Trump has a Good Chance of being President, again, and it’s Biden’s Fault

Donald Trump is very likely to be our next president, again. That’s a scary proposition. As damaging as he was to this country and the world during his last clusterfuck of a presidential term, we can count on his second run being worse. He hasn’t toned himself down since being forced from office. He hasn’t gotten more sane and reasonable. If anything, he’s more demented and fascistic than ever. He’s also been facing myriad criminal and civil cases, giving him the disposition of a wounded and cornered elephant seal, ready to maul whomever he regards as a threat. It’s a virtual certainty that his behavior and policies during a second term will be worse and more harmful than his first.

We could blame the Republican party for this, for not having anyone better to put forth as their candidate, and for being too cowardly to sever ties with him, and for being a party which has nurtured the worst ideologies and promoted the most despicable, destructive bigots in US politics for many decades. They are certainly deserving of blame for many things. They are, as Noam Chomsky has described, one of the most dangerous organizations, an existential threat to organized human life, that the world has ever seen. But they are not alone in blame.

We could blame the pathetic primary candidates who vied for the Republican nomination in Trump’s place. None of them offered anything to voters other than the same bigoted fascist bullshit Trump does, with more or less coherence and politeness, and none of it more appealing to the Trump cultists. It doesn’t matter a great deal, because any of them would be comparably as bad or worse. DeSantis probably would have been worse, but he couldn’t even keep up the facade of being a genuine human being past the first primary election and bowed out, bent over, and opened up wide for Trump. The only one still sticking it out for now, for no discernible reason other than milking her supporters’ funding accounts dry, is Nikki Haley. The only positive thing I can say for her is that I am convinced that she doesn’t actually have a genuine ideology, or conscience, or soul, that she doesn’t believe in anything, and is simply a skilled opportunist who will give the corporate and white supremacist elite whatever they want in exchange for wealth and power.

We could blame the people who continue to support and vote for Trump. They are a truly wretched gaggle of human detritus. To an extent, they’re a mixed bag, though unfortunately mostly a mix of lunatics and idiots, of varying degrees of evil. Some of them are not truly evil at all, but are afflicted by such lunacy or idiocy that they should ethically not be participating in anything of consequence, let alone the fate of this country or the world. There’s no more argument for ignorance. Everyone had the opportunity to see what Deranged Turd would do if made president. It was a sick joke. Doubling down on it is unacceptable.

But we can also blame Biden and the Democratic party machine that forced him down the throats of American voters and into office, and which continues to back him. Even if he weren’t a doddering old codger in worsening cognitive decline, he’s a real piece of shit. On top of a history of racism, warmongering, corporate servitude, and pushing his party further to the brand of old school conservatism that Republicans used to own, he has made the United States directly complicit in genocide. Not that he’s the first US president to support a criminal regime in another country, nor the first to support ethnic cleansing or profit off the wholesale slaughter of innocent people. But he is in the rare position to be able to halt an active genocide, which the majority of his party and the people who voted for him want him to do. That’s the real kicker: Biden is actively driving voters away from him and the Democratic party by full-throatedly supporting, rhetorically and financially, an in-progress genocide.

Yet there will be those who blame voters, people who choose not to vote for Biden, because of his direct complicity in genocide, for Trump’s victory. They will argue that whatever Biden does, he’s still better than Trump. They’ll say that a vote withheld from Biden is equivalent to a vote for Trump. They’ll say that it is the fault of American voters, who for personal and/or moral reasons, choose not to vote for a genocidal warmonger. And to them I can only say, Fuck you. It is Biden’s fault, his and those who have supported and continue to support him. He could halt a genocide with the scribble of a pen. Those around him could make him end it. He doesn’t want to, and they don’t care to. He and they are responsible for the Palestinian genocide, and he and they will be responsible if Trump wins another term.