Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell (CA-14) really doesn’t get enough credit for being simultaneously one of the least intellectually gifted and most morally repellent figures roaming the halls of Congress—but he should. Often overshadowed by louder colleagues like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett, Swalwell has nevertheless compiled a quietly impressive résumé of reprehensible behavior that rivals even the most bafflingly dim figures of the so-called resistance.
This week, the California gubernatorial hopeful padded that résumé yet again. Faced with a somber and deeply personal announcement from former Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse, who revealed he is battling stage-four pancreatic cancer, Swalwell somehow saw an opportunity—not for decency or restraint, but for political exploitation.
Where a normal person heard a man grappling publicly with what he described as a near “death sentence,” Swalwell instead asked himself the most on-brand question imaginable: How can I turn this into a win with my base?
Friends-
This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.
Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence.…
— Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) December 23, 2025
“How can someone so good like Ben Sasse be stricken with something so bad like pancreatic cancer? Life’s unfair. Terribly so,” Swalwell responded in a statement on X. “But that’s why we can’t allow the proposed 40% cut to cancer funding.”
“2 out of 5 of us will be told one day, ‘I’m sorry. You have cancer.’ Let’s make that not a death sentence, but a chance to live decades more.”
What would motivate a man—and I use the term loosely—to post something like that? One is tempted to speculate, uncharitably but not unrealistically, about a lifetime of poor judgment and arrested development. The behavior fits a pattern. It’s not a stretch to conclude that this kind of tone-deaf cruelty didn’t just appear overnight.
More to the point, once you’ve already demonstrated a willingness—allegedly—to entangle yourself with a Chinese spy, you’re clearly dealing with someone for whom there are no remaining guardrails. At that stage, nothing is off limits. Tragic personal news? Fair game. A man confronting a terminal diagnosis? Just another prop to twist into a talking point about government funding. For Swalwell, decency is optional; political opportunism is mandatory.
The response on X was, unsurprisingly, volcanic.
“Using Ben Sasse’s announcement of stage 4 pancreatic cancer to push an agency funding argument is about as garbage as it gets,” one political commentator wrote. “You didn’t even have the decency to wish him well before trying to score political points (off) his tragic situation.”
“Ben Sasse is a very good man. You should consider being more like him.”
“Man, you are a tool,” journalist Adam Housley said.
Classy, Representative Swalwell. Turning someone else's terminal cancer announcement into a chance to score points against Trump, and to angle for taxpayer-funded grants for pharmaceutical donors already posting record profits. Just stop.
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) December 24, 2025
What Swalwell was referencing is a proposed 40 percent reduction to the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). That idea appeared in leaked drafts of the FY2026 budget request and included consolidating NIH’s 27 institutes and centers down to eight, capping indirect grant costs at 15 percent, and reshuffling research priorities.
Here’s the part Swalwell conveniently ignores: it’s a proposal—and one that faces clear opposition in the United States Congress. In other words, he knows full well it’s unlikely to become law. Yet that didn’t stop him from hijacking a man’s devastating, deeply personal health announcement and forcing it into a cheap political narrative.
That’s the tell. This wasn’t about policy, budgets, or public health. It was about reflexive opportunism—about proving, once again, that no circumstance is too tragic to be exploited if there’s a talking point to be squeezed out of it. By any reasonable standard, that’s the behavior of a trash human being.
