It took three days for President Biden to personally remark on the October 7 massacre in Israel. He moved slowly to make his comments as he usually does.
Though, for once, he actually appeared to get the general sentiment correct: “So, in this moment, we must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel. We stand with Israel. And we will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself, and respond to this attack.”
A good start, but being that it was a national security/foreign policy issue, it was only a matter of time before he fucked things up.
Days later, Biden would jettison his decisive tone, softening his message to lame equivocations. He and others in his administration, like Secretary of State Tony Blinken, repeated calls for a “humanitarian pause,” not, as they insist, a ceasefire — a distinction which they struggle to articulate. A pause, or ceasefire, or whatever you want to call it, favors Hamas. Hamas would be able to regroup while Israel is prevented from dismantling their murderous terrorist regime.
Yes, the Biden administration’s official position went from pro-Israel to functionally pro-Hamas in a matter of days.
During his icy visit to the West Bank, Blinken assured Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that the U.S. was pushing for relief for Gazans, but could only say he was “working on” answering Israeli concerns about the effect a “pause” would have on the ongoing hostage crisis.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Nov. 5, 2023. (Jonathan Ernst/Pool photo via AP)
This is all appalling, if not entirely unexpected, especially considering none other than Barack Obama himself had unfurled pro-Hamas comments in a recent public appearance. The former President told a group of activists and supporters that he yearned for “a peaceful coexistence between two sovereign and free peoples.” His proposed scenario is an impossibility. As my colleague Joel Pollak pointed out: “Hamas does not want ‘peaceful coexistence,’ nor do the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, in cities and on college campuses, who celebrated the Hamas attack and called for the State of Israel to be destroyed, ‘from the river to the sea.’”
There will be no two-state solution in the near future.
Joe Biden is stuck between a rock and a hard place. As I document throughout my New York Times bestselling book, Breaking Biden, he’s not nearly as dumb as he appears, and he knows who the bad guys are in this scenario. Yet, his voters do not, and Joe never betrays his base. Its increasingly clear substantial portions of the American left harbors pro-Hamas passions. If you need evidence of that, look no further than our campuses.
So, Joe made a seemingly bizarre announcement. He was going to take on Islamophobia.
Yet, as usual, there is method to his madness.
Sabotaging Kamala (Again)
“For too long, Muslims in America, and those perceived to be Muslim, such as Arabs and Sikhs, have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks and other discriminatory incidents,” read a recent statement from While House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre. “We all mourn the recent barbaric killing of Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old Palestinian American Muslim boy, and the brutal attack on his mother in their home outside Chicago.”
It was a disgusting moment that did a disservice to both innocent Israelis and the family of the small boy who was being exploited to score political points for Joe Biden.
Biden knows shifting to focus to Islamophobia at this particular moment has little potential to succeed, at least in the traditional sense. So, he resorted to yet another tried and true tactic: offload his toughest battles to Vice Underachiever Kamala Harris. Biden has also tasked Harris with the broken border and Artificial Intelligence, among other challenging elements of his policy portfolio.
Vice President Kamala Harris with her husband Doug Emhoff dances to live hip-hop music during a 50th anniversary celebration of hip-hop at the Vice President’s residence, on Sept. 9, 2023, in Washington, DC. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
This is clearly sabotage. Harris cannot win on these issues, as I thoroughly explain in Breaking Biden. Effectually, he is keeping Harris in her place so that she’ll never surpass him politically, at least until Joe is done running for office.
If any Republican president treated a BIPOC female this way, he would have been accused of racism, full stop. Joe sure has it good.
The Biden administration’s policy has gotten whackier still.
While Biden assigned her another impossible mission (solving Islamophobia), her husband, longtime entertainment lawyer Doug Emhoff, was absurdly tasked with the leading efforts to confront antisemitism. “Just know that I have your back,” Emhoff un-ironically told a group of Jewish American elementary schoolers shortly after the October 7 attack.
Don’t you all feel safe now?
It’s all a colossal joke, as evidenced by Emhoff’s stepdaughter, model Ella Emhoff, who is raising money in support of Gaza.
A P.R. Crisis for the Biden Brand
Time and again throughout his career, Biden’s policies have reflected the passing political trends of the moment much more so than any coherent dogma. Biden views the world through the lens of electoral politics. And it usually works out for him, as I document in Breaking Biden.
Tackling the Middle East inevitably means alienating important voting blocs. Thus, the Biden administration and their allies have assumed the posture that their primary concern stemming from the October 7 terror attack is to manage the anger of American Jews and Muslims.
This philosophy—to tackle geopolitical turmoil as a corporate P.R. crises—has guided his entire administration. It is the lens through which he has viewed other major crises like the open southern border and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, among others.
This tracks with other patterns as well. Consider that his top staff is made up of corporate consultants and campaign flacks, and it all begins to make sense. The main qualifications to be a top-level Biden official is not a record of competence, it’s an ability to manage a brand through crises.
This isn’t leadership. This is cynical politicking, which is all that Joe Biden knows.
During his first Senate campaign in the latter days of the Vietnam War, Biden successfully courted the anti-war and civil rights movement of that time to propel himself to victory. There’s no evidence he had any deep ideological predisposition toward those movements — Biden largely sat out of counterculture fights — but he recognized its political value in a race against an establishment candidate.
He won on those issues, and that success has informed the rest of his career. It’s The Brand that matters, not the substance.
That is where Biden finds himself now, in a position where he is trying to alienate as small a portion of his political base as possible. These are treacherous political waters.
Interestingly, Joe Biden modeled himself after fellow Irish-American Bobby Kennedy, calling him “the man who I guess I admire more than anyone else in American politics.” But Biden’s admiration for RFK was clearly more about presentation than his beliefs: Kennedy was a staunch supporter of a strong Israel at a crucial moment in the country’s history. He was ultimately killed for it.
Biden has taken a different approach, one without any discernible principles whatsoever.
But perhaps it will work for him. After all, if nothing else, Joe Biden is the ultimate political survivor.
Breaking Biden is available now in hardcover, eBook, and audiobook read by the author.
Alex Marlow is the Editor-in-Chief of Breitbart News and a New York Times bestselling author. His new book Breaking Biden is available now. You can follow Alex on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @AlexMarlow.
