But then I thought about it, and now I am not so sure. There's two items where Trump might actually be better than Biden - and one of them is Gaza. The other, shockingly, is the border. Everything else, no contest - Trump is worse and will be worse, without a doubt. Also, I'm not entirely convinced that Biden will be worse on those two issues - just that there's a pretty decent argument that it is possible. Whereas with Trump on every other issue, there is no argument. Trump is just so bad that he would be worse than anything Biden could manage. On climate change, the environment, energy, emergency preparedness, inequality, criminal justice, strength of democracies, corruption, trust in institutions, the performance of those institutions, social safety nets, health care, the opioid epidemic, housing, the economy, jobs, science, literally every other possible thing - Trump would be worse.
So, here are the arguments. On Gaza - the assholes who say that supporting Palestine and opposing Genocide Joe is just enabling MAGA, they also claim "but what can Biden do?" They say that you cannot blame Biden for the choices that Netanyahu makes. This of course is bullshit - Biden has a LOT of tools to impact Israeli policy. He could follow the law and cut Israel off from a resupply of bombs and artillery shells. He could refrain from vetoing Security Council resolutions. He could impose sanctions just like civilized countries do when rogue states engage in militaristic aggression. But relevant to the actual point, Biden does none of these things. And he positions himself as never even possibly considering any of them.
Instead, Biden unconditionally supports Israel. No red flags. Pretends that there is no evidence of war crimes even in the face of the thousands of videos of war crimes uploaded by IDF soldiers. You cannot support someone more than 100%. 100% is everything - it's the most extreme position. What can Trump possibly do to make this worse?
So it is as the assholes claim - Biden is not making Netanyahu commit genocide. Netanyahu is doing that of his own free will - and Biden is merely enabling it with no restrictions or limits. But in this case, Trump cannot make it worse. The horrors we're seeing in Gaza are not limited in any way by any action taken by the US president (because no US president is willing to prevent genocide from happening), therefore a much worse US president (and Trump would be a much worse president than Biden) will not make Gaza worse.
OTOH, a Republican president will allow a whole mass of people who oppose what's happening in Gaza to actually oppose it. There will be actual opposition instead of people biting their tongues because "omg what if Trump gets elected?!"
This is like the War on Terror. Bush started it, yes. But Obama did not rein it in. In some countries, the Drone War program was ten times more active under the Democratic president than under W. I mean, you would imagine that Afghanistan was safer when Obama was in charge as compared to "War Preznit Bush". You would be seriously mistaken. And maybe this is driven by how the US electorate responds to having each of the parties controlling the White House. A sort of "only Nixon could have gone to China" thing. IOW, only "anti-war" and "progressive" and "vaguely possibly Muslim-ish" (/s) presidents like Barack Obama could expand the global campaign to bomb Muslims into hating the West.
So Trump cannot make things worse (because Israel apparently can never be constrained). But he will galvanize opposition to genocide, so maybe this is a net plus for Palestine. Maybe not, this argument relies on a lot of hypotheticals - but I believe that the actual results from the War on Terror under each of Bush and Obama are at least somewhat relevant.
The other argument here is also that Trump is incompetent and a big boob. He'll be too distracted with petty revenge to make any actual policy. And an environment like that - ruled by grievances where everyone is fighting for the favour of the brain-worm addled baby - it's not conducive to actually getting any shit done. If the choice is between two pro-genocide presidents, I think I would prefer the less competent and more easily distracted one.
As for the border - this is another thing where Biden faces no real opposition because - omg, what if you're enabling Trump, who would be much worse. Only, this doesn't seem to be true either. And it is the Democrats themselves that are pitching this angle, about how Biden has made the border much more "secure" and the treatment of migrants much more harsh and unforgiving. Here's Steve Rattner making the case that Biden deported way more people than Trump did.
I think results matter. Data matters. And the Democrats themselves are saying that the data shows that they are much harsher on the border. And the data they cite sure seems relevant. So if Biden can be worse than Donald "not sending their best" Trump on immigration - then I think it is reasonable to believe that Biden may well be worse for Palestine than Trump.
No comments:
Post a Comment