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God may or may not have moved Donald Trump’s head that vital inch to make the assassin’s bullet miss him a week ago, as he claims. But there is every sign that God really does have it in for the Democratic Party on which He has visited repeated disasters in what is so far the most disastrous US presidential election campaign to date.
I have always been sceptical about President Joe Biden as a leader, but it is sad to watch him as he tries to force his frail legs to walk with a jaunty step. Before he was forced to isolate after testing positive for Covid-19, he made serially disastrous efforts to prove in interviews that he is still compos mentis.
At his first press conference for a year, he mumbled replies to reporters’ questions, hopping from one topic to topic to another. Asked if, in retrospect, he would have done anything different about the war in Gaza, his mind veered back to an account of a meeting he had with Golda Meir, Israeli prime minister from 1969-74, accompanied by Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated in 1995.
This detachment from present-day reality feels pathetic and evokes sympathy – until one considers that the cost of Biden’s cognitive disability is being paid by the tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly women and children, slaughtered in Gaza in a war that would probably have been ended long ago by any other US president.
Piling the pressure on Biden
Democratic Party leaders are now piling the pressure on Biden to withdraw from the presidential race. Former president Barack Obama reportedly wants him “to consider his position” and Speaker Emerita of the House, Nancy Pelosi, along with Senate majority Chuck Schumer have warned him that he faces certain defeat in November and may bring many Democratic office holders down with him.
This does not guarantee that he will go since loss of self-awareness is a frequent symptom of mental disability. Vice President Kamala Harris will presumably be the new Democratic candidate because choosing anybody else might look like a repudiation of the Biden Administration as a whole.
Democratic Party leadership and mainstream media, which until the car-crash Biden-Trump debate on 27 June denied that anything was wrong, have now turned fiercely on Biden. They are in a panic because they foresee a calamitous electoral defeat in which they not only lose the Presidency, but both houses of Congress as well.
Cognitive decline
Yet the automatic assumption of the big Democratic players – politicians, donors, media – that they can evict Biden from the White House and determine his successor, provokes some deeper questions about who holds power in America. How did they conceal Biden’s declining mental state for so long? No credible candidates opposed him in the primaries.
Carl Bernstein, famed reporter of the Watergate scandal, said in an interview with CNN that multiple sources had informed him about at least 15 occasions in the last year and a half “where the President has appeared like he did at that horror show [debate]”.
In the past 18 months this cognitive decline has accelerated, with Biden frequently losing his train of thought and being unable to recall what he was saying. The White House press corps, whose reputation in the rest of the media is of being part high-profile journalists, part courtiers at the seat of power, must have known the same facts as Bernstein, but culpably failed to report them.
He describes a fundraiser at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York in June of 2023, where Biden became “very stiff… almost like a kind of rigor mortis”.
Obsessive hatred for Trump
A measure of the introversion of the American political elite and their absorption in holding power is that to this day none of those demanding that Biden step down ever refer to the danger of having a president whose mind is giving way as the man in charge of the nuclear codes and is making decisions about war and peace in Ukraine and Gaza.
It can be argued that all regimes seek to hide the physical and mental disabilities of their leaders. As a correspondent in Moscow in 1984/85, I wrote about the terminally ill Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko who, like Biden, made the odd embarrassing appearance geared to showing that he was still in charge, but in practice, gave precisely the opposite impression.
Yet there is something different and self-destructive about the way in which the Democrats appointed Biden their sole flag holder when they should have known that he was no longer up for the job. The explanation is probably that an obsessive hatred for Trump was so intense that it prevented his worst enemies, then as now, making rational decisions on how best to oppose him.
Again and again, they played to his strengths as a supremely skilled showman and television performer who revels in publicity good or bad.
The oxygen of public attention
Over the past three and a half years, Democrats, the Washington establishment, and most of the American press have kept Trump in the public eye by focusing on his courtroom battles, although his offences were usually trivial or legally dubious. They never succeeded in giving him a knockout blow, but they did give him the oxygen of public attention, without which he might not have been able to make a political comeback.
Anti-Trumpism became a sort of religion, much like the pro-Trumpism on display at the Republican convention in Milwaukee this week, a phenomenon that reporters haughtily, but not inaccurately, describe as being like a cult of religious devotees.
In anti-Trump circles, it became verboten to suggest that anything he said or did was not both evil and idiotic at the same time. Trump-bashing even obscured Biden’s success in promoting a progressive agenda.
If Trump said that he will end the war in Ukraine – a conflict unwinnable by either side, according to military experts – anti-Trumpists would insist that this could only be because he is in cahoots with his friend President Vladimir Putin.
Revolt against the establishment
As for claims by Trump and his Vice-Presidential nominee, JD Vance, that peace in Ukraine will save thousands of Ukrainians and Russians from being killed in battle – it is absurd to suppose, so claimed the anti-Trumpists, that any such humanitarian motive could weigh with either of these toxic individuals.
It is important to keep a sense of proportion: Trump and JD Vance are not fascists, but what has been described as pluto-populists, or plutocrats adopting popular causes. Their weakness is that their programme involves making contradictory promises to very different constituencies that they will be unable to keep. Both men are multi-millionaires, but pretend to be in revolt against the establishment.
The US is not on the brink of a civil conflict or of turning into a full blown authoritarian state, though the potential for more violence is certainly there. Trump may be a product of America’s faltering political system, but so too is Biden.
Further thoughts
I have been writing about President Joe Biden’s “senile obstinacy” when it comes to foreign policy for over a year, arguing that nothing but impaired judgement could explain his stance on Ukraine and later Gaza. Even so, I was shocked on reading in full the rambling incoherence in the answer Biden gave to a question he was asked about Gaza at his press conference on 11 July.
This was meant to be when he would show the world that he was still compos mentis, but the opposite happened.
Anybody harbouring doubts about Biden retaining executive authority a day longer should read the White House transcript of this press conference in which passage after passage provide proof that Biden’s brain no longer functions as it ought.
This was Biden’s first press conference in a year – and one can see why, since only desperation can explain why the White House staff did not stop him from giving this one. As regards the current conflict in Gaza – more of an ongoing massacre than a war – Biden fantasises about a ceasefire which somehow does not include Hamas or its leaders.
Biden’s core supporters in the US media at first described this embarrassing blather as a tour de force of presidential eloquence and analysis, though it was more like watching a drowning man as he sinks deeper in the water despite his frantic efforts to postpone the inevitable.
I had seen clips and read about the press conference, but it was only when I read the full text after being alerted to its devastating cumulative impact by Jeffery St Clair of Counterpunch that I became aware of how bad it was. Keep in mind as you read that the man speaking is the only non-Israeli who has had the power to stop a war which has so far killed 38,000 Palestinians and shows no sign of ending.
The quote is long, but is worth reading because it exposes the terrifying incoherence of Biden’s brain, even more than his disastrous debate with Trump on 27 June did:
The PRESIDENT: Asam [actually Asma Khalid] from NPR.
ASMA KHALID: Thank you, Mr. President. Asma Khalid with NPR. I have two questions. Earlier, you spoke about the ceasefire plan between Israel and Hamas. We’re now looking at 10 months of war. And I’m curious if there’s anything that you feel personally you wish you would have done differently over the course of the war.
And then, secondly, if I may, I wanted to ask you about your presidential campaign. I remember covering your campaign in 2020, and there was a moment where you referred to yourself as a, quote, “bridge” candidacy, a transition to a younger generation of leaders. I want to understand what changed.
THE PRESIDENT: Two things. Let’s – let’s go back to when you talked about would I have changed anything that’s happening with Israel and – and the Palestinians and the Palestinian movement.
The answer is, as you recall, from the very beginning, I immediately — I went to Israel, but I also got in immediate contact with El-Sisi in Egypt. I met with the King of Jordan. I met with — I met with most of the Arab leaders to try to get a consensus going as to what had to be done to deal with getting more aid and food and medicine into – in – into the Gaza Strip.
And we pushed it really hard. And Israel occasionally was less than cooperative. Number one.
The Israeli War Cabinet I’ve been – I’ve been de- – dealing with Israel since Golda Meir. I – some – some of the reporters around here who cover me all the time have heard me say this: The last – first time I met with Golda Meir, I sat ne- – across from her and her desk, and her assistant was [Yitzhak] Rabin, sitting next to me. That’s how far back I go.
I know Israel well, and I support Israel. But this War Cabinet is one of the most conservative War Cabinets in the history of – of Israel. And there’s no ultimate answer other than a two-state solution here.
And so, what was able to be done in terms of the orga- – the – the plan I put together was it would be a process for a two-state solution. And we get the Arab nations to – particularly from Egypt all the way to Saudi Arabia to be in a position where they would cooperate in the transition so that they could keep the peace in Gaza without – without Israeli forces staying in Gaza.
The question has been from the beginning: What’s the day after in Gaza? And the day after in Gaza has to be – the end – the end of the day after it has to be no occupation by Israel on the Gaza Strip, as well as the ability for us to access – get in and out, as rapidly as you can, all that’s needed there.
I’ve been disappointed that some of the things that I’ve put forward have not succeeded as well, like the port we attached from Cyprus. I was hopeful that would be more successful.
But that’s why I’m – when I went to Israel af- – immediately after the massacres that occurred at the hands of Hamas, that I – the one thing I said to the Israelis, and I met with the War Cabinet and with Bibi: Don’t make the same mistake America made after bin Laden. There’s no need to occupy anywhere. Go after the people who did the job.
You may recall, I get – still get criticised for it, but I was totally opposed to the occupation and trying to unite Afghanistan. Once we got – once – once we got bin Laden, we should have moved on because it was not in our – no one is ever going to unite it – unite that country.
I’ve been over every inch of that – not every inch – of the entirety, from the poppy fields, all the way to the north. I said, “Don’t make the same mistake we made. Don’t think that’s what you should be doing is doubling down. We’ll help you find the bad guys, Sinwar and company.”
And I – and all this criticism about I wouldn’t provide – when the we- – the weapons they needed. I – I am not providing them 2,000-pound bombs. They cannot be used in Gaza or any populated area without causing great human tragedy and damage.
But we’re – remember what happened when – when you had the attack on Israel from – with rockets and – and intercom- – and ballistic missiles? I – I was able to unite the Arab nations as well as – as well as Europe, and nothing happened. Nothing got hurt. It sent – it sent an incredible lesson to what was going on from the Middle East.
So, there’s a lot of things that, in retrospect, I wish I had been able to convince the Israelis to do. But the bottom line is we have a chance now. It’s time to end this war. It doesn’t mean walk away from going after Sinwar and Hamas.
And if you notice – you know better than most – there is a l- – a growing dissatisfaction in the – on the West Bank, from the Palestinians about Hamas. Hamas is not popular now.
And so, there’s a lot of moving parts. I just have to keep ma- – moving to make sure that we get as much done as we can toward a ceasefire – a ceasefire – and get those –
And, by the way, look – look at the numbers in – in Israel. I mean, I – I – my numbers are better in Israel than they are here. But, then again, they’re better than a lot of other people here, too.”’
Beneath the Radar
The most under reported aspect of the Ukraine war up to now has been allegations of massive corruption on the part of the Ukraine government in dealing with non-military contracts ultimately paid for by the Western powers.
Allegations include the attempted deposit of $350m in cash in an Italian bank by a senior Ukrainian official, a Ukrainian business source told me. The bank rejected the deposit and was later told privately by the Italian government that it was right to do so, but asked to keep quiet about what happened.
In the US, officials were resigned to a continuing rake off of aid funds by the Ukraine government, but they wanted the funds diverted to be 20 per cent rather than 40 per cent. Meanwhile South Korean companies are willing to start reconstruction work before the war ends, but do not want project finance to be handled by the Ukraine government.
This alleged high-level corruption is known to Western governments, but they dare not talk about it publicly because this might undermine popular support for aid to Ukraine. At the summit of Nato, EU and other governments in Vilnius in July 2023, Western leaders pressed President Volodymyr Zelensky to curb this corruption, but nothing positive eventuated.
On the contrary, an Ukraine official with a long record of combating corruption resigned in June from a government agency in charge of carrying out Western-financed reconstruction contracts.
The official in question, Mustafa Nayyem, had been director of the State Agency for Restoring Ukraine but suffered repeated efforts by the higher authorities to marginalise himself and his agency, though it has the vital task of rebuilding electrical plants, roads, bridges damaged by Russian missile attacks as well as financing the building of some military fortifications.
Nayyem is the second senior Ukraine official involved in reconstruction to depart recently. In May, Oleksandr Kubrakov, the Minister for Infrastructure, known for speaking out against bribery in the construction industry and for being close to the US, was fired. In an interview with the New York Times, Nayyem said that contractors for this essential work were often not paid for months. He told the paper that “those who tried to make this system [for reconstruction work] transparent and accountable have had to leave”.
Mr Nayyem makes no direct allegation of embezzlement in his interview, but says that the work of his agency had been systematically undermined by delaying payments to contractors and cuts to the pay of the agency’s own staff.
A great deal of money is at stake as Western aid for reconstruction may eventually total tens of billions of dollars. Nayyem says that he resigned after he was excluded by Ukrainian government officials from a team attending a conference in Berlin on reconstruction in Ukraine. The Government deny this, saying that he was due to meet Zelensky, but Nayyem says he received no such invitation.
The government blames the pressures of war for the non-payment of contractors and other failings. But the removal of two top officials known for their vocal opposition to corruption is an ominous development, reminiscent of official harassment of anti-corruption agencies imposed by the US during the war in Iraq.
Cockburn’s picks
The strange story of Casement Park in Belfast is suddenly getting national attention. I find it fascinating because it shows how every issue in Northen Ireland is toxified by communal differences and how UK planning laws mean that any project can be delayed indefinitely. The most lucid account of the affair is by Eliot Wilson in The Ideas Lab.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.