Mentions Joe Biden

There can be no doubt that while Biden rhetorically discussed a more humane approach to the border, his actual tenure has been devastating for migrants. Biden deported 271,484 people in 2024 alone — the highest number of any year since 2014. He maintained Trump-era border restrictions, such as the misuse of the Title 42 public health statute to deny migrants access to the U.S. and violate due process of asylum seekers. In its opening days, the Biden administration detained 14,000 Haitian migrants seeking asylum, and summarily deported them en masse. The devastating episode involved U.S. border agents on horseback whipping Haitians, producing photos reminiscent of slavery.

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Will Trump be worse than Biden? This has been a complicated question to answer for many on the left in light of Biden’s unwavering participation in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For sections of the population, there will be a dramatic, catastrophic change from Biden to Trump. The new attacks on reproductive rights, LGBTQ folks and women, immigrants and Muslims should not be underestimated. We should also prepare for a new round of attacks on organizing, beginning with especially vulnerable activists, such as international students, Muslim and immigrant organizers. But such attacks are already happening under Biden, who has presided over mass arrests of student protesters and the criminalization of organizing for Palestine.

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This continuity between Biden and Trump — and convergence between the Democratic Party and MAGA — complicates an assessment of Trump and made it difficult for many progressives to support Kamala Harris’s campaign.

Her only reference to Gaza was a line in which she credited Harris with “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bring the hostages home.” The moment was quickly clipped and posted to TikTok by the Harris campaign—a clear attempt to use one of the most popular young, left-wing politicians in the country to win over younger, left-leaning voters concerned about Gaza. “💙 @Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” the campaign account commented.

But Ocasio-Cortez’s statement was simply not true. There have been no indications that Harris is playing a central role in any ceasefire negotiations. And there is mounting evidence that those negotiations are more fantasy than reality.

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Reasonable people can disagree about the value of Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to work a more inside track within the Democratic Party. There are undoubtedly benefits to having someone like her moving up the ranks, and she could very well help elevate a whole host of progressive causes.

But Gaza is not just any cause. It is a red-line, defining issue of our time, and Ocasio-Cortez has found herself on the wrong side of it.

While serving as a contractor and senior adviser for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Alex Smith had a broad mandate.

He was tasked with offering insight on issues concerning gender, infectious disease, nutrition, and the health of mothers and children.

And all of those issues converged in Gaza, as Israel’s siege unfolded. […]

As he reflects upon his time in the Biden government, Smith notes a stark contrast between Biden’s support for war-torn Ukraine and his lack of support for Gaza, where entire neighbourhoods have been levelled.

“When we talk about Ukraine, we can condemn the bombing of hospitals. We can talk about the resilience of the people who are being attacked. We can talk about the perpetrators who are attacking them,” Smith said.

“But when it comes to Gaza, we don't talk about those people. We don't plan for their health systems to be rebuilt.”

When he voted in the 2024 presidential race, Smith knew he could not back Biden’s vice president, Harris, fearing a continuation of the president’s policies.

His home state of Maine employs a ranked-choice system, allowing residents to offer support to multiple candidates. Smith used his ballot to rank Harris as his last choice, behind the third-party candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein.

Smith explained he has a grim view of Biden’s legacy will be perceived in the years to come. “He will be remembered as the US president who manufactured a genocide against children in Gaza.”

Every time a farm worker is infected with H5N1, it’s like a game of Russian Roulette for the rest of us. The virus is making trillions of copies of itself, and many of them carry random mutations. If any of those copies carry mutations that allow it to achieve human-to-human transmission, it will likely be passed on to a contact- or contacts- of that worker. You’ve just witnessed the potential birth of a new pandemic.

So basically, you really, really don’t want this thing- this Spillover Event- to happen even a single time. Every time you do, you’re potentially gambling with 8 billion people’s futures. The Biden Administration has allowed it to happen 61 times in less than a year. And instead of treating it like an emergency, which they almost certainly would’ve before COVID, the USDA, FDA, CDC and White House keep treating their Russian Roulette “wins” like permission to play another round.

Like most of the conclusions the White House appears to have drawn about public health, this betrays a poor understanding of statistics. When you win a round of Russian Roulette, it doesn’t mean you’re “good” at Russian Roulette, or that the game is easy, or that you’re on a hot streak, although gamblers believe these sorts of things about gambling all the time. It just means you got lucky. It shouldn’t be taken as an invitation to go around again.

Where Hong Kong, Finland, Spain and many other governments took immediate and drastic action to avoid spillovers, the US has watched the virus spread and worsen, looking the other way as infections among farmers crop up. Through negligence and incompetence, the US government is creating the conditions for another global pandemic, despite having had months to avert it entirely. 

Finally, the pervasive tendency among nominally anti-MAGA leaders to accommodate Trumpism in power and cling to a treacherous idea of “normalcy” is also rooted in foundational myths that shape the collective imaginary of liberal America, in particular. We may be decades removed from the heyday of the so-called “liberal consensus” of the post-war era, that shared understanding among the country’s elite that America is fundamentally good, the institutions essentially healthy, and the U.S. inexorably on its way to overcoming whatever vestigial problems there might still be – but such ideas of exceptional goodness are still powerful today. They often go hand in hand with a mythical tale of American democracy being exceptionally stable. Never mind that, empirically speaking, multiracial democracy has existed for only about 60s years in this country and has been hotly contested at all times: What could possibly happen to America’s supposedly “old, consolidated” democracy? A fundamentally healthy, functioning, consolidated democracy cannot, in this imagination, be brought down by an authoritarian threat rising within its midst. So, either the system is not healthy – or the Trumpist regime is not an acute threat to the survival of American democracy. The latter is a much more comfortable proposition.

In retrospect, the most honest and accurate rendering of Biden’s policy was found in his remarks to donors last December, in which he assured them that, while his administration would continue seeking to build a broader regional security architecture, “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing.” If he was willing to constrain Israel at all, it was mainly in preventing the war from spreading beyond Gaza. This was perhaps his true and only red line for many months. Israel would be free to turn Gaza into a killing field, provided it didn’t escalate regionally. Yet today, Netanyahu is rolling over that red line too in Lebanon, and possibly soon in Iran, to the exultation of all of those who have been most stupendously and consistently wrong about the region over the past 20 years.

And why shouldn’t he? By taking the option of suspending military aid off the table, Biden signaled from the outset that his red lines were meaningless. 

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The story that is now being crafted through friendly journalists is that Biden tried his best but his effort to bring the war to an end was ultimately frustrated by Netanyahu’s shenanigans. But Biden wasn’t hoodwinked by Netanyahu any more than he was by George W. Bush when he chose to back the Iraq War. He chose this path, and stayed on it despite constant warnings of exactly where it was leading. Having done so, when he exits the White House, he and his team will leave this world a more dangerous and lawless place, America’s credibility more broken, the so-called “rules-based order” even more “so-called” than when he entered. 

“The costs of these new rules of war” that Biden has co-authored in Gaza, wrote Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, “will be paid with the blood of civilians worldwide for generations to come, and the U.S. responsibility for enabling, defending, and normalizing these new rules, and their horrific, dehumanizing consequences will not be forgotten.”

I mean, imagine if Russia did that. Imagine if Putin started raining military explosives on parts of Ukraine known to be densely packed with children, and then saying the mass-scale child-killing will continue until Ukraine surrenders and that all of the child deaths are actually the fault of the Ukrainians because they still haven’t given Putin everything he wants.

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They’re not just doing this with airstrikes and bullets — they’re doing it with food as well. Aaron Maté has a new article out titled “The Biden doctrine in Gaza: bomb, starve, deceive” which picks apart statements from White House officials about the temporary pier this administration is planning to build on Gaza’s coast over the next several weeks, ostensibly to allow for the arrival of more aid into the enclave.

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Maté explains that Vice President Kamala Harris recently gave a speech in which she said Hamas needs to agree to a hostage deal in order to “get a significant amount of aid in,” which is the same as saying Israel and its allies will help starve Gazan civilians until Hamas capitulates to their demands.

If you were still laboring under the delusion that it matters who the US president is, the fact that an actual, literal dementia patient has held that office for three years now should dispel that notion once and for all. The US empire has been marching along in exactly the same way it was before Biden took office, completely unhindered by the fact that the person who’s supposedly calling the shots is in a state of degenerative neurological free-fall.

Literally anyone could hold that office and it would make no meaningful difference in the way the US empire is run. A coma patient could be president. A jar of kalamata olives could be president. The position which Americans hold elections over in the belief that it could bring positive changes to their country and their world is nothing but a figurehead.

Which is a bit of a problem for Americans who would like to change certain aspects of their government’s behavior, like for example the backing of an active genocide in Gaza. Whose conscience do they work to appeal to if the person they were told is in charge actually isn’t? Who do they vote for if the people who really call the shots aren’t even on the ballot? 

In the one hundred fifty days after October 7, Israel killed thirty-one thousand Palestinians, injured seventy-two thousand, displaced 1.7 million, and razed or damaged more than half of Gaza’s buildings. Joe Biden sent over one hundred weapons shipments to Israel during the same stretch. In a recent classified briefing, US officials told members of Congress that the Biden administration approved and delivered more than one hundred separate weapons sales to Israel in the one hundred fifty days after October 7, “amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid,” the Washington Post reported on Wednesday. That works out to one new arms deal every thirty-six hours, on average.

These transfers are classified as sales, but very few of them meet that definition in the conventional sense. The vast majority are funded through State Department grants. Biden made just two of these publicly funded sales to Israel public, and the only reason he did is because he had to. Section 36 of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) requires the president to notify Congress when a proposed arms sale exceeds a certain value. The notification threshold depends on the type of matériel (for “significant military equipment” it’s $14 million; for other military articles and services, $50 million; for military construction services, $200 million), but also the recipient. For NATO countries and South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Israel, the notification thresholds for these three categories are considerably higher ($25 million, $100 million, and $300 million, respectively).

While Biden is loud and proud about arming Ukraine, he prefers to arm Israel in secret. The quantity of sales since October 7 is case in point. By spreading his military support for Israel across more than one hundred sales, Biden kept pretty much all of them “under threshold” per the AECA, thereby avoiding congressional and public scrutiny.

Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.

In short, these four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other clueless leaders, such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World War One, waded into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of recent military debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. They are endowed with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress, to provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq. This inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed counsels in the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the refusal of the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing genocide as ill-advised and dangerous.