"Who Was Running The Country?"

I'm not sure why anyone is asking this question, because the answer is hiding in plain sight. The conventional version runs through a list of "insiders", icludinmg Ron Klain, Jeff Zients, Anita Dunn, Bob Bauer, Anthony Bernal, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Hunter, and Dr Jill, but every one of them took orders from someone else, almost certainly not Joe. So who gave them orders? Well, who set up the July 21 phone call that told Joe how it was gonna be?

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi insists she never told President Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, despite multiple media reports claiming otherwise.

Yet Pelosi — who has known the president since the early 1980s — was convinced Biden was going to lose to former President Donald Trump in November unless major changes were made to the president’s campaign. Pelosi said she told Biden this directly during a call with the president.

. . . “I never said ‘Put Mike Donilon on the phone,’” Pelosi added, referring to reports that she asked Biden to put one of his top advisers on the phone during a critical call. Pelosi asserted she wasn’t aware of Donilon’s role inside Biden’s orbit, mistaking him for a speechwriter.

“Nobody has any quote from me about what I said to [Biden] whenever it was,” Pelosi insisted.

But wait a moment. Joe had flown to Rehoboth Beach directly from Las Vegas July 17 following an alleged medical episode that "didn't happen", and he appears to have been essentially incommunicado there following his "COVID diagnosis". We may assume it was close to just one person who could put through a call to the Rehoboth Beach switchboard and get Joe to pick up the phone. It doesn't matter who went to see Joe, whether it was Ron Klain, Jeff Zients, Anita Dunn, Bob Bauer, Anthony Bernal, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Hunter, or Dr Jill, to tell him Pelosi was on the line, the key name was Pelosi.

The other names were unimportant, as were whatever specific words Pelosi used. Pelosi called, gave Joe a little time to think things through, and he quit the race. I sense echoes of the choice Hitler gave Rommel after Rommel was fingered in the 1944 assassination plot; he was given a choice and a little time to think things over, and he made his choice.

It's especially pertinent that Pelosi had retired from any leadership role in Congress the previous year and held no constitutional office that would give her a role in removing the president under the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution. In fact, we may assume that the vice president, the cabinet, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives were all informed of the move after the fact, and none raised a peep in objection.

The switch in the presumptive nominee was made before the party nominating convention, which simply ratified everything after the fact. Pelosi had previously made the 2024 primary process irrelevant by ensuring that no potential opponent to Joe could be put on enough primary ballots to make a serioous challenge, and Kamala Harris would not have become the nominee after Joe withdrew without Pelosi's approval. There can be no question that Pelosi was running the Democrat Party as well as the White House.

The problem was that, as the link above put it, Pelosi "declared her highest priority is to make sure Trump never returns to the White House," and in this, she failed. Yes, she ran the White House, she ran the Democrat campaign, her choices dominated the news, but after the election, she didn't run the country. Her leadership role, unspoken or not, ended after her fall and hip replacement in Luxembourg last December; since then, she's been variously reported as using a walker or walking with two canes. There is in fact a leadership vacuum, which reinforces her previous role:

In theory, the Democratic Party is a political organization aimed at gaining power and implementing an agenda. In practice, the Democrats more closely resemble a hospice, if not a funeral home. An inordinately large number of party leaders are so old and infirm they are at death’s door. This is most notoriously true of the party’s most recent standard-bearer, former president Joe Biden.

The writer here won't even mention Pelosi, although her de facto departure from the scene is even more calamitous. He goes on,

The party is a heterogenous coalition of centrists and progressives that has failed to define a core goal. Even anti-Trumpism, which served as an effective glue for holding the faction-ridden party together from 2016 to 2024, is no longer effective.

The one figure who held the centrists and progressives together was Pelosi, who could control the agenda by controlling the money. Her de facto departure from the scene via Trump's defeat of her proxy candidate Harris has been an event so momentous that, six months later, commentators are still afraid to name it for what it was.