My name is Clifford Hudis, and I am a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where I am chief of the Breast Medicine Service. I am also professor of medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College and president of ASCO. I have had an amazing year serving as the president of ASCO, and today I am delighted to welcome you to our society’s 50th annual meeting commemorated in recent weeks by both the Congress of the United States and also by our host city, Chicago, and its Mayor, Mr. Rahm Emanuel.
The Trump administration did exactly what it said it would do to disorient anyone involved in making policy or touched by it. The president and his crew have “flooded the zone”—the term and the image are theirs, as is the strategy of dropping a flurry of executive orders and memoranda that shake the foundations of the American system of government, raising questions of legality and constitutionality, and, above all, making it a challenge for anyone to see the entire picture and think strategically.
