"If You Have To Explain He Isn't Pooping His Pants, You're Losing"

Let me say that I do accept, at least for now, Snopes's fact-check of Joe's awkward pose at the D-Day commemoration. But it's worth pointing out that this is at least the third allegation, no matter how far-fetched, that Joe has done this, from an episode at the Vatican on June 21, 2021, to this one last month on the White House driveway:

Anyone who has parented a toddler knows exactly what's going on here pic.twitter.com/6J2QZBwFMt

— L A R R Y (@LarryOConnor) May 5, 2024

Someone posted this post's title on Twitter, but it raises a bigger question. Whether Joe has been pooping his pants at all, these episodes all catch Joe in awkward moments that suggest he is simply not a well man.

And this leads to Jim Geraghty's point that I linked in yesterday's post, that at some point in the future "we will ‘learn’ something like, ‘the president’s official health report said he was in fine shape for his age. But behind the scenes, Jill Biden, Ron Klain, and Susan Rice were deeply concerned the president’s health was rapidly declining, and that he would soon be unable to perform his duties.’” My own reading of Dr Steven Lomazow's research on Franklin Roosevelt's actual health condition in the years before his death makes me suspicious that there may well be more behind those and other of Joe's awkward moments than just pooping his pants.

Two US presidents have died during or soon after strenuous trips, Warren Harding in 1923 and Franklikn Roosevelt in 1945. Harding was reported to have died "suddenly" on August 2, but he had cut short a tour of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest due to abdominal pain and other symptoms and had been attempting to recover in a San Francisco hotel since July 29. As with Roosevelt, the widowed First Lady forbade an autopsy, and the exact cause of Harding's death has never been satisfactorily established, but this link says, "Today, most historians accept that Harding, 57, died from a heart attack brought on by ample evidence of cardiac problems."

Roosevelt was clearly very sick during his trip to Yalta in February 1945, and Dr Lomazow in FDR's Deadly Secret, published years before Biden's presidency, makes a great deal of Roosevelt's faltering performance speaking before Congress on his return on March 1, losing his place, rambling, repeating himself, and garbling his words much like Joe does now. This was such a stark departure from Roosevelt's former brilliant and assured oratorical style that observers at the time viewed it with deep concern. He died on April 12, six weeks later, and as with Harding, his death was reported as "sudden", when insiders, especially his White House and personal physicians, were fully aware of his real condition.

As with Harding's widow, Eleanor Roosevelt forbade an autopsy, and details of Roosevelt's actual health condition have been closely guarded secrets ever since. Dr Lomazow, as a trustee of the FDR library, has had unique access to what records exist, and he has found evidence of congestive heart failure, inoperable prostate cancer, and melanoma that had matastasized into his brain and digestive tract.

So here we have another president, Joe Biden, whose public appearance can only be described as frail -- and the way his suits hang loose and the collars stand out from his neck suggests he's losing weight -- on a strenuous trip to France, while he's also apparently consumed with Hunter's legal problems:

Over the past few weeks, President Joe Biden has grown consumed by worries over the trial of Hunter Biden. He’s called family members more regularly to check on his son’s mood. The topic of the criminal case dominated the family gatherings in Delaware over the weekend.

Dr Jill's travel schedule indicates the real level of concern in the Biden family over Hunter's predicament:

[W]hen Joe flew to France to start his trip, landing on Wednesday morning. Jill wasn't with him. She went to Hunter's trial. Then, acccording to CNN, she took a separate "red-eye flight" to France later on Wednesday to be there in Normandy for the D-Day ceremonies on Thursday. She boarded a military aircraft at Paris-Orly to go back home to Wilmington after the Thursday ceremonies, so she could be there at the trial for Hunter on Friday, while Joe was in Pointe du Hoc making his remarks. After that, she got on another flight back to France, so she wouldn't miss being honored during the festivities of the state dinner on Saturday.

Fox picked up how she was flying back to Wilmington for the trial on Friday, but they weren't getting a lot of answers from the White House.

The writer asks what this cost the taxpayer, but he misses the other question of what this says about how much strain Hunter's trial must be putting on Joe, whose schedule at this point must be extraordinarily tiring for someone in his condition in any case.

Yet nobody seems remotely to be thinking about the parallels with Harding and Roosevelt, especially given the entirely reasonable suspicion that, as the White House has ever done with presidents' health reports, a great deal about Joe is not being revealed. The obtuseness at legacy sites like RealClearPolitics is clear when it carries betting averages for the Democrat nomination (Biden 79.6, Newsom 6.0, Michelle Obama 5.8 when Michelle took herself out of the running months ago) but doesn't list Kamala Harris at all. Oddschecker.com does, however, carry odds for Kamala for both the nomination and the presidency, though they aren't high.

The fact is that looking at Joe's condition and performance, factoring in other issues like his preoccupation with Hunter's mutiple trials, the strain of a lengthy foreign trip, and the historical parallels of Harding and FDR, I would say that the likelihood of Kamala Harris succeeding to the presidency before November is at least non-trivial. This could happen if Joe resigns or if he's clearly incapacitated, or if he passes away. Even if he chooses to complete his term but withdraws as a candidate, Kamala is the only realistic choice for the nomination, since the far left faction of Democrats will never get behind a potential white replacement when she's available.

Nobody is gaming this out -- except, you know what? I'll bet Trump and his advisers have thought this through. I'll bet the new Trump megadonors, many of them very smart people, have been thinking about it as well.