President Joe Biden faces new questions over his candidacy in the November election - with his campaign events currently on pause due to a Covid-19 infection.
The top two Democrats in the US Congress, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, are both reported to have met him individually to express concerns over his bid for the White House.
Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker, has also privately told him that he cannot beat Donald Trump in November's election, according to CNN.
Mr Biden’s re-election attempt was already being buffeted by growing dissent among top Democrats after his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump last month.
Announcing his Covid infection on Wednesday, Mr Biden's press secretary said the 81-year-old was facing mild symptoms.
He would isolate at his home in Delaware while carrying out "all of his duties fully", said Karine Jean-Pierre. She added that the president was vaccinated and boosted. He has tested positive for Covid twice before.
A strong majority of Democrats want President Joe Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race, new polling finds, as faith in his mental fitness drops and Democratic lawmakers are stepping up their efforts to replace him with a different candidate.
AP-NORC’s latest polling released Wednesday finds that 65 percent of Democrats say that Biden should step aside and allow the party to choose a different candidate. Only 35 percent say that he should stay in the race.
Opposition to Biden’s continued candidacy is especially strong among younger people — a key demographic for Democrats — with 75 percent of those aged 18 to 44 agreeing that he should withdraw, though a strong majority of those older than 45 also believe another candidate should be selected.
The findings come amid growing concern over Biden’s health, with only 3 in 10 Democrats saying they’re “extremely” or “very” confident that Biden can effectively serve as president, down by roughly 10 percentage points from a February AP-NORC poll.
These concerns were largely sparked after Biden’s disastrous debate performance at the end of June, though progressives have long been warning Biden that he is risking his chances of winning due to his funding of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Concerns about his health have compounded in recent weeks, however, with the president doubling down on his candidacy even as he continues to make embarrassing gaffes in every public appearance.
The US announced on Wednesday that it will end aid delivery to Gaza through its temporary pier and instead send relief for the Palestinian enclave to Ashdod port in Israel.
The pier was plagued by many issues including severe weather damage, ensuring security and increasing aid to Gazans, who are wrestling with worsening humanitarian aid crises.
But the US insists the temporary pier was "successful" despite the challenges.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency: Breaking with Convention.” I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from the Republican National Convention.
On Tuesday night, several of Donald Trump’s former rivals endorsed the Trump-Vance ticket. Speakers at the RNC included former Ambassador Nikki Haley, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Much of the evening focused on the party’s hard-line border and immigration policies. The 2024 Republican platform backs Trump’s pledge to carry out, quote, “the largest deportation operation in American history,” unquote, and to stop what it calls a “migrant crime epidemic.” This is Texas Senator Ted Cruz speaking last night.
SEN. TED CRUZ: Never before has an election mattered so much. We are facing an invasion on our southern border — not figuratively, a literal invasion. Eleven-point-five million people have crossed our border illegally under Joe Biden. Every day Americans are dying, murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released. Teenage girls and boys wearing colored wristbands are being sold into a life of sex slavery. This is evil, and it’s wrong. And it is happening every damn day. Today, as a result of Joe Biden’s presidency, your family is less safe, your children are less safe, the country is less safe. But here’s the good news: We can fix it. And when Donald Trump is president, we will fix it.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz, speaking here in Milwaukee at the Republican National Convention last night. There’s no data linking immigrants to rising crime.
For more, we’re joined by Jean Guerrero, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, author of the book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. Her latest piece is headlined “How Biden Can Win Over Young Latinos.” She’s a senior fellow at the UCLA Latina Futures 2050 Lab and a former opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times. She’s joining us from Los Angeles.
Jean, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t you summarize your response to what Ted Cruz was saying, in particular? And, overall, the theme of last night was the issue of immigration and safety, as they put it, immigration and crime, Jean.
JEAN GUERRERO: Exactly. Great to be here, Amy.
What we saw last night was the politics of hate. The Republican Party is not letting up on its deceptive anti-immigrant hatemongering. Again, this is a politics of hate, that is rooted in the deceptive demonization of one of the most vulnerable groups in the United States, which is immigrants.
And Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s speech was one of the most debased and deceptive of the week. He listed example after example of Americans being killed by immigrants, which, as you noted, Amy, immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than people who are born in the United States. Data consistently shows this. But this is a strategy that has been used by Trump, and it’s straight out of the playbook of Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller, which is to take aberrant examples, unusual examples of crimes and to paint them as the norm. This is a strategy that was used by the Nazis to vilify Jewish people and other groups that they didn’t like. They published lists of crimes committed by these people to create the false notion that these are monsters, that they’re subhuman, that they’re a threat to society.
And this is what we saw last night, that even in the wake of Trump’s assassination attempt, the Republican Party is not letting up on its anti-immigrant hatemongering, on its very dangerous and deceptive rhetoric, which is not surprising, given that when Trump was shot, he was in the middle of anti-immigrant hatemongering. If he hadn’t turned to look at that chart showing border crossing statistics, he might be dead. So, as the Republican Party is painting Trump as the victim of demonization by the left, Trump and the Republican Party continue with its classic anti-immigrant hatemongering, which is endangering this group of people and Latinos across the United States who come from mixed-status families.
AMY GOODMAN: And we should say, as Senator Cruz spoke, as Nikki Haley spoke, as our next clip we’re going to play of a mom who lost her son to fentanyl spoke, President Trump was there sitting next to J.D. Vance, and President Trump had a bandage over his right ear after Saturday’s assassination attempt. I want to go to another speaker at the RNC last night, and that was Anne Fundner of Southern California, who said her son Weston’s fentanyl overdose death was because Biden opened, quote, “our borders.” This is a clip.
ANNE FUNDNER: We did everything right. I had those conversations with him, and fentanyl still found my son. And on February 27th, 2022, our lives were shattered, and our baby was gone. This was not an overdose; it was a poisoning. His whole future, everything we ever wanted for him, was ripped away in an instant. And Joe Biden does nothing. I hold Joe Biden, Kamala Harris — the border czar, what a joke — and Gavin Newsom, and every Democrat who supports open borders, responsible for the death of my son.
AMY GOODMAN: In fact, data shows fentanyl is largely smuggled by U.S. citizens across U.S. ports of entry. Jean Guerrero, this is a statistic that you talk about. The statistic is 90%?
JEAN GUERRERO: Exactly, about 90% of fentanyl is actually smuggled through ports of entry, not through the desert, and it’s smuggled by U.S. citizens, not by immigrants. So the Republican Party is misusing a legitimate tragedy to manipulate perceptions about what is happening at the border.
This woman’s son, Weston, should not have died. It is a tragedy that he died. However, this blame on, quote-unquote, “open borders” is misleading, to say the least, because the border, first of all, is not open. Biden has deployed more Border Patrol agents than any president in U.S. history. They have had record fentanyl seizures under his administration. And again, when fentanyl is smuggled across the border, it is smuggled through ports of entry, which are always open. And there’s — yeah, the Trump administration also kept the ports of entry open because you have legitimate commercial traffic that needs to be coming across the borders. And that is where the fentanyl is being smuggled, not through the desert.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you respond to Senator Cruz saying that immigrants commit murders, I think he said, “every damn day”?
JEAN GUERRERO: That’s extremely deceptive. Again, immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than people who are born in the United States. They have a lot more to lose, particularly undocumented immigrants. The statistics consistently show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. And so, this idea that they’re committing crimes every day is just absolutely bonkers.
But it’s a strategy that is very classic Stephen Miller. My book was about Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller. And one of the things that they did under the Trump administration was they created an office called the VOICE. It was for the victims of immigration crimes. And it was constantly publishing lists of immigrants committing crimes, which, again, creates the false notion that they’re out there disproportionately committing crimes, when in fact that is not the case.
And if you wanted to demonize somebody based on a statistical fact, you might choose, for example, the fact that white men are disproportionately responsible for mass shootings. But, of course, you don’t see anybody advocating for the mass detention or deportation of white men, because that would be crazy. And again, this is based on a completely false notion that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes, which is — it’s just not the case.
AMY GOODMAN: Kari Lake, who’s running for Arizona’s Senate seat left vacant by Kyrsten Sinema, kicked off the RNC on Tuesday night, lashing out against the media and her Senate race opponent, Congressmember Ruben Gallego.
KARI LAKE: You have spent the last eight years lying about President Donald Trump and his — and his amazing patriotic supporters. Actually, guys, they lie about everything. They’ve lied about Joe Biden’s health, the economy, the laptop, the border. I could go on and on and on. But the really good news is that every day more and more people are turning off the fake news. And they’re — that’s right. And Americans are waking up to the truth about the disastrous Democrat policies pushed by Joe Biden and his favorite congressman, my opponent, Ruben Gallego.
These guys, they are full — they’re full of bad ideas. Just last week, Ruben Gallego voted to let the millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election. Gallego and the Democrats have handed over control of my state Arizona’s border to the drug cartels. And because of them, criminals and deadly drugs are pouring in, and our children are dying. Our children are getting their hands on these drugs and dying.
AMY GOODMAN: Kari Lake falsely said that her opponent, the Congressmember Ruben Gallego, quote, “voted to let millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election,” unquote. However, she did not mention that it’s already banned by federal law for noncitizens to vote. Lake is a former TV news anchor who lost Arizona’s governor’s race and has since become a face for Trump’s 2020 election denial movement. Jean Guerrero, her comments?
JEAN GUERRERO: Gallego is a moderate on immigration. And what the Republican Party does is, regardless of whether you are a moderate, which is the case with Biden — you know, he has, as I mentioned earlier, increased border security to unprecedented levels. But regardless of whether you take a moderate stance on immigration, they’re going to say that you have opened the borders, that you are in favor of people coming across the border without any sort of security measures, without any enforcement. And that’s just simply not the case.
But they are heavily leaning on this because they have nothing else to offer the American people. It’s a scapegoating politics, which is rooted in stoking fear and stoking hate and creating the impression that there’s a dystopic reality at the border, which simply is not the case. You know, Trump promised to shut down the border, and he was not able to build the wall that he said he was going to build, because it’s physically impossible to build a 2,000-mile structure along the terrain that exists at the border.
So, President Biden is doing the best that he can, and Democrats like Gallego are in favor of moderate immigration strategies that embrace certain levels of border security. And the Republican Party simply takes that completely out of context, ignores that, and claims that they’re in favor of open borders, which is just absolutely not the case.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to another clip. We’re on the floor of the convention at night. This is another Arizona delegate, named Stacey Goodman, who spoke with Democracy Now!’s Renée Feltz. Goodman wore a white patch of paper on her right ear, similar to the bandage Trump is wearing at the RNC on his right ear after the assassination attempt on Saturday.
STACEY GOODMAN: I’m here to serve my community, my country. What I have on my right ear is in solidarity with President Trump. He got shot on Saturday. Somebody attempted to take his life. It was an attempted assassination, all because of the rhetoric on the left. Even Joe Biden said it, and he even apologized for it. He said, “We need to put Donald Trump in the bull’s-eye.” So, crazy people take that as meaning, you know — you know, the hypocrisy is ridiculous, because the left says, “Oh, unity, unity, unity,” but there is no unity on the left. Look what CNN did today, said D.J. [sic] Vance is more toxic than Trump. Where’s the unity in that? No.
RENÉE FELTZ: And I just have to ask. It does seem like it’s being reported that this young man was able to use a gun purchased by his father and that the family, or at least the young man was a registered Republican. So, it seems —
STACEY GOODMAN: He wasn’t a registered Republican, OK? His Facebook page was wiped. He was not a registered Republican. That’s just the narrative of the left. He was not a Republican.
RENÉE FELTZ: What was he?
STACEY GOODMAN: I’m not 100% sure, but he was probably mentally ill and easily swayed by the left.
RENÉE FELTZ: OK. Can I ask you one other question —
STACEY GOODMAN: Sure.
RENÉE FELTZ: — about immigration? It seems like it’s a major topic tonight. Is it a big one for you?
STACEY GOODMAN: Well, yeah. I’m all for people coming into this country and supporting this country, speaking English, assimilating. What we have — and I’m from a border state — we have open borders. We have illegal immigrants coming in here, killing, raping and maiming our children. OK? That is not acceptable. The border wall —
RENÉE FELTZ: But you’re saying that’s not all of them?
STACEY GOODMAN: The border wall needs to be finished. Joe Biden, had he just left that alone, we would have had a complete border wall. The blood is on Joe Biden’s hands and his administration’s.
RENÉE FELTZ: Just real quick, there are some people who have drawn attention to reports that show that U.S.-born citizens are much more likely to commit crimes than immigrants.
STACEY GOODMAN: That’s a lie. That’s an out-and-out lie. I don’t know where you’re getting your information from, but it’s a lie.
RENÉE FELTZ: One, I got it from a study that was done by Northwestern, who used census data.
STACEY GOODMAN: No. No. No, not buying it.
RENÉE FELTZ: And one other —
STACEY GOODMAN: I was a police officer for 21 years. I will tell you, illegal immigrants commit more crimes than anyone else, because, first of all, they’re coming into this country — they’re committing a crime by coming into this country, so they don’t care about our laws. They don’t abide by our laws.
AMY GOODMAN: In fact, it’s been widely reported that Thomas Matthew Crooks was in fact a registered Republican, who would have been eligible to cast his first presidential vote in November for the election. Public records also show Crooks’ father is a registered Republican, his mother a registered Democrat, and that, as a 17-year-old, Crooks made a $15 donation to a Democratic Party cause. Jean Guerrero, you’ve been shaking your head through this comment. Stacey Goodman is a retired police officer.
JEAN GUERRERO: Yeah, she mentioned blood on Biden’s hands. If you want to talk about somebody who has blood on their hands, the Republican Party has spent the last seven years normalizing the white supremacist “great replacement” theory, which has been used by white terrorists, by white extremists across the world and in this country to commit horrific acts of violence against Mexican Americans, against Latinos, against Black people, and it’s one of the most dangerous theories that exists today. And it has been normalized in U.S. politics. It’s the idea that immigrants are being brought to the United States to replace white people. It confuses demographic change and demographic growth with demographic subtraction and demographic violence. It’s extremely deceptive and manipulative, and the Republican Party has been doing this for seven years. And so, it’s, of course, no surprise that under the Trump administration we saw the worst, the most deadly attack against the Mexican American community that the United States has seen, in El Paso, when you saw the white supremacist shooter attack a Walmart because of this theory.
So, the notion that Trump is the victim, that he is being victimized, or that Americans are being victimized by the Democratic Party’s border policies, completely ignores the reality, which is that President Biden has deployed historic numbers of agents to the border. They’re seeing record seizures of fentanyl. He has kept in place a majority of Trump’s restrictive policies at the border. And again, the research consistently shows that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes, and this includes undocumented immigrants. Undocumented immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes.
AMY GOODMAN: Jean Guerrero, before we go, I want to ask you about your latest piece in The New York Times, “How Biden Can Win Over Young Latinos.” You say that 20% of the Latino population that will be voting will be voting for the first time. What is the significance of this?
JEAN GUERRERO: So, the focus has been on the MAGA Latino. Every time you talk about the Latino vote in the national media, you hear about the MAGA Latino, the Latino who’s supporting Trump. And while this is a reality of a segment of the Latino voters, those who are going to determine the future of the Latino vote are young progressive voters, who are overrepresented, actually, in battleground states. So, if President Biden focuses on turning out this young Latino electorate, it can make all the difference.
And these are Latinos who are very, very progressive. They believe in a pathway to citizenship for long-term undocumented immigrants. They believe in abortion rights. They believe in stopping climate change. They believe in stopping gun violence. They’re more likely to belong to groups that have been harmed by Trump. They’re more likely to identify as LGBTQ. They’re more likely to have a family member or a close friend who is undocumented.
So, if President Biden wants to win over young Latinos, he needs to take the group of people that Trump has chosen to persecute systematically, and show that he has what it takes to defend them. He has already taken significant actions as far as executive action to provide deportation relief to the undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens. However, he needs to go farther than that. He needs to take much bolder action to show that he is in fact a fighter for oppressed communities.
Right now there is an impression among young voters, including Latino voters, that he is as bad with oppressed communities as Trump, because of the horrors in Gaza. And there is one way — there is just one way that President Biden can counter that narrative, and it is to take these people that Trump is victimizing, that the Republican Party is victimizing, and show that he has what it takes to defend them and take bold action to provide deportation relief to all undocumented people who have lived here a long time, who have U.S. citizen children here, who were essential workers during the pandemic, and make sure that they can be safe here, they can continue paying taxes, and they can continue to save this economy from a recession.
AMY GOODMAN: Jean Guerrero, we want to thank you for being with us, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. We’ll link to your piece in The New York Times, “How Biden Can Win Over Young Latinos.”
That’s not true. A number of those counted as having been apprehended at the border were turned away. Millions more were deported and millions remain in detention.
“But,” Cruz continued, “the numbers don’t show us the true price that our country is paying.”
That cost? That “every day, Americans are dying — murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.” The accuracy of that sweeping, unsupported statement notwithstanding, it has been demonstrated repeatedly that immigrants are less likely to commit crime than native-born Americans.
Cruz was building to something, though, exaggerating the number of immigrants in the country and the threat they pose so that he could make a staggering, dishonest claim about his political opponents.
Ahead of the International Court of Justice's expected advisory opinion on legal consequences for Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, Palestine's permanent observer at the United Nations reminded other diplomats at a U.N. Security Council meeting on Wednesday that the slaughter of more than 38,000 people in Gaza has been broadcast for nine months—while Israel has claimed it is acting in self-defense and is targeting Hamas.
"What is happening in Gaza is going down as the most documented genocide in history," Riyad Mansour said. "When will the world denounce the crimes and stop tolerating their reoccurrence?"
In addition to the daily news of aerial and ground attacks on schools, homes, and places of worship in Gaza, Mansour pointed to Israeli soldiers' filming of their own attacks in the enclave, leaving no doubt that innocent civilians are being targeted.
Members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have "openly, brazenly, and repeatedly" shared its "crimes" on social media, said Mansour.
Since the IDF began its bombardment of Gaza in October with political and material support from the United States and other Western countries, videos taken by Israeli soldiers themselves have shown the controlled detonation of Israa University, a soldier blowing up a mosque, and another IDF fighter giving a thumbs up while driving a bulldozer into a destroyed car, accompanied by the caption, "I stopped counting how many neighborhoods I've erased."
In a segment produced by Al Jazeera in March, Sarah Leah Whitson of Democracy for the Arab World Now said
that "there have been a remarkable number of videos posted by Israeli
soldiers on social media, depicting themselves pillaging property,
mocking the death and destruction that they are causing, and most
egregiously, torturing, humiliating, and mocking detained Palestinian
prisoners."
Meanwhile, human rights experts and aid groups have amplified images of the results of Israel's use of what Mansour called "the ultimate weapon": a near-total blockade on humanitarian relief. Last month, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights documented the deaths from starvation of five-month-old Fayez Attaya and 13-year-old Abdulqader Al-Serhi—two of more than two dozen children who have perished as U.N. experts have warned famine has taken hold in Gaza.
"Two million people who were subjected to a 17-year-old blockade are now confronted with a hermetic siege, dying of hunger and disease while food and medicine are available only meters away," said Mansour on Wednesday.
Palestinians including Bisan Owda, a journalist who won a Peabody Award for her coverage, have also documented their own forced displacement, the destruction of their homes, and the loss of loved ones.
Mansour on Wednesday asked the Security Council—which only voted in favor of a cease-fire in Gaza in June, after U.S. officials had vetoed several resolutions—why it has allowed Israel to violate international laws and norms.
Doctors in Gaza are having to make extremely difficult choices, aid groups said on Thursday, as over 500 have been killed and hospitals have collapsed with an influx of patients.
The United Nations Palestinian Refugee agency receives 1,000 patients a day across their eight clinics in the Strip, spokeswoman Tamara Rifai told The National, with doctors being “heroes” and taking on much more than their capacity, she said.
“We are going to run out within a few weeks if we do not manage to get more supplies," Ms Al Rifai said, adding that UNRWA is facing two major issues.
"One is the very, very low access of humanitarian drugs, including those that carry medical supplies, but also our inability to truly go around the entire Gaza Strip," she said.
“We're still getting our access permits denied to the north.”
Gaza remains under assault. Day 286 of the assault in the wave that began in October. Binoy Kampmark (DISSIDENT VOICE) points out, "Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion. The ongoing campaign in Gaza by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction. But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become a challenge for the propaganda outlets: How to justify it? Fortunately for Israel, the United States, its unqualified defender, is happy to provide cover for murder covered in the sheath of self-defence." CNN has explained, "The Gaza Strip is 'the most dangerous place' in the world to be a child, according to the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund." ABC NEWS quotes UNICEF's December 9th statement, ""The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. Scores of children are reportedly being killed and injured on a daily basis. Entire neighborhoods, where children used to play and go to school have been turned into stacks of rubble, with no life in them." NBC NEWS notes, "Strong majorities of all voters in the U.S. disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign policy and the Israel-Hamas war, according to the latest national NBC News poll. The erosion is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza." The slaughter continues. It has displaced over 1 million people per the US Congressional Research Service. Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) points out, "Academics and legal experts around the world, including Holocaust scholars, have condemned the six-week Israeli assault of Gaza as genocide." The death toll of Palestinians in Gaza is grows higher and higher. United Nations Women noted, "More than 1.9 million people -- 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza -- have been displaced, including what UN Women estimates to be nearly 1 million women and girls. The entire population of Gaza -- roughly 2.2 million people -- are in crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse." THE NATIONAL notes, "Gaza death toll reaches 38,794, with 89,364 wounded." Yes, that is the same figure they offered yesterday morning. No, the deaths did not stop on Wednesday. ALJAZEERA notes this morning, "At least 54 Palestinians killed in 24 hours as Israel’s military intensifies strikes on central Gaza where hundreds of thousands of displaced people are 'drowning' in sewage." Months ago, AP noted, "About 4,000 people are reported missing." February 7th, Jeremy Scahill explained on DEMOCRACY NOW! that "there’s an estimated 7,000 or 8,000 Palestinians missing, many of them in graves that are the rubble of their former home." February 5th, the United Nations' Phillipe Lazzarini Tweeted:
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