Trump and Biden: which liar will you vote for?
Over the past several months, the public and media have directed a lot of attention to the advanced age of the two leading candidates for the U.S. presidency this November. In the case of Trump, he has only an abstraction, the calendar, working against him. Otherwise, looking at him, listening to him, he seems to be in fighting trim. Of course, his well-tailored suits do help.
In Biden’s case, his stumbling on staircases, his disorientation coming to and leaving the dais at public functions and his overall mental frailty lead many, including registered Democrats, to ask if it is wise for him to stand for re-election. Wouldn’t it be better if he showed the wisdom of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall who explained his resignation from the court in June 1991 very simply and honestly: “I’m getting old and falling apart.” Marshall’s infirmities were physical, not mental and in his farewell press conference he was sharp as a tack. In answer to a reporter’s question how he felt, Marshall shot back “With my hands…”
In yesterday’s delivery of the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, Biden demonstrated that he still has some fire left in him, so we may give him a pass for now. What was striking was not how he spoke but what he said: he reminded us all that we have an outrageous liar as president whose appeal is pitched to the intellectually and morally lazy among the electorate and who, through his prevarication, is taking us all to the brink of a devastating world war.
I direct attention to what he said at the start and finish of his address about the two foreign policy issues of the day: Israel’s continuing acts of genocide in Gaza and the Russia-Ukraine war.
Biden argues that he and his administration are doing their utmost to achieve a cease-fire in Gaza. That is a bare-faced lie. A solution to the crisis is readily available: for the United States to stop supplying arms to the Israeli army. De facto, the atrocities would wind down and stop; de facto the Israeli army would begin its withdrawal. Biden and Co. are the enablers of this genocide and to speak of their role in peace talks in Cairo or elsewhere is a distraction and a falsehood.
The situation is no better with respect to Biden’s remark that we must support Kiev for the purpose of stopping Putin’s armies in their tracks, since victory in Ukraine will be followed by a Russian advance into NATO countries and an all-out war. This Big Lie has no substance behind it whatsoever and is merely an aggravated continuation of the Russia-bashing that the Democratic Party has used as a substitute for foreign policy since 2014. The mendacious story of evil Putin was given wings in the 2016 presidential campaign when Hilary Clinton launched the Russia-gate allegations.
Turning to the Republican candidate-to-be, Donald Trump, he was dogged during his entire presidency by daily tallies in mainstream U.S. newspapers of how much misinformation and outright lies he had said publicly the day before. I draw attention to the point that he has been repeating lately and surely will be using up to election day: namely that there would never have been a Russian attack on Ukraine in February 2022 if he had been president, because Vladimir Putin respected him, Trump, whereas he was contemptuous of Biden. Of course, this campaign message ignores the fact that a Trump administration would have been no better prepared to deal with Russia’s demands in December 2021 for redesigning the European security architecture than was Biden’s.
I do not think there are many state leaders anywhere, including among the vassal countries that count as American allies, who respected the United States and its president over the past twenty-five years, except perhaps during the first term of Barack Obama, who was deemed, mistakenly, to be the man of peace. In this regard, the Russians align with most other countries. The relationship to the USA is not one of respect but of fear.
We hear this fear expressed by hosts and panelists on the Russian talk shows, which stand for the chattering classes. Russians accept without question that America is a mighty military force, economic force, political force in the world. What they fear is the irrationality they see in American elites, their loss of pragmatism and the crowning of ideology as the guiding forces in Washington’s Deep State.
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After these negative observations about the likely candidates on the ballot for U.S. president in November, some may think I have a dim view of American democracy, but they would be deeply mistaken. Like in the Wendy’s hamburger advertisements, in the USA you will have a choice on election day. The country is split in sentiment between Democrats and Republicans roughly 50:50 and it is this division that gives us all freedom of speech today, not a scrap of paper called the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.
Putting aside domestic policy issues, the two candidates for the presidency are promoting two very different revisionist views of America’s place in the world. I say revisionist because the Democrats’ concept of their country as global hegemon dates back only to 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving the United States as sole superpower. Before that the United States claimed to lead the Free World, not the whole world. Meanwhile, the Trump Republicans are keen to implement a different revisionist scenario in which the country is freed from its parasitic ‘allies’ and can arm itself to the teeth with new strategic weapons systems.
Like so many others who voted for Trump in 2016, I was deeply disappointed by his inability to turn around the ship of U.S. foreign policy in all the different domains he had led us to expect, beginning with restoring normal relations with Russia. His personnel choices in foreign affairs were awful, starting with his first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and ending with Mike Pompeo. In between there were John Bolton as National Security Advisor and Nikki Haley as ambassador to the United Nations. Terrible people, all of them, who worked against the policies that Trump declared upon taking office.
Why would a new Trump presidency be any better in foreign relations? The single and decisive reason that I adduce is that Trump has taken aim at NATO and for him to achieve his unstated but clear goal of dismantling NATO all that he has to do is nothing, that is to say not provide support, which is far easier to do than something.
Allowing NATO to sink into oblivion by itself would be the greatest contribution to world peace that one can imagine. It would take all the wind out of the sails of our hyper-aggressive heads of the European Commission, European Council and European Parliament.
But what about China, you may ask. Wouldn’t Trump lead us into a war in the Pacific?
The defense cooperation between Russia, Iran, North Korea and China, growing by the day thanks to the intensifying intervention of the USA in the territorial disputes in Southeast Asia would present a brick wall against which even the hottest heads in Washington will not go when the moment of truth arrives. Right now I see just glowing embers of a potential conflagration there, whereas the European battlefields are fully aflame in Ukraine.
For all of the above reasons, come election day, I will hold my nose and vote for Trump.
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If, despite all of its flaws in personalities at the top and in procedures, meaning ‘the swamp’ in the District of Columbia, the United States has the semblance of a representative democracy, the same cannot be said about Europe, both at the EU level institutions here in Brussels and at the national levels. At the Union level and at the national level in much of the Continent we have rule by coalition which amounts to institutionalized corruption. We, the people, are an irrelevancy when a coalition of parties deals out the ministerial portfolios as favors, without relation to policy or to individual competence.
In the first week of June, here in Europe we have parliamentary elections which are a cause for despair, not celebration. By law, Belgians are required to vote or face fines and so I also will trudge to my voting booth in one or another nearby school and cast a ballot. But for whom? As I learned in the last elections, on the one issue that really interests me, foreign policy, all but one of the parties here are spouting the same undying support for Kiev and hatred for Russia. And that one party singing arias from another opera is the Communists.
Cast a blank ballot, you say. But here in Belgium blank ballots have till now been deprived of their sting. The given vote is systematically divided up proportionally among the official parties in accordance with their overall tallies. To be sure, this year there is a movement called ‘Blanco’ which hopes to overturn that tradition and require blank votes to be counted as ‘against all of the above.’ We will see how far that initiative goes.
And so, notwithstanding my pro-business, culturally traditionalist turn of mind, very likely I will be casting a vote for the Belgian Communists this June.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024