Still can't
I will not choose between two unacceptable options
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In a piece today at The Free Press, Eli Lake alerts us to an interesting phenomenon: big-bucks political donors who have been solidly Never Trump but are so thoroughly disgusted with Biden’s conditioning of the current round of Israel aid on Israel not finishing off Hamas in Rafah that they are reconsidering what to do this year:
Cliff Asness, a Republican donor who says he “spent well over seven figures” to support Trump’s primary opponent Nikki Haley, told The Free Press that “My ‘Never Again’ is trumping my ‘Never Trump’ these days.”
“Biden is a huge disappointment, really a moral outrage with this arms embargo being only the latest and greatest outrage,” continued Asness, the co-founder of AQR Capital Management. “Despite my long opposition to him, this makes me more likely, though I haven’t quite gotten there yet, to see Trump as the better of two bad alternatives.”
Asness is not the only Never Trumper to move to the Never Biden camp.
Billionaire entertainment mogul and major Democratic donor Haim Saban wrote of Biden’s policy switch in an email to two senior White House advisers last week: “Let’s not forget that there are more Jewish voters who care about Israel than Muslim voters that care about Hamas.”
And after CNN aired Biden’s comments on Wednesday, hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, a registered Democrat, took to X to call the move “one of the worst acts against an ally of a sitting president ever. Hopefully, this means he won’t be sitting for longer.”
David Friedman, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Israel and has been in touch with many Trump-skeptic Jewish donors though he has no official role on the campaign, told The Free Press that he has seen “more Jewish money coming in” for Trump in the election.
“I think the announcement on Wednesday,” he said referring to Biden’s arms decision, “was the last straw for people who were already leaning very close to going for Trump. He continued, “There is clearly a change going on, people who are active in politics with big money, people who were never Trumpers or reluctant ‘hold your nose Trumpers’ are telling me that Trump has to win.”
Michael Granoff, a managing partner of Maniv, a venture fund dedicated to clean transportation technology, told The Free Press that he voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but has lost confidence in the president: “I am not voting for Biden. I’m not saying I’m voting for Trump, but it’s a nonzero chance now.” Granoff was a staffer on the Clinton-Gore campaign and was a close friend of the late senator Joe Lieberman. These days he calls himself a political independent. He has given to campaigns for Rep. Ritchie Torres, the Bronx Democrat who has emerged as one of the most pro-Israel voices in Congress, as well as former Rep. Liz Cheney, who broke with Trump after January 6.
Granoff said Biden’s current policy toward Israel’s war betrays the commitments he made after Hamas invaded the Jewish state on October 7. “The speech he gave on October 11 was one of the finest speeches a president has ever made,” he said. “Had he stuck to that policy, he would be leading in the race right now. I would be raising money for him.”
A new set of polls shows Biden trailing Trump in five of the six swing states that will likely decide the election.
One politically connected New York bundler told The Free Press that the anti-Biden sentiment among pro-Israel donors has been rising steadily since March. “I trace it back to the State of the Union,” the source said. In that March 7 speech, Biden adopted the casualty figures of the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, which do not separate dead civilians from dead combatants. What’s more, in April the ministry acknowledged its data was incomplete for 11,371 of the 33,091 deaths it had recorded, suggesting the totals Biden cited were exaggerated. As Peter Savodnik reported this week, even the UN now admits those numbers cannot be trusted.
Look, I understand that either Trump or Biden will be elected president in November. These powerful donors’ binary-choice mindset reinforces that certainty.
But that’s for them - and every other donor and voter - to decide for themselves.
I can only hope they’re checking their heart of hearts, the still, small voice, their moral compasses.
I share the disgust with Biden’s treatment of Israel. But not to worry, I wouldn’t vote for him, anyway. From his across-government executive order on DEI to his thumbs-down on LNG exports to - well, the guy has been an empty suit parroting what he thinks the majority of his party wants for his entire career.
But seriously? Donald Trump as an alternative?
Look, I understand that a strong argument can be made that the current hush-money trial is predicated on flimsy accusations. The Very Stable Genius may get convicted of falsifying business records, but it sure looks like the throne-sniffers have something of a point about the long knives being out for the object of their adulation.
But doesn’t it look a little incongruous for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who makes a point of putting his Christian faith front and center, to make the prosecution’s zeal the main point? Yes, there is a solid rule-of-law angle to this, and precedents could be set that would subject future presidents to ever-more-frivolous legal challenges.
And yes, Michael Cohen has done his credibility no favors over the past few years, but come on, nobody doubts that Trump had a tryst with Stormy Daniels (the included a bonus spanking with a rolled-up magazine) or a months-long affair with Karen McDougal, all while Melania was home with an infant Barron. Nobody doubts there were other dalliances as well.
For the I’m-not-voting-for-a-pastor crowd, I’d ask how confident they are that things would go well on a policy level in a. second Trump administration.
It’s dire out there.
But how does Damon Linker think Trump would deal with it?
It's always extremely difficult to predict 4-5 years into the future—who in 2019 would have predicted the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, or the COVID-19 pandemic, January 6, and President Joe Biden struggling for re-election because of inflation?—but this is especially so when it comes to Trump, because he holds very few positions on principle. He has a core of convictions on immigration, trade, and foreign policy, but even these he’s willing to trade away for the sake of a “deal” that advances his own personal interests. So would he pull out of NATO? I bet he’d like to in theory. But then he’d face the technical challenge of figuring out how to get it done, and the political headache of the consequences. So he’d likely just insult our NATO allies and threaten a withdrawal like he did the last time.
And consider that he won’t have the caliber of advisors and cabinet-level department heads he had the first time around. It will be sycophants crawling across broken glass to prove their loyalty to him alone.
Speaking of loyalty, he’d have to repair relations with Bibi Netanyahu, who committed the transgression of congratulation Biden on his election victory in 2020.
So, no, Biden’s shameful treatment of Israel doesn’t move me closer to a decision to pull the lever for his opponent.
I still intend to stay home in November. There’s the spiritual level - Trump is a phony who sucks up to gullible pastors, and Biden is cool with the extermination of fetal Americans - but my position is also based on some kind of remnant of a love for America.
We’ve taken quite a cultural and spiritual beating over the past century, but the uniqueness of the American experiment is still there, at least as a potential option for us to revisit. To vote for either major American party in their current iterations would be to see that potential fade even more from the realm of possibility.
So here I stand on the Narrow Sliver of Terrain. It strikes me as safer than any place else I might plant my feet.