Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Former Vice President Joe Biden speaking with attendees at the Iowa State Education Association Legislative Conference in Des Moines, Iowa, January 2020.
This month, we welcome columnist Wajahat Ali, who will be pinch-hitting for Negin Farsad for the next few issues as she works on another project. We first met Ali in 2016, when he spoke at the Global Engagement Fair at the University of Wisconsin–Madison the week after Donald Trump won the presidential election. We interviewed him for the December 2016/January 2017 issue of the magazine. Ali says he “believes in sharing stories that are by us, for everyone: universal narratives told through a culturally specific lens to entertain, educate, and bridge global divides.” We are pleased to have Ali as a columnist for the next few issues.
By now, you might have seen headlines about President Joe Biden’s advanced age as being one of the many reasons to vote against him in the upcoming 2024 presidential election in November.
Granted, he’s not a spry, agile buck of seventy-seven like Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, whose diet consists of Diet Coke, cheap steaks, and lawsuits. Biden also isn’t seventy-three, the youthful age of cherub President Ronald Reagan when he began his second term in 1985, after which he began showing early signs of dementia.
If elected again, Biden, who would be eighty-two on Inauguration Day in 2025, would be the oldest person to ever hold the most powerful office in the world. But here’s an even scarier number: Ninety-one.
That’s the number of criminal offenses facing Trump, who currently has four criminal indictments against him in four different cities. This alleged criminal behavior includes interfering in the Georgia election results, inciting a violent insurrection against the U.S. Capitol and trying to overturn the 2020 election, mishandling top-secret documents, and paying hush money to an adult film star during the 2016 presidential campaign. Oh, he was also held liable for sexually assaulting and defaming columnist E. Jean Carroll, and he owes a bigly number— $464,805,336.70, as of this writing—in fines for business fraud.
But former President Barack Obama once wore a tan suit and Biden is old!
Folks, there’s no “both sides” here. Yes, Biden is flawed, but at least he isn’t actively plotting to subvert our beleaguered democracy with the help of white nationalists, violent militant groups, and anti-America foreign actors. Meanwhile, if elected again, Trump has promised to be a dictator only on “day one” and retaliate against all of his real and imagined enemies, which I imagine include but are not limited to the press, law enforcement, poll workers, elected officials, NATO allies, immigrants, unions, windmills, women, people of color, and Muslims. That first day would certainly suck for the majority of Americans who refuse to bow to the Orange Calf of Trumpism.
The terrifying reality Americans must confront is that Trump is no longer the sole threat. His raw embrace of authoritarian power is now openly shared by the entirety of the Republican establishment.
At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which represents the GOP’s mainstream, activist Jack Posobiec warned: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.” When James Bond villains tell you their plans, you should pay attention.
MAGA is laying out the blueprint for a white, Christian nationalist utopia through Project 2025, a governing agenda supported by numerous influential conservative groups. With a second Trump Administration, they plan to unleash a fascist’s paradise by purging the government and replacing public servants with MAGA loyalists, unleashing the Department of Justice to punish Trump’s enemies, ending marriage equality, and privatizing Medicare. After weakening women’s rights through the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, they want to finish the job and pursue a national abortion ban. We just got a sneak peek in Alabama, where the conservative state supreme court ruled that embryos are considered children, which immediately resulted in several in vitro fertilization clinics stopping services for fear of criminal punishment. A second Trump Administration would be The Handmaid’s Tale on steroids.
Despite this grim dystopia, there’s another horrific number that renders many loyal Democrats undecided: 34,000.
That’s the number of Palestinians in Gaza that Israel has killed so far in retaliation for the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023. Several polls reveal that many Democratic voters—not just Arabs and Muslims—are increasingly critical of the Biden Administration’s financial, diplomatic, and military support of Israel’s collective punishment that has left 12,000 Palestinian children dead and has displaced nearly 1.9 million people.
Biden, a proud Zionist who never tires of sharing his Golda Meir story, has parroted Israeli propaganda and rarely shows Palestinians his otherwise trademark empathy.
It’s shameful and disheartening that Americans will most likely have to choose again between two aging, white men who have spent their careers catering to the privileged establishments of power and wealth.
In response, Democratic voters in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania are organizing campaigns to either “Abandon Biden” in 2024 or vote “uncommitted” in the primaries. Some are considering voting for a third-party candidate, such as Cornel West, or not voting at all.
Can you blame them?
I empathize and share their anger and frustration, which is both righteous and real. Biden has to earn their votes, not expect them. It’s very difficult to tell a Palestinian American, or any American appalled by war crimes, to vote for the man supporting and arming the bombing of innocent families in Gaza. If these efforts against Biden can force a much-needed ceasefire before the 2024 election, then so be it.
But even though the Biden Administration has utterly failed in its role to limit Israel’s aggression, we know that Trump would have been worse. In the aftermath of Israel’s attacks, Trump has promised that if elected, he’ll bring back the Muslim ban, bar refugees from Gaza, and impose an “ideological screening” for immigrants who are perceived to sympathize with Hamas.
When Israel’s fascist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir says a Trump Administration would be better for Israel and its current war in Gaza, you should believe him. Trump is the same man who moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, appointed a pro-settlement zealot as his ambassador to Israel, and is indebted to a white, Christian evangelical base that believes Jews must control Jerusalem as a necessary condition for the “end times.”
It’s shameful and disheartening that Americans will have to choose again between two aging, white men who have spent their careers catering to the whims of the privileged establishments of power and wealth that remain allergic to bold progressive reforms. Many voters feel like they’re being emotionally blackmailed and hijacked, choosing between two poisons. Even though this is our current depressing reality, it is not a permanent one.
A vote for Biden isn’t perfect—far from it—but right now, a Trump victory is not just the enemy of democracy; it’s also the enemy of the hard-earned rights and freedoms of some of the most marginalized communities in the United States.
There will be a cost to sitting out the 2024 election or voting against Biden, and sadly, it will be suffered by women, workers, people of color, LGBTQ+ kids, and our environment. The only victors will be an extremist rightwing minority ascending to power and maintaining it by any cruel and violent means necessary.
As such, please vote accordingly, even if it is for an eighty-one-year-old man with zero criminal indictments.