $3.3 to $5.2 trillion over ten years, much of it added directly to the deficit Trump once decried. But its real legacy is who it punishes and who it protects. Poor families? Cut. Public services? Starved. Undocumented workers? Targeted. Hedge funds and real estate developers? Showered with tax breaks and loopholes.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that across the U.S., smaller public colleges are collapsing under the weight of falling birth rates, rising tuition, federal funding cuts, and a “flight to prestige” that favors flagship universities over the regional schools that once served working-class communities. The Trump administration’s proposed education cuts and student visa clampdowns are salt in the wound, shrinking budgets, slashing faculty, and gutting the fragile economic ecosystems these towns depend on.

For decades, college towns were held up as examples of sustainable local prosperity. Now, they’re the new Rust Belt: casualties not just of economic shifts, but of deliberate political choices that prioritize billionaire tax cuts over basic educational stability. As the GOP touts its “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the message to college towns like Macomb, Illinois, is unmistakable: you’re on your own.

This is class warfare, and it’s happening while the working class struggles under rising costs, crumbling infrastructure, and a deepening sense of institutional abandonment.

There’s a sickness in the body politic, far deeper than cancer. And unlike Biden, the legislature refuses to even acknowledge the diagnosis, let alone seek a cure.