Biden and Harris Tweet Through It as Police Raid Anti-War Student Protests

On Tuesday night, Columbia University deployed a highly militarized police force against its own students, who formed an encampment in protest of Israel’s U.S.-funded war on Gaza that’s killed over 34,000 people in six months. About 300 people were arrested from Columbia and the City College of New York for demanding that their universities divest from Israel-affiliated companies, and video footage that’s been circulating on social media shows disturbing brutality from police officers against the unarmed students.

In the wake of this gut-wrenching chaos, the president and vice president have responded by not responding. Instead of just… saying nothing, which would also be very bad, their social media accounts spewed out regularly scheduled, asinine, and hollow liberal slogans. “Trust women,” Kamala Harris tweeted from the official vice president’s Twitter account at 8:20 p.m. on Tuesday. And on Wednesday morning, Joe Biden shared a graphic from the official @POTUS Twitter that reads “Mental health is health” in semi-illegible cursive, with the caption, “It’s simple.” And on his personal Twitter, Biden wished Amtrak a Happy 53rd Birthday. Harris tweeted again at 1 p.m. Wednesday, only to say, “Women must have the freedom to make decisions about their own bodies.” (Which, true, but there’s really nothing else you wanna’ address right now?)

It's simple. pic.twitter.com/M6pHdOA4YU

— President Biden (@POTUS) May 1, 2024

The tone-deaf social media posts have since sparked a wave of online backlash and outrage, and for good reason! They pathetically read as Biden and Harris “trying to K-Mart line Live Laugh Love their way out of reality,” as my fellow Jezebel writer, Kady Ruth Ashcraft, so aptly described it in our Jezebel Slack. I know writing an article is to the contrary of this but—in the middle of consuming photos, videos, and testimony from student protesters—I barely have words for how insane Biden and Harris’ banal, blue-wave ad-libbing made me feel today.

It’s not as if I think Biden and Harris would come up with a good tweet or statement to respond to what’s happening on college campuses if they even tried—they absolutely wouldn’t! But the silence itself is deafening. If these weren’t anti-war, pro-Palestine student protesters being criminalized, suspended, and expelled from their schools, I can only imagine that Biden and Harris would physically show up to support these encampments. Meanwhile, as Congress wades into one highly politicized, inflammatory, and misleading hearing on campus antisemitism after another, Muslim and Palestinian students have been attacked, harassed, and discriminated against for months now. And it’s largely crickets from this administration.

–3 Palestinian college students shot in Vermont
–Arab Muslim Stanford student hit-and-run by a car
–Columbia students (Jews, Muslims, more) harassed & attacked at a Gaza rally
–South Asian Muslim USC valedictorian's grad speech unilaterally cancelled

And this is just a sampling

— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) April 16, 2024

Biden’s poll numbers are tanking; young people want a ceasefire and divestment from a foreign government committing war crimes; and, as their wildly cringe social media pages tell us, this administration wants to just play-act business as usual. It’s not only immoral but politically stupid. Yet here we are, watching young people risk everything—even their lives—to demand an end to the war and all Biden and Harris can do is idly tweet at us about the importance of mental health. Like I said, I feel insane.