Opposing Trump Must Not Mean Accepting Biden's Crimes
While a Trump victory must be avoided, ignoring Joe Biden's many failures and crimes will lead to an eventual MAGA victory even if it's not this November
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Ruth Ben-Ghiat knows a thing or two about strongmen, and autocratic tyrants. I’ve recommended her book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, on many occasions and, though I don’t always agree with her contemporary political analysis, I don’t hesitate to do so again now. It’s a must-read, especially in any age when the very forces she is discussing are overtaking western Liberalism.
Dr. Ben-Ghiat is sounding the alarm about what we are facing in the United States. And I certainly agree with her concerns. By now, many of you have seen the image that she pointed to, an image of a pickup truck that showed a bound and helpless Joe Biden painted on the pickup’s rear hatch. Her worry is not so much with the image itself, though that is concerning enough, but that it had been shared on Truth Social by Donald Trump.
“Wake up people,” wrote Dr. Ben-Ghiat. “This is an emergency. This is what authoritarian thugs and terrorists do. Trump is targeting the President of the United States.”
She is not wrong. Nor was Leslie Jones wrong earlier this week when she pleaded with American voters not to elect Donald Trump again. “The election is less than eight months away,” Jones said during her Daily Show monologue. “And guess what? America is on the path to doing something really, really, stupid.” After a few news clips reflecting the reality that Trump holds a clear advantage over Biden at this point, Jones comes back and says, “What the fuck is wrong with us?”
An academic and an entertainer, and they’re both saying the same thing. They’re both right. Yet both calls leave an uneasy feeling in my heart.
I have to wonder, where was this urgency, where was this concern a year ago or more when Joe Biden, despite poor poll numbers, went back on his word to be a one-term president? Where was this panic when the Democratic Party was making it clear it would brook no challenge (they said they would throw all its resources behind Biden and refused to schedule any debates) from within its ranks to Biden, despite a consistent majority of Democratic voters saying they would prefer another candidate and did not want Biden to run?
The absence of those voices when they were most needed has brought us to the situation we face today. Donald Trump is leading in polls. The leads aren’t huge, and there’s more than enough time for Biden to overtake Trump in the key swing states. But Trump still leads Biden in an overwhelming majority of polls, and, thanks to our antiquated and ludicrous electoral college system, a Democrat needs to win a good deal more than a bare majority of the popular vote to actually win the election.
Stop underestimating voters
As much as I agree with Ben-Ghiat’s and Jones’ haranguing, it’s the wrong approach. The punditry is generally united in the, often unspoken, view that voters are simply ignorant of the wonderful job Joe Biden has done. That’s simply wrong on many levels, even beyond the snobby hubris that motivates the attitude.
James Galbraith has an excellent analysis in The Nation that explains why Bidenomics pleases economists and pundits but is not nearly as good for working people as those folks think. Galbraith makes many of the points I have made in the past about Biden and the economy of the past few years, making them with a lot more gravitas and background than I have.
While Biden likes to talk a lot about liberal issues, he has actually done precious little to advance those causes. His response to the Black Lives Matter movement—large increases in funding for law enforcement—was, to be kind, tone deaf. His cynical use of reproductive freedom as a talking point after he failed to do anything to protect that freedom when he had a fully Democratic-controlled Congress was a disgrace. It was made more so by the fact that even in red states, voters came out to protect those rights in 2022, demonstrating that he also missed an excellent opportunity to score a major political blow against the Republicans.
All that is before we even touch on his abetting of genocide in Gaza and his disastrous decisions to neglect both the issue of Palestine—until it blew up on October 7 in just the kind of tidal wave of blood many of us had been warning about, a tidal wave that has grown much more bloody and vicious since—and Iran, where he failed to do anything to reverse, or even mitigate, the suicidal course Trump had put us on with his abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal and the cataclysmic policy of “maximum pressure,” a policy which Biden has maintained with modified rhetoric.
Now there is this cajoling, bullying tactic that claims that voters must ignore all of that and offer their unqualified support to Biden. That tactic is quite familiar from 2016. Ben-Ghiat’s exhortation to “wake up” and Jones’ pleas to avoid doing something stupid are equally solid examples of it. It didn’t work eight years ago, and it is not going to work now.
But what is particularly disturbing is the fact that there is no sense that these people are grappling with the enormous crime Biden is committing. He isn’t just abetting and supporting genocide in Gaza, he is a full partner in it.
Partner in crime
From the first, when Biden spread horrifying, unsubstantiated and, as it turned out, completely false stories about the events of October 7 (an attack that was quite horrifying enough in the real world without the lies embellishing it), to his refusal to obey U.S. law when it comes to providing arms to Israel, to the shameless assertions of recent days that Israel was in compliance with international law in both its military actions and its prevention of nearly all aid from reaching starving people in Gaza, Biden has been a full party to one of the most horrific crimes of the post-World War II period.
Yet Biden’s defenders seem to have no problem accepting this. It doesn’t seem to bother them at all, in fact. There is no hint that Ben-Ghiat, Jones, or any of the other Biden cheerleaders understand that it might be difficult for many—especially Americans who are Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, or have some affiliation, connection or just a place in their hearts for those communities—to vote for a man who is literally trying to wipe their people out right now.
Those of us who are listening are hearing our Palestinian-American neighbors as they mourn the loss of family members, sometimes as many as a hundred or more of them, to the Israeli slaughter, an operation that could not continue without the support of the United States. The blithe way Americans are ignoring this is sickening.
I recently noted on social media that Biden is definitionally dishonest when he says he is trying to get Israel to take more care to avoid civilian deaths in Gaza, which we know by the fact that he is sending more of the very weapons that have been used so indiscriminately. One person responded that they “guess you’d better vote for Trump then.”
That response, which is far from rare, goes well beyond simply arguing that Trump must be defeated at all costs. It shows, at minimum, a complete indifference to the lives that have been taken in Gaza, the war crimes too numerous to even count that have been committed, and Biden’s unwavering support for all of it.
What about Election Day?
I’m fortunate enough to live in Maryland, so I don’t have to worry about voting for Biden. He will win my state regardless, and I can comfortably vote for some other candidate or none at all. But what if I lived in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania or any other battleground state?
I would have to vote Biden in one of those states, but I certainly cannot ask any of my Palestinian and Arab American friends to do so. The ease with which I see others making that demand, and in such haughty language as if it is a responsibility to vote for a man who is perpetrating a crime of such magnitude only reinforces my sense that they simply don’t care that they are talking to people who have just lost scores of family members to Biden’s genocidal policies.
Are those people really satisfied with Biden’s obviously disingenuous words about there being “too many Palestinian civilian victims” when he just approved 1,800 MORE one-ton bombs, 500 more smaller bombs, and 25 more F-35 fighter jets to Israel despite the fact that these are the weapons Israel has used to kill over 12,000 children in Gaza? Or is it that they consider Palestinian lives as being of lesser value?
Dehumanization of Palestinians is a big part of what we are seeing here. The rest is fear of another Trump presidency. And fear that we should. There is every possibility that electing Trump could be the last democratic thing Americans do in even this poor semblance of a democracy. It’s hardly credible that Trump will be any better than Biden even on Palestine. Indeed, a big part of Biden’s failure on this issue, from the day he took office, is that he largely continued Trump’s policies and failed to reverse the dangerous steps Trump took.
So logic demands that anyone in a battleground state who isn’t a far right fanatic should vote for Biden. But if that is an inescapable logic, it is also a very cold one.
Ben-Ghiat knows a fascist when she sees one, and even in the most realistic view of Biden—the one that accurately shows his lifelong fealty to corporations over working people, his racism, and, of course, his current genocidal actions—Biden is not a fascist, not an autocrat. He is a faithful defender of the American status quo. That status quo is elitist, oligarchical, patriarchal, racist, and kleptocratic, among many other things. But it is not fascism.
It is, by now, too late to credibly replace Biden as the Democratic nominee. He has too much of the Democratic party’s resources devoted to him, and, even if he were to step aside, it’s unlikely that any alternative—whether it is Kamala Harris, the milquetoast Gavin Newsom, or any other Democrat, moderate or progressive—would fare better starting at this late date than Biden will against Trump.
For better or worse—and it is most assuredly worse—Biden is going to be the only realistic alternative to Trump in November, and, let’s face it, any progressive, liberal, leftist, or centrist needs Trump to lose.
But that should not, indeed must not, mean that we accept Biden unconditionally. Indeed, any president, no matter how much one may agree with their policies, must be looked at with skepticism at all times. That is, or rather, should be, the function of media, of political analysts, even of bloggers.
In that context, Joe Biden is a genocidal monster. That has been proven not only in Gaza but, on a smaller scale not long before it, in Nagorno-Karabakh. He does not have good foreign policy judgment even when he pursues a correct goal, as is evidenced by his adamant refusal, since long before Russia’s invasion, to engage in diplomacy regarding Ukraine (again, I have explained this before, most recently here), instead pursuing a military pseudo-strategy with no plan to actually win or end the war, repeating the mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan, but this time without the restraint of risking American lives to do it.
Biden seems more successful domestically, and he has been, although that has been ridiculously inflated by his sycophantic boosters, often using statistics taken out of context, and claims based on shaded facts.
If someone as monstrous and incompetent as Biden (even if he is much less of both of those things than Trump), is going to remain the standard, we will not be able to hold off either Trump or whatever autocrat comes to assume his mantle. It is precisely on the failures and double-talk of politicians like Biden that far-right populists build their support. That is the practical reason that we should be clear-eyed and vocal about what we see with Biden.
But even more important is our collective humanity. There is, to be sure, a wide spectrum of views in the United States on Gaza. We have seen many supporters of Palestinian rights, opponents of genocide and just decent people come out in the streets to protest Biden’s murderous policies. We have seen some surprising responses from audiences when people speak in support of Palestinian freedom.
There is also a significant sector that supports everything Israel is doing because they see all Arabs, especially Palestinians, as sub-human killers. Far from being confined to the right (though they are the ones who are loud about it) that view seeps deeply into more centrist and liberal Americans, who don’t have such an actual thought, but respond very differently to heinous acts when they are committed by Palestinians as opposed to Israelis (or any other western/white people).
Yes, Americans need to stop Trump in November. But we should be outraged that the Democrats have limited us to the feeble vessel of Joe Biden for that crucial task. We should be livid that our country is engaging in a horrific war crime, and the president is ignoring even the professional staff in the State Department and White House in his absolute pursuit of this crime.
Instead, we see people chant “four more years” when people protest American partnership in genocide. That isn’t just trying to prevent Trump. That’s actual support for genocide. When we see and hear that, we have to ask ourselves: “What have we become?”
When we see people as distinct as Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Leslie Jones completely ignoring not only Biden’s many failures, but his massive war crimes, that can’t be written off. I am as concerned as they are about another Trump presidency and what that could mean. But if we allow ourselves to lower the bar so much that Joe Biden’s smoke and mirrors domestic policies and, much worse, his genocidal foreign policies are accepted, Trump wins anyway.
News Roundup
US: Rutgers University to face congressional antisemitism investigation
By Zainab Iqbal, Middle East Eye, March 28, 2024, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-rutgers-university-face-congressional-antisemitism-investigation
Tim Walberg’s Talk of Annihilating Gaza Shows the Bloodthirsty Extremism of Today’s GOP
By John Nichols, The Nation, April 2, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/tim-walberg-gaza-comments-gop/
IDF Drone Bombed World Central Kitchen Aid Convoy Three Times, Targeting Armed Hamas Member Who Wasn't There
By Yaniv Kubovich, Haaretz, April 2, 2024,
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-04-02/ty-article/.premium/idf-bombed-wck-aid-convoy-3-times-targeting-armed-hamas-member-who-wasnt-there/0000018e-9e75-d764-adff-9eff29360000
Al Jazeera to be banned soon in Israel in unprecedented censorship after months of persecution
Reporters Without Borders, April 2, 2024,
https://rsf.org/en/al-jazeera-be-banned-soon-israel-unprecedented-censorship-after-months-persecution
Israel strikes Iran consulate in Syria’s capital Damascus: What we know
Al Jazeera, April 2, 2024,
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/2/attack-on-iran-consulate-in-damascus-what-do-we-know
Under Cover of Gaza War, Assault on West Bank Accelerates
By Dalia Hatuqa, The Century Foundation, April 1, 2024, https://tcf.org/content/commentary/under-cover-of-gaza-war-assault-on-west-bank-accelerates/
‘Most Unethical Army in the World’ – Palestine Chronicle Assesses the Damage at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital
By Abdallah Aljamal, Palestine Chronicle, April 1, 2024, https://www.palestinechronicle.com/most-unethical-army-in-the-world-palestine-chronicle-assesses-the-damage-at-gazas-al-shifa-hospital/
My Latest Articles
I’m proud to announce that Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm, the first book on Israel’s war on Gaza is about to be published by OR Books and is available for pre-order. I contributed a chapter to this book, as did many other renowned and respected thinkers, including Nathan Brown, Mouin Rabbani, Khaled Hroub, and Sara Roy. Edited by Jamie Stern Weiner and with a forward by Avi Shlaim, this promises to be a book well worth reading.
Preorder at https://orbooks.com/catalog/deluge/
There will also be an event as part of launching the book on April 10, at 6:30 PM eastern time. The panel will include the book’s editor, Jamie Stern-Wiener, as well as Norman Finkelstein, Mouin Rabbani, Slavoj Zizek, and Colter Louwerse. It will be moderated by Razia Iqbal. I won’t be there, but I do encourage you all to check out the livestream here.
Chuck Schumer’s speech widens rifts over Israel in Congress
Democrats are fracturing over US policy toward Israel, because their constituents don’t support it in its current, genocidal form, but so many of their major donors do. The long-term result could be the end of the bipartisan consensus on Israel.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/chuck-schumers-speech-widens-rifts-over-israel-in-congress/
How Netanyahu will use the U.N. ceasefire resolution to prolong Gaza’s genocide
Netanyahu may have been angry the U.S. refused to veto the ceasefire resolution in the U.N. Security Council this week, but he will still use it to prolong the Gaza genocide. He does not want an end unless it’s an ending that keeps him in office.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/how-netanyahu-will-use-the-u-n-ceasefire-resolution-to-prolong-gazas-genocide/
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