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Let me start with my own news. At almost 80, I've decided not to run for president. I know it's a shock and, if the presidency were largely a morning or even an afternoon job, I might actually consider it. But 24 hours a day, with crises endlessly multiplying in a world truly on edge (and seemingly at the edge as well)? No, I don't think so. At this age, I find that I already tire out more quickly than I once did. And assuming I won (which I suspect I might), I would be 84 in my final year in office, which I find worrisome. Yes, an 84-year-old or even an 86-year-old could prove to be a perfectly competent, even exceptional president, but is it really something you want to bet your bottom dollar on?
I have a strange feeling that this country deserves someone younger in the White House than Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or me. I mean, comedian Bill Maher even suggested that Joe Biden could prove to be the "Ruth Bader Ginsberg of the presidency." How true! After all, when Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House in 1961 at age 70, having had a stroke in office that affected his speech, he was the oldest president in our history. When Ronald Reagan left at 77 in 1989, setting a new age record, he might even have had dementia.
Now, we face two men, both of whom would set remarkable age records for that office and both of whom are already often fumbling with words when they speak extemporaneously (though admittedly each always did some of that, even in his better years). Still, only one of them represents a danger beyond compare should he enter the White House a second time and that, of course, is The Donald. In that context, let TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon explore the strange and potentially all too ominous presidential race of 2024. Tom
Trump Showed Us Who He Is the First Time Around
Trump 2.0 Would Be Even Worse
Recently my partner and I had brunch with some old comrades, folks I first met in the 1996 fight to stop the state of California from outlawing affirmative action. Sadly, we lost that one and, almost three decades later, we continue to lose affirmative action programs thanks to a Supreme Court rearranged or, more accurately, deranged by one Donald J. Trump.
It was pure joy to hang out with them and remember that political struggle during which, as my partner and I like to say, we taught a generation of young people to ask, "Can you kick in a dollar to help with the campaign?" For a couple of old white lesbians who, in the words of a beloved Catherine Koetter poster, "forgot to have children," those still-committed organizers and activists are the closest thing to offspring we've got. And their kids, including one now in college, who were willing to hang out with their parents' old buddies, are the closest we'll ever have to grandchildren.
As people whose lives have long been tangled up in politics will do, we soon started talking about the state of the world: the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, the pain on this country's border with Mexico, and of course the looming 2024 election campaign. It was then that the college student told us he wouldn't be voting for Joe Biden -- and that none of his friends would either. The president's initial support of, and later far too-tepid objections to, the genocidal horror transpiring in Gaza were simply too much for him. That Biden has managed to use his executive powers to cancel $138 billion in student debt didn't outweigh the repugnance he and his friends feel for the president's largely unquestioning support of Israel's destruction of that 25-mile strip of land on the Mediterranean Sea. To vote for Biden would be like taking a knife to his conscience. And I do understand.
Vote Your Conscience?
This year, I wonder whether only people who live in California and other dependably "blue" states can afford that kind of conscience. I'm not objecting to voting "uncommitted" in a Democratic Party primary as so many citizens of Michigan and Minnesota have done. If I lived in one of those states, I'd have done the same. In fact, I didn't vote for Biden in Super Tuesday's California primary either and, in truth, I wouldn't even have to vote for him in November, because in this state my vote isn't needed to ensure his victory, which is essentially guaranteed. But God save the world if voters in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, or other swing states follow that example.
I'm less sure, however, what I'd do if, like thousands of Arab-American voters in Michigan, I had friends and family in Gaza, the West Bank, or indeed among the millions of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon or Jordan. Would I be able to mark my ballot for Joe? And if I wouldn't, then how could I ask anyone else to do so?
In the end I would have to vote for him because, however terrible for that part of the world another four years of the Biden administration might be, a second Trump presidency would be even worse. (Trump's recent comment about Gaza aimed at Israeli forces couldn't have been blunter: "You've got to finish the problem.") At least, unlike Trump, Biden isn't beholden to the Christian Zionists of the evangelical right, who long to gather all the world's Jews into the state of Israel, as a precondition for the return to Earth of Jesus Christ. (The fate of those Jews afterward is, of course, of little concern to those "Christians.")
What We've Seen Already
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