It Begins

I thought Trump was actually a little slow to roll out what looks like it's going to be his interim campaign theme:

Former President Donald Trump said on Saturday that if President Joe Biden “is too mentally incompetent to convict at a trial,” as laid out in Special Counsel Robert Hur’s damning report of the Biden classified documents probe, then he is unfit to serve as president.

. . . “Crooked Joe got off scot-free,” Trump said before quipping, “and I don’t know if you call it scot-free; they said he was a mental basket case.”

. . . “Now, I’m not looking for anything to happen to this guy. He wouldn’t know the difference,” Trump said, vowing there would be “no revenge” if he was elected as the 47th president.

This could potentially be Trump's theme for the next eight months until the election, but so far, events have unfolded much more quickly than that. The current conventional wisdom at NBC goes like this:

Washington is abuzz with fresh concerns about President Joe Biden’s fitness after a special counsel report released Thursday raised questions about his memory.

But Democrats have rallied around Biden and despite the fantasies of some pundits and anxious Democrats, the president is almost certain to be the Democratic Party’s nominee as long as he wants.

. . . No prominent Democrats have called for Biden to step aside and there's no known serious conservations about it.

“The Democratic Party is united in supporting President Biden, who will be his party’s nominee this fall and will make Donald Trump a loser a second time this November,” said Biden campaign spokesperson Daniel Wessel in a statement to NBC News.

But that doesn't make the problem go away. In the New York Post,

We need to talk about Kamala Harris.

. . . Biden could be pressured to resign.

He could be removed from office under the 25th Amendment on the grounds that he’s “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

All well and good, but his constitutional successor is no better, and conceivably worse.

What could Democrats possibly offer Harris to get her to step aside gracefully?

Biden won’t go, and his age and mental decline only make him more stubborn.

Harris won’t go, because there’s nowhere for her to go but down.

Nobody in the party — not even Bill Clinton or Barack Obama — seems to have the pull to make either of them step aside.

Democrats know what they need to do.

That doesn’t make it any easier to do it.

In other words, the lizard people aren't too far from the problem they had with Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew. Nixon faced impeachment, but nobody seems to have been comfortable with the idea of Agnew becoming president, so they forced him out with an old bribery scandal, quickly replacing him with Gerald Ford. This prevented a Democrat House speaker from succeeding to the presidency, and the establishment appeared to be satisified with that temporary measure until the 1976 election. But this all took place with more than three years left in Nixon's term, nearly a year before Nixon himself resigned in August 1974:

On October 10th, 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew, resigned after being indicted on charges of accepting bribes and evading income taxes while Governor of Maryland. Two days after Agnew's resignation, Nixon nominates Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, who at the time is House Minority Leader, as Vice President. . . . Confirmation hearings by the Senate and House begin, soon leading to votes by both chambers to approve the nomination. Ford is sworn in as the 40th Vice President on December 6, 1973.

For Harris to resign and be replaced in an election year, unlike Agnew-Ford in 1973, would be far more contentious and unlikely to be resolved as quickly. This would increase the likelihood that if Harris were to be forced into resigning before Biden, the vice presidential slot wouldn't be filled, and the next in succession would be the House speaker, currently Republican Mike Johnson. The lizard people would find this distasteful indeed.

On the other hand, I feel certain that the deep state does have something on Harris already, likely even more effective than bribery was for Agnew. My guess is it could well involve last summer's baggie of cocaine outside the Situation Room, or any number of equivalent circumstances, and she could be eased out quickly if the need arose.

What we don't have yet is a national crisis that would actually force invocation of the 25th Amendment against Biden, but given his truly bad luck over the past several months, we simply can't rule it out. Nor can the lizard people. Contra NBC, I've simply got to assume conversations are beginning to take place.