Biden Is Not— And No Matter How Horrible He Is, Will Never Be— As Bad As Trump... True, A Low Bar

Ric Grenell, who claims, rather spuriously, that he will be Trump’s Secretary of State in a second administration, failed miserably when Trump assigned him the tasking of wooing  influential Arab-American leaders in Michigan. There was a dinner at a mediocre Italian chain restaurant and Grenell promised if they backed Trump there wouldn’t be another Muslim ban. But his empathy for the plight of the Gazans was cluelessly non-existent, making the whole endeavor basicly a non-starter for the community.

In fact, Trump has already signaled he will be much less receptive towards Palestinian aspirations than Biden has been. Biden, basically, embraced Netanyahu in public so he could influence him in private, a strategy that hasn’t worked well. Trump, and Grenell, have endorsed Jared Kushner’s suggestion that the beachfront territory is too valuable for Palestinians and should be cleared of Arabs— genocide. Yesterday, Josh Dawsey and team reported that before the Michigan dinner, Trump has already promised a roomful of mostly Jewish GOP fat cats in New York City [AIPAC adjacent] that he plans to crush pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses and that He would expel student demonstrators from the U.S. “‘One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,’ Trump said on May 14, according to donors at the event.”

It’s worth noting that conservative AIPAC billionaire, Stephen Schwarzman announced he would support Trump. His statement, drenched in blood money: “The dramatic rise of antisemitism has led me to focus on the consequences of upcoming elections with greater urgency. I share the concern of most Americans that our economic, immigration and foreign policies are taking the country in the wrong direction. For these reasons, I am planning to vote for change and support Donald Trump for President. In addition, I will be supporting Republican Senate candidates and other Republicans up and down the ticket.”

When one of the donors complained that many of the students and professors protesting on campuses could one day hold positions of power in the United States, Trump called the demonstrators part of a “radical revolution” that he vowed to defeat. He praised the New York Police Department for clearing the campus at Columbia University and said other cities needed to follow suit, saying “it has to be stopped now.”

“Well, if you get me elected, and you should really be doing this, if you get me reelected, we’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years,” he said, according to the donors, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail a private event.

Trump has waffled publicly about whether Israel should continue its war in Gaza, saying “get it over with … get back to peace and stop killing people.” Major Republican donors have lobbied him in recent months to take a stronger stance backing Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The private New York meeting offers new insight into his current thinking. Speaking to wealthy donors behind closed doors, Trump said that he supports Israel’s right to continue “its war on terror” and boasted of his White House policies toward Israel.

…Both Trump and Biden have struggled with the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the campaign trail. Biden’s base is deeply divided on the Israel-Gaza war, but Trump’s rhetoric on the subject has limited his ability to capitalize on his opponent’s problems.

Trump has repeatedly claimed in public statements and interviews that Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which sparked the Gaza war, would have never happened if he were president.

But he has also criticized Israel’s approach to the war, albeit in somewhat confusing terms. In a March interview with the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, Trump said, “You have to finish up your war. To finish it up. You gotta get it done.” In April, he argued the war was bad for Israel’s image, telling conservative talk show radio host Hugh Hewitt that Israel is “absolutely losing the PR war.”

Trump took a different tone in the meeting with donors. Instead of saying it was time to wrap up the war, he said he supported Israel’s right to continue its attack on Gaza.

…Trump repeatedly listed for the donors everything he believed he had done for Israel in the White House… I did Golan Heights. You know that’s worth $2 trillion, they said, that piece, if you put it in real estate terms. But it’s worth more than that. It is,” Trump said, according to donors present.

…The former president repeatedly expressed frustration that Jewish Americans did not vote for him as much as he believes they should, the donors said.

“But how can a Jewish person vote for a Democrat, and Biden in particular— but forget Biden. They always let you down,” he said, referring to Democrats.

Other than the ultra-Orthodox— who prefer to be unassimilated into American culture and voted as a bloc in accord with what their cult leaders tell them to do (and voted for Trump by as much as 95% or more)— most normal American Jews are Democrats. Around three-quarters of normal Jews voted for Biden in 2020. A poll of registered Jewish voters (including Hasidics and other ultra-Orthodox Jews) taken by the Jewish Electoral Institute, shows Biden leading Trump 72% to 22% this cycle.

On Sunday, Hamilton Nolan reminded his readers that America’s “prosperity is built atop a foundation of lawless secret crimes against humanity that render laughable our claims to moral leadership. He readily acknowledged that “Biden’s policies are better than Trump’s and if Biden loses and Trump wins politics would get worse. Do progressive activists, who are as a group deeply engaged in the issues, need thousands of words to understand this? To put a finer point on it: Who is this for? Setting aside the small number of [foolish] accelerationists… where exactly is this enormous group of left wing activists who are unable to understand that Trump is worse than Biden? For one thing, I am on the left and I know a lot of people on the left who go out in the streets and protest Israel, and in November, most of those people who are politically engaged will vote for Biden, because he is not as bad as Trump. Some portion of them will refuse to vote for Biden out of sheer disgust at the direct role he has played in the murder of thousands of civilians. In the context of 150 million voters across America, the number of those people is small. To the extent that there are places like Michigan where there are significant pockets of people who, you know, have had direct relatives blown up in Gaza and who therefore might not be able to bring themselves to pull the lever for the guy who sent the bombs, any electoral damage is 100% the fault of the Biden administration itself. Look in the mirror.”

Yes, there are some left wing activists who will not vote for Biden. Is this group going to throw the election to Trump? No. What Biden needs to worry about is not highly engaged activists making some considered calculation not to vote for him, but instead millions of regular ass people who will not vote for him because they don’t feel excited about him. They will stay home because he has not given them an inspiring thing to vote for. That is approximately one thousand times more likely as a scenario for Biden to lose than “left wing activists marshal millions to stay home as negotiating leverage.” Obama excited people. So they turned out to vote. In 2020, people hated Trump so much that they were excited to turn out to vote. Now, Biden is the incumbent and he owns what the government is doing and he has achieved the nifty trick of actively supporting a crime against humanity and isolating himself on the world stage and thereby causing deep moral revulsion within the left wing of his party at the exact same time that he needs them to rally to support him during election season. This is not a problem of miscalculation of leverage; it is a problem of doing something horrible and turning off his political allies right when he is supposed to be pulling them into his coalition. I think that most of the left, including me, will end up voting for Biden, because he is better than Trump. (Polls show Biden winning overwhelmingly among Democratic-leaning swing state voters who pay attention to the news, a group that includes left wing activists. This is not the group that will lose him the election.) But they will not be excited about it, because Biden himself has made that impossible. And that lack of excitement in the Democratic Party’s base will sap the Biden campaign of the energy it needs to turn out voters more broadly.

Is that the fault of the left wing activists? Should those who vote for Biden grudgingly be lectured because they didn’t pretend to be jazzed about the guy who shipped 2000 pound bombs over to be dropped on residential areas? No. Again, if the Biden administration is looking for the culprit who has put its prospects in danger: look in the mirror.

The pernicious thing about these preemptive lectures to the left about the (obvious) fact that Trump is bad is that they serve primarily to build plausible excuses in the event that Biden loses. If you write enough “Dreamy lefties need to get real and vote for Biden!” essays in the six months before Election Day, the narrative of “the left abandons Biden” will be established, and then if Biden loses, you have your culprits already. (Indeed, this very same thing happened when Hillary Clinton lost, and when Al Gore lost.) But have you correctly identified the culprit? No. If Joe Biden loses, will it be because of the lost votes of highly engaged progressive activists who decided to stay home to exert leverage? No. Not even close! It will be because the totality of Biden’s actions during his first term was not sufficient to excite more than 80 million Americans enough for them to get up and troop to the polls for him. And— maybe I missed it— are pro-Palestinian progressive activists running the White House? Are left wing activists in charge of the Biden reelection campaign? Are left wing activists in charge of the State Department? Are left wing activists setting Biden administration policy right now, which voters will then judge him on in November? No. They are not. If you are worried that Biden is going to lose you better look at Steve Ricchetti, not Ilhan Omar.

To blame the left for the political troubles of a president who is not of the left and who is under fire from the left specifically because he is pursuing a policy that is the exact opposite of what the left wants is the definition of a strawman. And most of the left will still vote for him! The Squad will all vote for Biden! How the fuck are we on the left already being set up to take the fall for this guy? It’s lunacy. I would, in general, like analysts and commentators who see themselves as political realists to spend less time lecturing a reluctant group of voters who will probably not determine the outcome of this election and more time lecturing the President of the United States who is making the decisions that will determine whether or not he wins this election. Thanks.

More broadly, this sort of quandary calls for something that the left has, and the realists often lack: A theory of change. In our two party system, the left will always be forced into an uncomfortable allyship with the Democratic Party, lest the Republicans win and do something even worse. This has been the case forever. It is not very interesting to pop up every four years and deliver a lecture to the left about how Democrats are closer to their position than Republicans. No shit. The interesting discussion, which smart people on the left have been grappling with for generations, is how to exert influence within the constraints of this dynamic. The boundaries of this debate reveal the shortcomings of thinking about politics purely in electoral terms. If elections are everything, the left is simply destined to be marginalized forever. The logic never changes, so Democrats can take them for granted. There are lots of smart people who care about politics and focus their thinking on elections and know a lot about elections, but they are susceptible to miss the larger story of how societies actually change.

Movements exist before and after and beyond elections. “The left,” by which I mean here “people with genuine progressive moral beliefs about the world,” make up political and social movements that can move society towards their goals even in the absence of “constituting a majority of the Democratic coalition in Congress.” In the case of almost every familiar movement— civil rights, labor rights, gender equality, gay rights, anti-war movements, and on and on— the left was on the morally correct but politically unpopular side. How did they win anything, then? By forming national and international social and political movements made up of thousands and millions of people engaged in protest and direct action and education and community building and labor organizing and other actions outside of electoral politics that, over time, change society of itself and thereby cause politicians to follow that change. To focus only on the politicians and the elections is to miss the underlying fact that those officials ultimately do not cause change themselves— they are the end products of change. If you are interested in true insight into change, it is much more instructive to think about electoral politics in terms of its place in broader movements, rather than vice versa.

The useful thing about this vision is that it allows you, a person who cares about things, to focus on just working to accomplish the things you care about, rather than trying to game everything out secondhand through the blurry and unreliable lens of elections. Is Biden better than Trump? Yeah, in the same sense that if you’re trying to get to three, two is closer than one. Biden is also the sitting president, with full control over his own actions. What all of those outraged activists on the left who inspire so much political nail-biting are engaged in is the act of trying to get Biden to change his actions in order to save human lives. That is the worthiest goal that there is. If you are a hard-nosed realist who has great wisdom in all of the levers of electoral politics, stop lecturing the left, and help it accomplish its goal.