Politics
What I tell my Palestinian son now that Trump is returning to the White House
While Americans voted in their next president on Tuesday, the message to us Palestinians remained as clear as ever: America’s promises of freedom and justice don’t include us. But the election does have an outsize stake in our safety and survival.
For my family and millions of Palestinians, this moment is all too familiar: the fear, the helplessness, the resigned certainty that nothing ever really changes.
And still it hurts, because the stakes in this election couldn’t be more personal. For us, the election of Donald Trump isn’t just a blip on the political radar or a shift in foreign policy. It’s a challenge to sustain existence while the world seems intent on erasing us. It’s about surviving 77 years under occupation and over a year of ongoing genocide — the very genocide I barely survived last December, when my family and I, including my elderly parents and 3-year-old son, were buried under the rubble of what was once our home after it was struck by an Israeli-fired, U.S.-made missile.
The trauma of that night, in both its physical and emotional toll, of my son’s small, fragile hand clinging to mine, comes back to me now as Trump prepares to take power once more.
The date: Dec. 7, 2023. Our bones were crushed beneath layers of concrete and twisted metal as we spent hours in the dark, buried together and praying to be pulled out in one piece. The trauma of that night, in both its physical and emotional toll, of my son’s small, fragile hand clinging to mine, comes back to me now as Trump prepares to take power once more.
After surviving the strike and escaping the war, my son stopped asking when we could go home. He’s learned that “home” is just something we remember, something that crumbled with our walls that night. At 3 years old — or, per the language of Gaza, two wars old — he already knows to duck when he hears a rumble overhead, instinctively reaching for my hand.
Our suffering in light of this election isn’t some ambiguous concept. Every missile that reduces our homes to rubble, every sanction that chokes our economy, traces back to Washington. Policies that might seem like distant concerns of foreign affairs to many Americans have left millions of Palestinians trapped in unending trauma, where survival itself has become our only form of resistance.
The Palestinian people have spent generations waiting for an American president who would care enough to hold Israel accountable — to see our humanity and put an end to this constant brutality.
I’ve seen how American political leaders toy with the idea of change, how they dress up their campaigns with grand ideas about peace and justice. Yet each president brushes off our reality. Barack Obama promised hope and “change we could believe in,” yet we got more bombs. Joe Biden offered a different approach, pledging unyielding support for Israel, leaving us to live through even more horror. Vice President Kamala Harris’ niceties included no concrete promises to protect Palestinians, but she did pledge to continue financial support for Israel. And Trump’s bluntness, as he promises to come back swinging, reminds us not to hold out hope for change.
For decades, bipartisan U.S. policies have reinforced Israel’s impunity, from unconditional military aid packages to diplomatic shielding at the United Nations, allowing the erosion of Palestinian rights to go unchallenged. Trump’s brazen support for Israel isn’t a deviation but a natural progression of a legacy in which U.S. presidents have continually prioritized geopolitical alliances over Palestinian lives.
But Trump’s comeback — and the Democratic Party’s own failure to champion any real justice for us — unveils a stark truth: America’s entrenched political system is built upon the erasure of our suffering. Every administration carries the same legacy of apathy, emboldening Israel’s destructive agenda and casting aside our pleas. It’s a bipartisan moral failure that reduces our lives to collateral damage, sacrificed to preserve strategic alliances. This isn’t about just one election or one president. It’s a policy anchored in decades of American complicity in our oppression.
America’s unwavering support for Israel reveals a deeper collapse of the ideals the country claims to stand for. Principles like freedom and justice now barely flicker, distorted into tools of control, hollowed out by years of hypocrisy. When those ideals ring hollow for people like us — oppressed and silenced — the democratic values America champions feel like just another weapon turned against us.
America’s unwavering support for Israel reveals a deeper collapse of the ideals the country claims to stand for.
With Trump in the White House again, the weight of it all feels crushing, with even more to fear in the years ahead. His stance on Palestine is as entrenched and dismissive as ever. His first term, from 2017 to 2021, left a bitter legacy by empowering Israel’s illegal occupation and writing blank checks for its military arsenal.
By moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, he treated our lives as bargaining chips. Trump slashed U.S. support for Palestinian refugees, effectively pushing millions into greater poverty and reducing our access to even the barest necessities. (Biden in 2021 reinstated $200 million in aid to Palestinians that Trump had cut.) Actions like these serve as solid proof, as elections come and go, that U.S. support for Israel is more ironclad than any candidate’s promise of “peace.”
Trump killed the two-state solution that was already hanging by a thread. And Biden? He’s talked about peace and rights but in ways that mean little when he continues to green-light the horrors unfolding in Gaza. Under his watch, Israel’s bombardments have only intensified. He provided billions of taxpayer dollars’ worth of military aid to Israel. His empty promises of peace sounded cruel when our hospitals and schools were flattened. During his recent presidential campaign, Trump hasn’t just promised unwavering support for Israel, he stated outright that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hadn’t gone far enough — a chilling endorsement of more destruction.
Whether red or blue, Democrat or Republican, as Palestinians, we know we have to fasten our seatbelts and brace for yet another four years of survival — for a life of terror and deprivation, of invisibility, of being told, through silence, that our suffering doesn’t matter, by whoever takes office.
This is our world, created and forgotten by the U.S. The billions of dollars in military aid, the weapons, the diplomatic shielding, it all has translated to fear, to lifelong traumas, to endless nights bracing for another missile, to telling my son that the bombardments outside the house were fireworks as I try to comfort him during the night. I can’t help but wonder: Will he see his next birthday? Will we see peace in our homeland? Will the homes of hundreds of others in Gaza be standing when morning comes? Will we ever feel the safety that so many American presidents have long promised us?
There is no reason to believe Trump will stop the destruction in Gaza, nor the devastation for those in the West Bank trying to stand up against settler violence and the illegal seizure of their lands. The war in Gaza has raged for over a year now, and we aren’t expecting a man who openly disregards our lives to bring an end to it.
Frankly, Trump’s comeback means more unquestioned support for Israel’s war machine. And Palestinians will be there to pick up the pieces, over and over again, as we have for generations.
Mohammed R. Mhawish is a Palestinian award-winning journalist and writer from Gaza City.
Iowa’s last Democrat on how he can win in Trump country
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Alaska GOP Sen. Dan S. Sullivan can’t shake his same-name challenger.
Retired teacher Dan J. Sullivan punched a ticket out of the state’s top-four, all-party primary early Wednesday morning. He could now play spoiler in a high-stakes Senate clash between the Republican senator and former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola that could help swing control of the upper chamber.
Republicans fought and failed to keep Dan J. Sullivan off the primary ballot, arguing he was a Democratic plant designed to boost Peltola. Both Dan J. Sullivan and Peltola’s campaign have denied any coordination.
The senator’s allies have already taken steps to mitigate the second Sullivan’s potential vote siphoning, in some cases running ads using the senator’s middle initial to help differentiate between the same-named candidates.
Supporters of the state’s ranked-choice voting system, which kicks in for the general election, argue the process helps curtail the spoiler effect. But the presence of other candidates could still skew the results of the battleground race. Outside groups flooded the primary with more than $2 million to boost myriad fringe candidates — and could do so again ahead of November.
It’s not smooth sailing for Peltola, either, as she wages an uphill battle to flip a red seat in a state President Donald Trump won by 13 percentage points in 2024. She recently replaced her campaign manager in a staffing shakeup ahead of the primary, among other internal moves.
President Donald Trump notched a major win on Tuesday night. Republicans in battlegrounds wonder if it was the best use of his time and money.
Sen. Darline Graham defeated Rep. Ralph Norman in South Carolina’s snap Senate GOP runoff, handing Trump a revitalizing win after several of his endorsed candidates fell in recent primaries.
It was a victory that Graham, a complete political unknown six weeks ago, could not have pulled off without Trump’s steadfast support, underscoring just how much his influence still matters among the Republican electorate in the deeply conservative state.
But South Carolina’s Senate seat will not dictate the balance of power in Washington, and GOP strategists working on critical swing state campaigns are eager for Trump to finally direct his attention to them.
“The message coming out of this is that obviously the president’s support is still super powerful. The president’s operation still has the ability to move the needle in a lot of these states,” said a Republican strategist working on several battleground races, including in Georgia, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about Trump’s involvement. “Hopefully, this is a sign of things to come that the president is willing to get involved and really start to move the needle in some other places that obviously matter a little bit more than South Carolina.”
Trump’s persistent backing of Graham defined the race: He championed her appointment to her late brother Sen. Lindsey Graham’s seat, he coaxed her into the race with an early endorsement, stood by her as she stumbled on the debate stage, and flew down to Myrtle Beach for a rare political rally that few of his chosen candidates have enjoyed this cycle. MAGA Inc., Trump’s behemoth super PAC, even spent a slice of highly sought after cash from its $400 million stockpile in the closing days of the race.
And yet, the president hasn’t taken a meaningful step into the states that will matter in a few short months — even as battleground Republicans have been clamoring for him to spend his MAGA Inc. money.
“It’s now or never. It’s put up or shut up time, and it’s really time to start to see if he’s going to get serious,” the GOP strategist said. “You’ve got September and October to really move the needle here, and it just doesn’t seem like there’s any sense of urgency, or like we understand that we are down big in some of these states.”
During her victory speech in Columbia, Graham acknowledged Trump’s heavy hand: “Our victory would not have been possible without you, and we are truly grateful,” Graham said of the president. “South Carolina is truly Trump country.”
Norman’s take on the president’s participation was not as rosy: “The president got involved. He has that right. That’s his prerogative,” Norman said in his concession speech Tuesday, prompting jeers from the crowd at his election night watch party. “Y’all,” he continued, “his policies are good. I never understood why he got in this race. It is what it is, and I’ll accept it.”
Norman’s bewilderment reflected several national and South Carolina Republicans’ confusion as to why the president would expend energy for the safe Republican seat when his MAGA allies like Mike Collins in Georgia, scandal-plagued Ken Paxton in Texas and Michael Whatley in North Carolina are facing tough Senate battles against Democratic opponents.
“There’s the principle,” said a North Carolina-based GOP strategist who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the battleground picture. “If you’re not Trump and you have these people shoved down your throat, you’re like, ‘Okay, are you gonna help?’”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Some Republicans are worried that though Trump helped power Graham’s win, the president’s overall unpopularity may be more of a curse than a boon in any highly competitive battleground state. A series of Trump-backed candidates lost gubernatorial and congressional primaries in recent weeks, including in Georgia and Iowa.
Republicans overall are facing a tough election environment given the ongoing and unpopular war in Iran, backlash to the administration’s highly-visible deportation agenda and voters’ persistent cost of living concerns.
“You have a president and maybe even a vice president that are just so underwater politically in the polls, that they might be a help by not intervening,” said Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and former State Department official in the first Trump administration.
Still, Trump swept the battlegrounds in 2024, and his ability to boost Graham despite her foreign policy debate gaffe and questions about her political inexperience serves as a reminder of his electoral prowess to campaign officials.
The question remains when — or if — he’ll throw them a presidential life raft.
“I wouldn’t count on the money if I were in these states,” said the North Carolina-based Republican strategist. “He still could. I’m just saying, I wouldn’t count on it. We’re not dealing with somebody that’s, you know, super calculated in the way they plan.”
For months, Republicans across the country have watched on as the president has continued to amass a remarkable pile of cash — and many have implored him to empty his pockets in their races. The president told reporters last week that he’ll spend “a lot of that money” to boost “Republican candidates that I think are good,” without being specific.
However, what some saw as a distraction from the greater Republican cause this year, others read as the first few drops of Trump’s cash flood.
“If they’re going to spend 800 grand in South Carolina, they’re going to spend in the midterms,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican strategist based in Texas who worked on Sen. John Cornyn’s failed reelection campaign and is now backing the GOP ticket. “It signals they’re going to make a substantial investment in the midterms because you don’t make an 800-grand investment in South Carolina and say, ‘Yeah, we’re going to let everybody do their own thing.’ This was in some ways a test case.”
Trump’s targeted support for Graham — the kind that some Republicans are banking on to shift the dial later this fall — paid off for her in dividends on election night. Horry County, the site of the president’s marquee rally with the candidate late last week, resoundingly broke for Graham.
Trump’s backing also helped open the door to endorsements from key South Carolina Republican figures, including fellow GOP Sen. Tim Scott, who helped Graham shore up support in his Charleston-area home base, Gov. Henry McMaster, and two members of the state’s congressional delegation, Reps. Russell Fry and William Timmons.
Outside spending also proved crucial to Graham’s success. Her campaign and its allies outspent Norman by more than $5 million in the runoff alone, according to AdImpact.
Trump’s allies took a victory lap after Graham’s victory was confirmed Tuesday evening.
“The power of the Trump endorsement is alive and well in South Carolina,” said Mike Hahn, a GOP strategist involved in the midterms. “A good opening salvo for the team at MAGA Inc. and the president ahead of the midterms.”
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