The Consequences of a Trump Presidency Are Simply Too Dire
This Week’s Call: Palestinian-American political strategist Rania Batrice
Our guest this week will be Rania Batrice, former deputy campaign manager for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, and an advisor on paid media for the Uncommitted campaign. I don’t know if Rania agrees with my arguments for supporting Harris, but she’s one of the smartest and most ethical people in Democratic politics, and I’m keen to hear how she sees the election in its final days.
Our call, for paid subscribers, will be at our normal time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.
Paid subscribers will get the link this Thursday to join the call live, as well as the video, which will go up later in the day. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
My New Book
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. As the weeks go by, I’ll offer different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me their own. One of the books that helped me understand the Nakba better is Raja Shehada’s Strangers in the House, a beautiful portrait of a relationship between a father and his son in a political environment made impossible by expulsion and oppression.
I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medical Aid to Palestinians. If you have other suggestions, please send them.
Sources Cited in this Video
Eric Levitz on why a Harris loss will push Democrats to the right.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on how she decides who to support for president.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), four Palestinians describe how they left Gaza.
Natasha Gill on how Jews are abandoning their children to face a moral reckoning alone.
A Palestinian and Israeli psychoanalyst talk about home.
Upcoming Talks
On October 29, I’ll be speaking at the University of Victoria. The event is online.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. So, I’ve kind of been putting this off because I’ve been really struggling with it at a number of levels but I want to explain why, if I lived in a swing state, I would vote for Kamala Harris. And I say this as somebody who thinks that Joe Biden and some of his top advisors should be brought before international courts as war criminals for their role in the utter destruction of the Gaza Strip. Surely, if I support the international proceedings that I hope will one day begin against the leaders of Hamas and against Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Golant, how could I not also support such proceedings against the top Biden administration officials who gave Israel the weapons that Israel has used to utterly destroy human life in the Gaza Strip.
So, I say that as someone who feels that way about Biden’s policies, and also someone who’s found that Harris’s response during the campaign on this question of Palestinian humanity has been worse than I could have imagined, utterly depressing and infuriating. The fact that they could not do the bare minimum—by which I mean have a Palestinian American state representative who had endorsed Harris come to give a speech at the Democratic Convention in which she simply spoke about Palestinian suffering and about Palestinian humanity, about principles like equality and peace, principles that supposedly Democratic Party believes in—the fact that even that could not be done, showed to me a level of just kind of moral cowardice and political idiocy that still I find staggering.
And I also want to say that I’m obviously saying this as a person with the good luck that my family is safe, you know. There’s no reason I deserve to be safe any more than the people whose families are in Gaza, or other parts of Israel and Palestine, and in Lebanon, whose families are being destroyed and living with daily terror of being killed. And, for those people, it is not my place to judge or lecture those folks. I can’t possibly imagine how I would be thinking and feeling were I in those circumstances. And I also want to say that I think that folks who are not in swing states and in safe blue states, I do think there is a case for registering a protest vote for president and voting Democratic for the other races.
But I do think there are some arguments to be made for why, if I were in a swing state, I would vote—with a heavy heart—I would vote for Kamala Harris. Some of these are going to be obvious, but I think that they’re worth going through. The first is that even though there is not nearly as big a difference on the question of Palestinian freedom between Harris and Trump as I would like, there is a really big difference on other issues that are also profoundly, profoundly important. Starting with climate, right, can we really even begin to come to terms with the consequences for all of our lives of four more years of a president Donald Trump, who essentially does not believe in climate change as a problem, and who would be moving aggressively with all of his kind of corporate industry allies to rolling back whatever the Biden administration was able to put in to place to try to move towards a kind of greener economy? The consequences of that are just incalculable.
Secondly, on abortion. How many women and other people who have abortions are going to die if Trump is allowed to appoint all these judges who will uphold these incredibly draconian, strict abortion laws that basically put women’s lives at risk because they basically say that you can’t get reproductive medical care because they prioritize the fetus over the life and well-being of the person who’s carrying that fetus?
And thirdly—and again, these things are obvious, but they’re worth saying—is we simply don’t know what kind of state American liberal democracy would be left in after four years of Donald Trump. We know that American liberal democracy is profoundly flawed as it is, but we do have some separation of powers. We do have some ability to have free elections. We simply don’t know how much of that will be left standing after four years of Donald Trump. We learned in his first term that many of these foundational things that keep us a somewhat moderately free society are based on custom. They’re much more fragile than we realize. That they really exist because people respect certain kinds of norms. We learned that when you have a president who simply does not respect those norms—and he’s worse than he was four years ago—that those things can really start to buckle, especially when you have a Republican Party just completely dominated by cowards who will support whatever he wants. And potentially those Republicans could control the House and the Senate. And they already control the Supreme Court. This is really existential for the future and standing of American liberal democracy.
And on those issues—climate, abortion, liberal democracy—there is an important difference between Harris and Trump, a very, very important difference. And I think one has to keep that in mind. Secondly, even on the question of Israel and Palestine, I think there is a difference between Trump and Harris. Not as big a difference, of course, as I would like, but there is a difference. And there would be a difference I think for this reason: because the political realities that they face are very different. Harris comes into the presidency facing some pressure from the Democratic base and even from some Democrats in Congress to end unconditional US military and diplomatic support for Israel. We don’t know what the outcome of that will be, but we know that she will face some pressure to do that from within our party. Trump would face no pressure from within the Republican Party at all. To the contrary, the pressure would be entirely from folks in Congress who want to maintain unconditional US support for Israel no matter what.
And I’ve heard some people say that, you know, Trump doesn’t like Netanyahu, and he doesn’t like wars, and maybe he wouldn’t be worse than Biden. But I actually think if you look at the record of the Trump presidency, and I actually read the kind of memoirs of Jason Greenblatt and Jared Kushner and David Friedman—for my sins—you know, the kind of three architects of Trump’s Israel policy, what you see from those books is that Trump is saying all kinds of things and he’s got all kinds of ideas. But the truth is he doesn’t really make policy because he doesn’t have the discipline to really focus in on anything. And so, those guys were really making policy. And they were pushing very much in the direction of letting Israel do whatever they want. Remember, they proposed a peace plan that created basically the most absurd of kind of Palestinian Bantustans. I think they were open to the idea of Israel annexing the West Bank legally, even though it didn’t come to fruition because of the Abraham Accords. I think they would be open to a legal annexation of the West Bank beyond the de facto annexation that we have now. I think that they would be more open to America entering a full-scale war with Iran. Remember the incredibly reckless decision they took to assassinate Soleimani in Trump’s first term.
And I also think they would be more supportive of mass ethnic cleansing in Gaza, right. There clearly are people in the Israeli government who would like not just a kind of moderate level of ethnic cleansing we’ve seen in Gaza now, where basically because life is impossible kind of getting across the border into Egypt. But to push Egypt to open the border so that you would have a mass exodus out of Gaza, and from which people would not be allowed to return, there are clearly people in the Israeli government who want that. There’s been a lot of reporting about this. And the Biden administration, while it didn’t do that much to stop it, when Egypt said early on, we’re not going to open our border and allow this to happen, the Biden administration does not appear, from the reporting I’ve read, to have turned the screws on Egypt to try to force them to do that. I think it’s quite possible that a Trump administration would do that using America’s economic leverage, maybe the leverage of Gulf countries over Egypt, to try to force Egypt to basically open its borders and basically have a situation where you don’t have tens of thousands of Palestinians leaving Gaza, but you have millions of Palestinians leaving Gaza without the ability to return. So, I think that’s a difference.
And beyond that, there is a difference, I think, in that the conditions for pro-Palestinian organizing would be different under Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris. This is a point that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a while back, which I think is really important. Which is to say the level of oppression—although it’s significant now on people who want to organize for Palestinian rights, quite significant—I think would be substantially worse under Donald Trump than it would be under Kamala Harris. I mean, I think you could really imagine a situation under Donald Trump, first in which the police brutality would make everything we’ve seen so far look absolutely like child’s play. But beyond that, in which the administration could really put real financial pressure on universities, threatening to defund American universities unless they basically ban pro-Palestinian activism, fire pro-Palestinian professors. I think that’s really imaginable under a Trump presidency. I think it’s less imaginable under a Harris presidency.
And the last point—and this is a point made by Eric Levitz—is I don’t think that defeating Kamala Harris will move the Democratic Party to the left and make it more progressive and more sympathetic to Palestinian rights. It may be on a trajectory of becoming more progressive to Palestinian rights on its own for reasons of generational change. But I actually think that the kind of establishment mainstream media discourse that will dominate the discussion after a Trump victory will be that the Democrats mistake was to nominate someone who was a progressive from the Bay Area who ran to the left of when she ran for president in 2020, and that they should have nominated a swing state moderate, and that they need to get back to doing that again—a kind of a reprise of the kind of Bill Clinton kind of strategy of when the Democrats nominated him in 1992. I just don’t think it’s the case that defeating Kamala Harris produces a Democratic Party that is more progressive on anything, including on this issue, than it would be if she were elected.
So, it’s for those reasons that I—I don’t live in a swing state—that if I were in a swing state, I would, with a very heavy heart, vote for Kamala Harris, and then do everything I could to try to influence and pressure her presidency so that it’s far, far better than her campaign has been. But even if it isn’t far better, I still think it will be better than a Trump presidency because one thing we have learned to our horror over the last year is that as terrible as things are, they can get worse. They can get much worse. They can get worse there in Palestine and Israel, and they can certainly get much worse here.
If I Lived In a Swing State, I’d Vote for Harris