Biden still thinks he could have beaten Trump. Do we really need this? | Arwa Mahdawi

It’s (not just) the sexism, stupid

Raise your hand if you’ve been desperate for Joe Biden to pop up and tell us all, yet again, how he would have handily beaten Donald Trump in 2024.

Obviously, I’m not the National Security Agency so I have no idea how many hands are up right now but I’d wager it’s not too many. Still, Biden seems to think we all want to relitigate the November election and has returned to the spotlight to explain exactly what went wrong.

In an interview on ABC’s The View on Thursday, the former president took a tiny bit of accountability for the hellscape we are currently living in, noting: “I was in charge and [Trump] won. So, you know, I take responsibility.”

Biden should have left it there, but he also explained that he thinks he would have beaten Trump if he hadn’t dropped out of the race due to the entire world seeing evidence of his cognitive decline during that disastrous debate. I don’t know what proof he has to support this idea – not poll numbers, anyway – but it’s always good to believe in yourself!

Another thing Biden believes: that Kamala Harris lost the election because of sexism. “I was disappointed but not surprised,” Biden said of Harris’s defeat. “They [Trump voters] went the sexist route.”

Trump’s campaign was full of sexist and racist attacks against Harris. Bigotry and misogyny clearly played a part in her defeat.

Still, to blame Harris’s defeat on sexism, as Biden does, is a massive cop-out. Harris didn’t lose because she was a mixed-race woman. She lost because Biden’s hubris meant she had very little time to put together a campaign and because, once she was the nominee, she refused to put any distance between herself and Biden’s unpopular policies. To refresh your memory, when Harris went on The View last October, the co-host Sunny Hostin asked her if there was anything the then vice-president would have done differently from Biden, and Harris said “not a thing comes to mind”. A new book by the reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes claims that Biden pressured Harris to ensure there was “no daylight” between the two of them. Biden denied saying this during his appearance on The View – but whoever decided on this strategy, it was disastrous.

It’s also disastrous, I think, to keep pushing the narrative, as Biden is doing, that Harris lost because of sexism. Saying that the US isn’t ready to elect a female president is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It makes it more likely that white male candidates, seen as a safer bet, are favoured over women.

Yes, there’s plenty of misogyny in the US, but the lesson to take from 2024 isn’t that the country isn’t ready for a female president, it’s that the country is desperately ready for change. A recent poll found that 50% of Democrats want the party to “become more progressive”. Another poll found that “a 58% majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say that the Democratic party needs major changes, or to be completely reformed”. Instead of relitigating the past, Democrats need to aggressively rethink their future.

Forget the new US pope – check out Mexico’s ‘weed nuns’

This is an old article but since religion is in the news this week I am resurfacing it because the pictures are brilliant.

Did Dora the Explorer join the manosphere?

Even your favourite cartoon characters are getting red-pilled. 404 Media reports that a video recently uploaded to the official Dora the Explorer Instagram account featured Dora explaining what “sigma” means. While sigma has gone through various linguistic shifts, it has been used in the manosphere to talk about an extreme form of masculinity. It’s a very weird thing for Dora to be explaining to kids. “Dora that’s not even Spanish you’re losing the PLOT,” one user said, in response. The video has been deleted now and Dora is exploring other things.

Israeli soldiers blow up Gaza building and joke about ‘gender reveal’

“It’s a boy!” they joked as blue smoke rose from the ashes of a neighborhood that kids used to play in.

Does Donald Trump think Stockholm is part of the US?

A city official in Stockholm has said they received a letter from the US ordering them to scrap the city’s diversity initiatives. “It’s quite unique,” one city official told the Guardian. Which is a polite way of saying Trump and his cronies are completely delulu.

Melania is so MIA that Donald Trump has taken on first lady duties

A woman’s work is never done. Unless you are Melania Trump, that is, in which case you are done working. According to the New York Times, Melania has spent fewer than 14 days at the White House during Trump’s second term. That means Trump “has taken to performing some duties that typically would fall to a first lady. She’s not the one carefully selecting light fixtures for the White House residence, redesigning the Rose Garden, greeting tour groups in the East Wing or hosting receptions for Women’s History Month. He is.”

A trip to the restroom now involves ‘proving’ your gender

A male security guard stormed into a woman’s bathroom in a Boston hotel and told a woman with short hair to leave because she “was a man”. Your regular reminder that anti-trans policies and rhetoric that reinforce rigid and regressive gender policing ultimately hurt all women.

US Customs and Border Protection rescinds protections for pregnant women, infants and other vulnerable groups

“It’s appalling and it’s just an extension of the culture of cruelty that the administration is trying to perpetrate,” a deputy director at the ACLU told Wired.

Who killed the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh?

A harrowing and important piece.

There’s still a disturbing gender gap in medical trials

A review of UK clinical trial data by the Guardian found that male-only trials (6.1%) were nearly twice as common as female-only studies (3.7%). “This under-representation means there is a lack of evidence on the safety and effectiveness of many interventions in women,” one expert told the Guardian.

The week in pawtriarchy

Move over, Cocaine Bear, hello, Methamphetamine Raccoon. Police in Ohio conducting a traffic stop were recently surprised to find a pet raccoon called Chewy with a meth pipe in its mouth. Seems that the world is so bleak even animals are turning to drugs. Their owner is in all sorts of trouble now but Chewy is fine. “No raccoons were hurt or injured in this incident,” the police said. Now the question is whether Chewy the trash panda can turn their viral moment into a lucrative career as a binfluencer.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist