First A Couple Of Questions From Patrick Toomey:
How many Democratic Senate and House candidates will want to have Biden stand next to them on a campaign platform this fall?
How many people assume that Biden will be even less lucid in 2028 than he is now?
Biden’s approval ratings have been stuck around 40% since last spring—What can possibly happen to improve those numbers in the coming months?
Based upon 2016 and 2020 results, Biden presumably will need to carry the popular vote by at least 3-4% to win the electoral vote. He’s currently essentially in a dead heat with Trump. Does anyone realistically think that he has a prayer of attaining such a margin?
When will party mandarins admit an obvious mistake, and will it happen soon enough to (hopefully) save 237 years of representative government in this country?
Little else matters politically now.
Second, A Statement From The Step Aside, Joe Campaign:
Joe Biden’s dreadful performance in the debate underscores his severe liabilities as a candidate. Biden is manifestly not up to the task of combating Trump’s lies, vitriol and neofascism— nor is he capable of articulating a coherent progressive vision capable of galvanizing voters this fall.
There is still time before the party convention to decide on a different nominee for the party. Democratic leaders must finally heed the clear preference of Democratic voters and reconsider their backing of Biden’s candidacy. We need a swift intervention to make Biden voluntarily a one-term president so a Democratic nominee can be up to the job of defeating Trump. The stakes could not be higher for the future of the United States, and the world.
Third, Ignoring The Herd Of Elephants In The Room...
Writing in The Forward yesterday, Rabbi Jay Michaelson discussed the dilemma many progressives find themselves in: Biden enabling genocide is hard, if not impossible, to abide although… Trump. “Eight months of horrifying images, death tolls, and accounts of human suffering, combined with US support of the war (including weapons sales, vetoes of UN resolutions, and political cover),” he wrote, “have caused many on the Left to declare that they cannot vote for Biden this year… I’ve heard another story from several progressives: that Donald Trump would not be any different. And that is clearly wrong.”
He’s very clear: “Trump was and would be an utter catastrophe for Palestine and the Palestinian people… The Israeli right loves Donald Trump. Miriam Adelson, who with her late husband Sheldon Adelson has massively funded the Israeli Right, destabilized Israeli democracy, and underwritten settlements and other extremist projects, recently announced that she is committing $100 million to electing Trump president. Does anyone think for one moment that she is doing this to promote peace between Israel and Palestine?”
Miriam Adelson is an extremist and genocidal Israeli whore who inherited billions of dollars from the half-dead toad she married. She should be deported today. “She and other pro-Israel donors,” he wrote, “are supporting Trump because he will support a ‘strong Israel’ and allow it to continue its de facto annexation of the West Bank (and perhaps Gaza). According to the New York Times, she said that people who criticize Israel or offer only qualified support are ‘dead to us’ and considers ‘land for peace’ deals to actually be ‘land for war.’ This is who is spending $100 million to defeat Joe Biden.
The first Trump administration was the friendliest towards Israel’s far right in American history. He gave the far right everything they wanted: a total freeze on all peace negotiations with the Palestinians, a blank check to increase the construction of settlements in the West Bank, and the once-unthinkable symbolic act of moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Moreover, Trump’s key advisors on Israel were, themselves, part of the American-Israeli right wing. David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, has deep ties to the settlement movement. If you want to talk about colonialism, Israel’s settlement project certainly qualifies, and Friedman was, himself, a longtime participant in and supporter of it. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, took a more pragmatic and less ideological approach to Israeli-Arab relations, but even there, his single greatest achievement during his time in the White House was decoupling Palestinian rights from the “Abraham Accords” signed with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
We don’t know for sure what a Trump administration would have done after Oct. 7— but we can imagine. There is not a single action that Trump took between 2016-2020 that improved the lives, or even considered the lives, of Palestinians. Would he have acted any differently in 2023 and 2024?
Of course not. Trump would not have forced Israel to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza. Trump would not have forced Israel to the negotiating table. Trump would not have delayed (some) weapons sales to Israel. Trump would have written more blank checks to Bibi Netanyahu— both literally, in the form of increased aid, and figuratively, in the form of permission to do whatever Bibi’s government wanted to do in Gaza, up to and including the Israeli right’s plan to occupy the territory in perpetuity.
Indeed, all Trump has really said about the Gaza War was (on April 4 of this year) that Israel should “Get it over with and let’s get back to peace and stop killing people… They have to get it done. Get it over with and get it over with fast because we have to— you have to get back to normalcy and peace.”
“I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it, because you’ve got to have victory,” he continued. “You have to have a victory, and it’s taking a long time.”
In other words, Trump isn’t saying there should be a ceasefire; he’s saying there should be a rapid, decisive Israeli victory. And the only way to “get it over with fast” is to increase the bombardment, displacement, and civilian deaths. He’s not calling for peace; he’s calling for more war that can lead to peace.
I’m not defending Biden’s policies from a left-wing perspective; I do not believe they can be defended in that way. His policies towards Israel have been centrist, perhaps center-left, and have balanced support for Israel with attempts to mitigate the suffering of innocent Palestinians.
But Trump’s policies would be nothing like that. They were, and would be, supportive of the extreme right-wing version of Zionism. Trump would never have pressured Israel the way Biden did— on the contrary, he would have urged them to bomb more. It’s hard to imagine the scale of the disaster Gaza would have seen as a result— and that Palestine will see, should Trump be elected again.
Voting is not the expression of support for everything a candidate does. It does not make one complicit in their every action. Rather, in competitive states, it is a tactical choice between one of two outcomes— namely, one of the two main candidates becoming president. Sometimes we vote out of wholehearted support, but other times we vote out of harm reduction.
And if the rights and well-being of seven million Palestinians are important to you, there is no comparison between the extreme shortfalls of Biden and the extreme catastrophe of Trump.
What I’m going to have to tell myself in November— what I dread telling myself in November— is that a vote for Biden is not an endorsement of all his Gaza policies, but a strategic decision to prevent greater harm. It's essential for me to get it through my head that voting in this context is an act of harm reduction. We can continue to advocate for the rights of Palestinians and hold Biden accountable while recognizing that a Trump presidency would drastically worsen their situation.
Yet, the specter of genocide looms as an absolute evil, one that defies any justification. Believe me, it haunts my conscience, unyielding and merciless. The horrors faced by Palestinians under a Trump administration would likely be unparalleled. I feel like I have a moral responsibility to prevent further suffering, as hard as that is to imagine in light of the genocide Israel is conducting against the Palestinians now. In the face of such atrocities, we must use every tool at our disposal to mitigate harm and fight for justice, even if it means making difficult choices at the ballot box.
Genocide, in its unrelenting cruelty, is a torment to the soul, an abomination that demands our unwavering opposition. As Dostoevsky might have said, to condone it for any reason is to betray the very essence of our humanity. And so, I ‘m going to vote, not as an endorsement, but as a desperate plea for a lesser darkness, while never ceasing to strive against the shadow of genocide.
Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the “banality of evil” reminds me— haunts me— that ordinary people can become agents of great harm through passive acceptance of immoral policies. Arendt would likely urge us to remain vigilant and proactive, resisting the normalization of atrocities. By voting strategically, we not only oppose Trump’s psychosis but also reaffirm our commitment to holding leaders accountable and striving for a world where such moral compromises won’t be necessary. I’m trying to convince myself that in this light, our vote is not an end but a means to continue the fight against injustice and for the dignity of all human beings.
And as Orwell would no doubt warn, the moral degradation that accompanies political compromises can lead us down a perilous path. In his eyes, the choice between evils is fraught with the danger of becoming complicit in the very injustices we seek to oppose. However, Orwell also understood the importance of pragmatic resistance against authoritarianism and the imperative to prevent greater harm when faced with stark choices. Voting for Biden, then, becomes an act of resistance against an absolute evil, a stand against the potential for a more tyrannical and destructive future under Trump.
but isn't a 'no' on the nazis the same as a 'yes' on pussy democraps? I mean, that may not be where you are today. But come november 1, that's absolutely where you'll be. As you always are.
Howie, this is a very thoughtful piece. You should write more about the Hamas atrocities and how releasing the hostages would help the Palestinian people.