Joe Biden's supporters' vile crowing over Trump's ethnic cleansing

Some Democratic Establishment types can hardly contain their glee at Trump's announcement. They are morally beyond the pale

One of the most grotesque spectacles of the past few days hasn’t come from Trump supporters, from loud-and-proud MAGA cap wearing proto-fascists, but rather from the Democrats - specifically, from cheerleaders of Joe Biden and his defeated vice-president Kamala Harris.

In response to Donald Trump’s proposal to murderously expel the surviving Palestinian population of Gaza, many of these so-called ‘centrists’ have decided not to focus on horror and outrage at an inherently genocidal proposition. No, they’ve taken a rather different tack - by instead crowing. They see this as a moment to score settle, to use this as an opportunity to face down those who objected to Joe Biden’s administration arming and facilitating Israel’s genocidal rampage.

Their mantra goes like this. You turned on Biden and Harris, and now look what you’ve got! How’s it worked out for your precious Palestinian people now the Democrats have been turfed out of office?

Just to be clear: both Biden and Trump are war criminals who deserve to be in jail. As a British citizen, I’m relieved not to have been placed in the impossible situation of so many US voters, with both presidential candidates committed to facilitating Israel’s genocidal rampage.

Now, I don’t believe for one moment that the crowing champions of the Democratic Party Establishment have any meaningful care for the future of the Palestinian people.

Let’s start with Julia Ioffe, founding partner and Washington Correspondent of Puck News. Screenshotting a New York Times news alert about Trump’s ethnic cleansing threat, Ioffe wrote:

Hope everyone is happy now that they got Genocide Joe out of office

You can just imagine the thrill she got when she typed that. More disturbingly I would ask - did she get a thrill from hearing about Trump’s plan? Is she feeling the emotion of delight because she feels the more the Palestinian people now suffer, the more she can dunk on the hated critics of the Democratic Party Establishment?

Firstly, Julia, Genocide Joe was called Genocide Joe because he provided vast sums of arms to Israel - nearly $23bn in the first year, in fact - on top of all the vast sums of US-supplied weapons they already had, in order to wipe Gaza from the face of the earth, exterminate its people and, in sum commit genocide. When two of his government agencies told him last April that Israel was deliberately preventing aid from getting to the desperate people of Gaza, his administration was legally obliged to immediately stop providing weapons. Guess what Biden did? That’s right, Julia, he kept those weapons flowing.

Aside from the fact that it was the Democratic Party Establishment which “got Genocide Joe out of office” - largely because they no longer thought he was really with us, if you get what I’m saying - what Ioffe do seem to be conceding, and we will come on to this, is that Gaza did play a role in Harris’ defeat. Which sounds like an argument for Harris having chosen a different path than she took - listening to those trying to get her to break from Biden’s administration on Palestine. Usually in a democracy when a politician loses, they are supposed to be hold themselves accountable for their failures, rather than blaming the voters, which is what the likes of Julia Ioffe are seeking to do.

Then there’s Dana Milbank in the Washington Post, who is a classic Washington insider. Now, I have struggled to find this man’s previous concern for the Palestinian people - there is something of a theme here. The only column before this week I could find is from last May, headlined ‘To the Gaza protesters helping to elect Trump: Give it a rest’.

Ah yes, that definitely sounds like a column written in good faith in just the style you would adopt if you were sincerely intending to win people over. I had to scan through several paragraphs until he said something about Palestine, in which he said about pro-Palestine activists that “their frustration with the president’s support for Israel is understandable” but they were simply helping to elect Trump. For him, the hideous suffering of the Palestinian people was, like everything else, relegated to the electoral arithmetics of the United States.

His column yesterday was headlined ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be… abolished?’ How drole, how amusing, to reduce the genocide of a people to a sarcastic headline. It underlines the total dehumanisation of the Palestinians - would other victims of mass slaughter be talked about this way?

His column opens like this:

“Genocide Joe” never looked so good.

Gaza peace protesters rallied Americans by the hundreds of thousands to oppose President Joe Biden and vote “uncommitted” in Democratic primaries. They heckled Vice President Kamala Harris and disrupted her events. On Election Day, Donald Trump prevailed in the majority-Arab town of Dearborn, Michigan. And across the country, many young voters stayed home or even voted for Trump — likely because, in part, they were disenchanted that the Biden administration had been insufficiently tough on Israel.

How’s that working out now?

Let’s just address this shall we. Even if you don’t accept genocide is taking place - well you’re wrong - but if you don’t, you must accept it’s a legitimate position, given there’s a consensus ranging from pre-eminent scholars such as Omer Bartov, the Israeli-American Professor of Genocide and Holocaust studies, to human rights’ organisations like Amnesty International. The polling showed that most Democratic voters believed Israel was committing genocide prior to the election.

My question to you, Dana, and those like you is: Do you accept, at the very least, that voting for a candidate who you believe is facilitating genocide represents a moral dilemma? If I asked you, in the abstract ‘Would you vote for a presidential candidate you knew was facilitating genocide’, what would you say - before 7th October, if that makes it easier? Would you answer without pausing, without blinking?

What if what had happened to Gaza had happened to Israel? What if Israel had been reduced to an apocalyptic wasteland, its hospitals systematically destroyed, its people deliberately starved, and countless tens or indeed hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis had been slaughtered, and what if this had been armed and facilitated by the President of the United States? If many Jewish Americans found it rather difficult to vote for a candidate in such circumstances, would you blame them? Would you mock them, as you do here?

What’s so obscene is you must know that the annihilation of Gaza happened under and indeed was facilitated by Biden. When Trump refers to the horrors of Gaza, which he uses as justification for its ethnic cleansing, is he not correct?

As Mairav Zonszein, an Israeli analyst I highly rate, puts it:

“It’s amazing how Trumps statement is at once the most dehumanising and destabilizing statement you can make about Palestinians and at the same time holds more humanity than Biden ever had”

And this is what is so perverse. There is far more recognition from Donald Trump of the utter depravity that has been unleashed by Israel upon the people of Gaza than there is from these Democratic vultures.

Simone D. Sandrs Townsend, who co-hosts a show on MSNBC, no doubt intended a strong side eye when she tweeted:

I think now it’s very appropriate to reiterate that elections have consequences.

As one progressive activist responded:

So true, we voted for Biden-Harris in 2020 and they committed genocide.

Seriously, there has been endless amounts of this. Accounts supporting the Democratic Establishment think they’re being terribly sassy, as one tweets, alongside a picture of a smiling Kamala Harris:

How’s that “uncommitted” vote going for ya?

Another quote tweets Donald Trump’s ethnic cleansing announcement with a picture of a smiling Kamal Harris with her hands outstretched, and adds no less than nine laughing emojis.

And I’m going to say it - these people are morally speaking no better than MAGA supporters, perhaps worse in many cases. Indeed, many Democratic ultras believe that Trump supporters need to be held to account, pointing out that at the very least they have chosen to vote for him knowing his history of gratuitous racism, and bile, his sexual misconduct, his threats to democracy. What about voting for a candidate despite them facilitating genocide? Is there any question of accountability there?

Now a poll released in January conducted by YouGov for the IMEU Policy Project concluded: “Vice President Harris lost votes because of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.”

It found that of those who voted for Biden in 2020 and cast a ballot for someone else, 29% did so because of “Ending Israel’s violence in Gaza.” That was the top reason, the economy came in at 24%, and Medicare and Social Security at 12%. In many key battleground states, like Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, the figure was even higher.

By a three to one margin, 2020 Biden voters who didn’t vote for Harris said they have been more likely to do so if she “pledged to break from President Biden's policy toward Gaza by promising to withhold additional weapons to Israel”, rather than less likely.

Actions, consequences. Now sure, you can choose to blame the voters. Or you can choose to hold the Democratic Party Establishment to account for arming and facilitating one of the most depraved crimes of our age.

Maybe here’s the conclusion. Maybe voters shouldn’t be put in this situation. Maybe it’s a damning indictment of US democracy. Maybe voters shouldn’t have to suffer the eternal moral stain of having voted for a candidate they believe is complicit in genocide because it’s the “lesser evil”. When we’re talking about facilitating genocide, even discussing the concept of a lesser evil is warped.

That Trump is a racist demagogue, a menace to an already profoundly compromised US democracy, and an accomplice to Israel’s genocide - that is all without question. But we live in an age when those who present themselves as the ‘moderates’, the ‘grownups in the room’, the ‘centrists’ have morally disgraced themselves. If you facilitate genocide, you have no moral legitimacy. It is as straightforward as that. And that must be a vital component of the reckoning which must take place within the Democratic Party - whose leaders have sole responsibility for the loss they suffered in the 2024 presidential elections.