"I’m Behind Him 1000%"

Tryng to make sense of the current crisis, I've looked at two 20th century constitutional crises, the 1936 UK crisis that led to Edward VIII's abdication, and the 1944 crisis of FDR's perilous state of health leading into the November election and his death the following year only months after his inauguration. Both were resolved largely behind the scenes. But I think a closer and more recent parallel is the problem that was posed by Thomas Eagleton, who was the 1972 Democrat vice presidential nominee who was forced to withdraw his candicacy when information surfaced about his medical history.

George McGovern's nomination for president at the 1972 Democrat convention wasn't assured, and his chances against Nixon in November were never bright. Thomas Eagleton, a US senator from Missouri, wasn't on McGovern's short list for vice president, but after Ted Kennedy and Abraham Ribicoff both turned him down, he had to find a willing substitute quickly. He fell back on Eagleton, and McGovern probably didn't even want to ask too many questions of anyone at that point.

According to NPR, after Eagleton was named McGovern's running mate and nominated by the convention,

Within a few days, rumors started to circulate, beginning with a call to McGovern's headquarters in South Dakota.

"The anonymous caller had said, 'Check into Sen. Eagleton's background; he has a complicated medical background,' " Hart says.

. . . Within hours, the McGovern campaign was getting those details. On three occasions in the 1960s, Eagleton was hospitalized for depression and had undergone electroshock treatment.

. . . McGovern, under increasing pressure, asked to speak to Eagleton's psychiatrists. Eagleton agreed to have McGovern speak with two of his doctors.

"McGovern, based on those conversations, makes the medical decision that Eagleton was too much of a risk to have his finger potentially on the metaphorical button," [historian Joshua] Glasser says.

But according to Wikipedia, before he made that decision,

In response to intense pressure from the media and party leaders that Eagleton be replaced, McGovern announced that he was "1000 percent behind Tom Eagleton, and I have no intention of dropping him from the ticket".

Wikipedia's comment is,

It backfired badly and became a byword for foolish and insincere exaggeration, and today is often used in irony or sarcasm.

There are several parallels between the Eagleton crisis of 1972 and the current calls for Joe Biden to step aside as this year's Democrat presidential candidate. The first is the conundrum that it was expected, up to Thursday's debate, that Biden would be nominated by an online process prior to the Democrat convention August 19-22, and this would be a purely pro forma event. In effect, Joe was already as good as nominated, so this is a very close parallel to Eagleton's position in 1972, potentially forced to withdraw from a ticket after being nominated.

The second parallel is that questions arose about both candidates' medical fitness for office -- as McGovern apparently put it, whether Eagleton should have his finger on the nuclear button. Nobody's put it specifically that way about Joe, but I cited several links yesterday questioning Joe's capability to deal with Putin, Xi, Kim, or the Ayatollahs given what we saw in the debate.

The third parallel is that the critical medical information for both men had or has been concealed. The NPR account makes it plain that Eagleton and his doctors relied on medical confidentialty to withhold specific data until McGovern insisted that Eagleton authorize its release. In Joe's case, it seems very likely that critical medical information about his condition, his medications, and his prognosis is still being withheld, and it's uncertain whether we'll ever get it.

Certainly one aspect of the current scandal is that staff, advisers, cabinet secretaries, and colleagues over recent months have insisted thst Joe is "fine", when it seems less and less likely that this is the case. But even if what we can assess now from Joe's debate performance is all we'll ever learn, we have the incredibly awkward situation that important papers like the New York Times, the Phildelphia Inquirer, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution, as well as important television commentators on CNN and elsewhere, have already called for Joe to step aside -- I'm not aware of anyone mentioning Eagleton, at least not yet, but the parallel is implicit.

If Joe continues his candidacy, it will be with a good part of even the Democrat-aligned legacy commentariat against him, which will be damaging even if they all eventually recant. In that context, we have this report from NBC News, which the Biden campaign so far denies:

President Joe Biden is expected to discuss the future of his re-election campaign with family at Camp David on Sunday, following a nationally televised debate Thursday that left many fellow Democrats worried about his ability to beat former President Donald Trump in November, according to five people familiar with the matter.

Biden’s trip was planned before Thursday’s debate. He and first lady Jill Biden are scheduled to join their children and grandchildren there late Saturday.

So far, the party’s top leaders have offered public support for Biden, including in tweets posted by former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Senior congressional Democrats, including Reps. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and Nancy Pelosi of California, have privately expressed concerns about his viability, said two sources apprised of those discussions, even as they all publicly back the president.

The piece goes on to say that there's a cautious wait-and-see attitude, but in the days after the debate, it's hard to avoid thinking everyone is stunned. and the consequences haven't been fully thought through. Among the considerations, though, must surely be that the campaign, in the end a likely loser, has four months still to go, while there will be increasing demands for the release of Joe's full medical records, neither of which developments will be good for Joe or his family. My bet, though, is that right now, everyone is 1000% behind him.

The 25th Amendment?

Let's delve a little farther into the 25th Amendment, or at least the part that's most applicable to the current crisis, Section 4:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide[.]

It goes on to provide that should there be a continued disagreement between the president and the vice president-plus-cabinet-majority, it's to be resolved by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress. This is an even higher standard than required to impeach a president, which requires just a simple majority in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate. As a practical matter, the 25th Amendment can't be invoked unless it's in the most extreme cases, for which at least for now, Joe's infirmities likely don't qualify.

This didn't stop House Speaker Johnson from trying to start the process:

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday that high-level discussions should be taking place in President Biden’s cabinet about invoking the 25th Amendment to make him step down after a disastrous debate performance the night before.

“There’s a lot of people asking about invoking the 25th Amendment right now, because this is an alarming situation,” Johnson (R-La.) told reporters. “Our adversaries see the weakness in this White House, as we all do.”

For now, this is just kabuki, but there's nevertheless legitimate reason for concern:

Joe fell apart last night, and he was only facing his American opponent for president armed with nothing but insults. Putin, Xi, Kim, the Ayatollahs, and all our adversaries have real weapons and a desire not just to take away Joe's nice home, helicopter, and the best private jet in the world. They want to reshape the map of the world and are willing to kill thousands or millions to accomplish that task.

Or this:

Put yourself in Xi Jinping's head. Or the Ayatollahs'. Or any adversary of the United States.

What did you see? Did you see an American president that you should beware of? A united America capably led? A country to respect?

Or this:

If I’m China, I’m taking off the shelf the war plans to invade Taiwan. If I’m Iran, I’m breaking out towards a nuclear weapon. If I’m Putin, I’m doubling down on Ukraine and possibly other former Soviet satellites. Can you imagine an emergency situation where immediate military decisions that only a president can make need to be made in seconds or minutes, and the military having to go to diminished Joe for a decision?

This is serious stuff. This is no joke. Biden’s cognitive decline is a national security threat of the highest order.

It doesn't necessarily follow that if Joe isn't fit to run for another term, he isn't fit to continue as president now, but the two issues are nevertheless hard to separate, although either scenario, Joe just drops out of the race, or he quits the presidency now, is pretty much wishful thinking. He won't do either voluntarily, and the possibilities of either selecting a replacement candidate at the Democrat convention or invoking the 25th Amendment are far distant.

In addition, following yesterday's media calls for Joe to drop out of the race, both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have announced their support for Joe, which indicates that at least for now, there won't be any delegations of power players heading to the Oval Office to tell him how it's gonna be.

The reason the establishment is holding off is that the alternatives are still worse. If Joe voluntarily withdraws as a candidate in November but serves out his term, it simply resurrects the problem Joe's nomination in 2020 was meant to solve: I hold with the view that the Democrat establishment allowed his nomination then because the alternative was Bernie Sanders. Sanders's nomination would have split the party, which has been increasingly dominated by the far left, and ensured Trump's reelection.

The problem for the Democrats is that nothing has changed, Joe is still the only figure who can conceivably keep the party, such as it's become, more or less united. If he withdraws as a candidate but serves out his term, the big problem is how they replace Kamala, his presumptive successor, with anyone who isn't at least notionally a person of color. Any attempt to nominate someone who isn't would permanently split the party, and any nominee who is would almost certainly lose.

If Joe leaves the presidency before his term ends, Kamala automatically becomes president, and replacing her as the nominee becomes all the more difficult, so as a practical matter, as long as Joe hasn't literally flatlined, he's going to stay on as president. But all either contingency accomplishes is to defer the bigger questions for a few days, a few weeks, or a few months. Even if Joe manages to be reelected, the Democrats still have the basic problem that the far left is their dominant faction, and Joe is the last figurehead who can conceal that.

It does look as if, now that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have publicly supported Joe, the current panic will subside. But let's keep in mind that, as I've been pointing out all along, this year's campaign is many months longer than usual. The crisis for the Trump campaign in 2016, the Access Hollywood tape, was a classic October surprise that in fact took place in early October. There were calls for Trump to withdraw and be replaced by his running mate, Mike Pence. But however reluctantly, the Republican establishment closed ranks, re-expressed support for Trump, and he went on to win the 2016 election.

But that was October 2016. This is June 2024. Trump was able to overcome one October surprise with too little time left in the campaign for the Democrats to find another one. Now, Biden is struggling to overcome a serious setback of his own making with four full months left in the campaign. It's hard not to recognize that he's already tired, but he has many more months to go in a campaign that's going to do nothing but tire him out more.

He's going to have more bad days, and the campaign is going to have to address each one as it arises -- but at least for now, he isn't going to do anything voluntarily, and the Democrat establishment is unlikely to force him out. For both sides, the alternative is worse.

Should an actual crisis arise, conditions might change, but in fact, there's only four months until the election, and any foreign bad actor would need to contend with, first, the likelihood that any Pearl Harbor-style attack would ensure Trump's election, followed by a response from the awakened US sleeping giant; and second, that Biden's remaining term, irrespective of his weakened state, is too short to let the bad actor consolidate any initial victory, and again, all it would do is ensure Trump's election, now looking more likely in any case, and make him mad. I don't think anyone is going to tickle the dragon's tail at this stage.

As I've Been Saying, We're In A Constitutional Crisis

Back on June 7, I posted about the unspoken constitutional crisis during FDR's third term in which the White House, according to Dr Steven Lomazow, concealed the president's metastasized cancer and severe cardiopulmonary disease that made his death inevitable early in his fourth term. Enough insiders anticipated this that they forced him to drop Henry Wallace and choose Harry Truman as his running mate for the 1944 election. I said in that post,

[I]t was a de facto constitutional crisis that under the circumstances could only be resolved by Roosevelt's death, which insiders fully understood to be imminent in any case.

It's hard to avoid thinking we're heading for an equivalent crisis before the next election, but the additional complication is Vice President Harris. . . . Biden is bad enough, but it's less and less likely he can last another four years, and we'd get Harris sooner than anyone expects.

By at least his final year in office, according to Dr Lomazow, Roosevelt was working a schedule from noon to 4:00 PM weekdays, although this included a 90-minute nap, which according to cabinet members simply wasn't adequate to do a president's job. The saving grace was that insiders had quietly planned for a succession, something they and Truman fully recognized at the time. From what we hear, Joe's schedule is similar now, which doesn't augur well, but as of now, there's no contingency as there was in 1944.

Roosevelt could pass away at any time after the 1945 inaugural and have Truman succeed him, although had he passed away before that date, his successor would have been Henry Wallace. As it happened, the country got lucky. The problem right now is that if Joe Biden leaves the presidency for any reason before next January 20, his successor is Kamala Harris.

There can be no disagreement that Joe's physical appearance alone in last night's debate was frail, pale, and almost cadaverous. His voice was hoarse. He seemed at various times to be fighting down the urge to cough. This leaves aside any question about his cognitive abilities, although at least some observers noticed a strange stare -- that suggests to me that he was under some type of strong medication, whether or not it was a performance-enhancing drug of some sort.

The first issue is a no-brainer. As Mark Leibovich writes in The Atlantic,

President Joe Biden needs to end his campaign. The first presidential debate, held last night, was a disaster. It was clear from the outset that Biden looked old, sounded old, and yes, is in fact very, very old.

This has been rumored for a while. Last night, it was confirmed.

But that's not the real question. Scott Jennings came closer to the point on CNN after the debate:

WATCH: @ScottJenningsKY on Joe Biden's debate performance:

"It is a fair question to ask right now, 'What is going on inside the White House every day?' Is [Kamala Harris] currently making more decisions in the White House than we know? Who is making decisions in the White… pic.twitter.com/mK5628i4DU

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) June 28, 2024

"Let me just take the other side of this Kamala Harris debate. It is a fair question to ask right now, 'What is going on inside the White House every day?' Is she currently making more decisions in the White House than we know? Who is making decisions in the White House right now? We‘re talking about this in terms of can Joe Biden win an election and serve for four years. I want to know I want to know what‘s happening on a day-to-day basis. To me, she is the big story tonight because her position in this administration, in this campaign, has become magnified by 1,000 right now."

Whether Joe continues his campaign is really irrelevant -- the question isn't even who's running the country, the question is who's been running the country, and who'll be running it until next January 20, because even if the 25th Amendment is invoked, either through Joe's resignation or his removal, the same people will be implementing the same disastrous policies, and they'll likely be doing all they can to keep them in place after either Joe or Kamala leaves office next year.

At minimum, I think it's time for the adults in the room to force the White House to reveal more about Joe's physical condition and begin to ask seriously if he's up to the job. What we saw last night was not a well man. Then I think some serious discussion needs to take place about how we're going to proceed for the next eight months.

This Morning's Polls

I was originally going to post on Nate Silver's Substack yesterday, The presidential election isn't a toss-up, and I'll have a few things to say farther down, but I actually think it's been overtaken by events, namely this morning's Qunnipiac and New York Times/Siena polls.

The Quinnipiac has Trump up 6 points over Biden in a 5-way matchup, while the Times/Siena poll has Trump up 3. Between them, they put Trump up 2.6 points in the Real Clear Politics 5-way aggregate, 1.5 points in the head-to-head aggregate, when only last week, the head-to-head had him up by only 0.5 points. Although as I've been saying all along, the national polls are meaningless, because the popular vote doesn't elect the president, I think the movement in those polls over June does mean something. Quinnipiac minimizes it:

As President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump prepare to face off in the first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, Trump has a slight lead over Biden 49 - 45 percent in a head-to-head matchup, according to a Quinnipiac . . . University national poll of registered voters released today. This is a small change from Quinnipiac University's May 22 poll when the race was too close to call with Biden receiving 48 percent support and Trump receiving 47 percent support.

How is a 5-point shift, Trump down 1 point in May but up 4 points in June, a "small change"? On the other hand, the movement in the Times/Siena poll is in the other direction. In May, it had Trump up by 5 points over Biden 48-43, while today he's up only 3 points. There's probably some statistical chatter in both cases. On the other hand, RCP points out that on this day in history, June 27, 2020, Biden was +9.4; on June 27, 2016, Clinton was +6.8. This suggests we should be adding a significant fudge factor to today's poll results to correspond with the inaccuracies of prior years' polling.

In addition, surfing the web for commentary on these recent polls, I found Dan Pfeiffer trying to deal with trhe May Times/Siena poll:

Before we get into the specifics of this poll, it’s worth remembering that Trump is up by about two points in the overall polling average. Trump may have a slight advantage, but the polling points to a very close, winnable race in November. The defeatism that we hear from some folks with every piece of bad news is disconnected from the reality of American politics in a closely divided election—especially when the other candidate is dealing with a whopping 91 felony indictments.

Notice the mantras: this is "a very close, winnable race". Trump is dealing with "a whopping 91 felony indictments". This brings us to the month of June, following Trump's May 31 conviction in the New York "hush money" trial, which will almost certainly be the only case to reach trial before the election. The conviction simply hasn't affected the polls. On the other hand, the big news as of yesterday was that Nate Silver has announced that the election isn't a tossup, or put another way, it's neither very close nor very winnable.

It seems to me that there are two factors in this morning's polls. Althoujgh one is that the New York conviction hasn't moved them, it's looking like something else did -- and nobody's mentioned it. That's Biden's disastrous performance, especially at the G7. It was so disturbing, and so obvious, that it's driven expectations of his debate performance.

Let's recall that in 2020, the expectation, which he exceeded, was that he'd defeat himself with some relatively minor gaffe, maybe a mispronunciation, maybe substituting one world leader's name with another, maybe referring to all 57 states. In the event, he didn't. This year, driven by the episodes in the first part of June, the question will be whether he can maintain situational awareness, avoid some sort of freezeup, or even remain standing for the entire 90 minutes.

This is a big difference, and it's beginning to move the polls again, and not in Biden's favor.

Silver's Substack essay -- or at least, the lengthy, self-excusing preamble that isn't behind a paywall -- goes to great lengths to support his conclusion. For instance,

[I]f the Electoral College/popular vote gap looks anything like it did in 2016 or 2020, you’d expect Biden to be in deep trouble if the popular vote is roughly tied. So if we’re being honest, pundits who obsess over whether Biden is 1 point ahead or behind in national polls are kind of missing the point. Because national polls being tied don’t make for a toss-up race — but instead one where Trump has a material advantage in the Electoral College. In fact, the race looks a lot like 2012 in reverse, when national polls were often close but the swing state polls consistently favored Obama and gave him the far more robust map.

I ran this url past wordcounter.net and discovered that this preamble, without the part behind the paywall, runs an astonishing 4780 words, when a weekly magazine or newspaper column is normally about 750. It's clear that Silver is deeply troubled by his own conclusions, and he knows his regular audience will find them close to abhorrent. But he also makes an intriguing quasi-confession:

Now that I’m on my own — not tied to some corporate behemoth like The New York Times or Disney — I feel freer to be transparent about my preferences.

. . . Wouldn’t it be suspicious if, in the first presidential cycle where the Democrat has consistently trailed in polls since 2004, I suddenly started telling you that you should trust vibes rather than polls?

Yes, of course. It would be a sign that I’d become a hack.

What he's implying, however indirectly, is that if he were still tied to big corporate money -- as he was with FiveThirtyEight and ABC News until he left last year -- he'd be under heavy pressure, especially this year, to continue with the mantra that the election is a tossup, which as we've seen is something the people at Real Clear Politics still claim, contra their own polling. But of course, this implicitly accuses RCP and the others who continue to claim the election is a tossup of being the creature of corporate money.

Well, if the shoe fits, wear it.

Real Clear Politics Changes The "Battlegrounds"

More than a week ago, I wondered why Real Clear Politics doesn't swap out at least a couple of the states in their list of "battleground" poll aggregates, when it seems like there's really not much of a battle taking place in several of those states:

I briefly thought of suggesting to RCP that, for instance, they revise the list of "battlegrounds" and take at minimum, say, North Carolina and Nevada off the list, since Trump is ahead by over 5 points in both, start running aggregates for Minnesota and Virginia, and place them on the "battleground" list instead. That would give a list that would show the real tipping-point states. Might not that provide more of a horse race?

The problem I saw, though, was that this would effectively put at least two more states in the solid-Trump column while acknowledging that two solid-Biden states are now in play, which changes the whole "close race" paradigm RCP and all the right people have been pushing since 2020.

As of Monday, in a bit of a surprise, RCP did in fact expand its list of "battlegrounds", which it designates with that precise word. Interestingly, though, while it added both Minnesota and Virginia to the list, it removed neither North Carolina nor Nevada, and it went on to add Ohio, New Hampshire, Florida, Texas, and Colorado as well. As of now, Ohio, Florida, and Texas are hardly tossups, they're for Trump, and it's completely uncontroversisal to say that Ohio and Florida haven't been swing states since 2000. The only potential new battleground they've added besides Minnesota and Virginia is New Hampshire.

Beyond that, even the Biden campaign has conceded Florida to Trump. As of yesterday,

Joe Biden’s campaign chairwoman, Jen O’Malley Dillon, has already conceded Florida’s 30 electoral votes to former President Donald Trump.

During a podcast interview with the far-left Puck, O’Malley Dillon was asked if the campaign considered Florida a legitimate battleground state . . . . Her answer was a flat, “No.”

So why is RCP xontinuing the charade when even Biden's campaign doesn't intend to contest Florida? All I can think is adding Minnesota and Virginia to the "battleground" list must have been quite a struggle behind the scenes, and adding the others looks like it must have been some sort of compromise. And even acknowledging the wider list of "battlegrounds", they've made no change to their Electoral College prediction, which is still Trump 219 and Biden 202, with 117 tossups.

But let's look at the mindset of Tom Bevan, RCP's co-founder and president, in an interview with Fox 11 Los Angeles published just this morning:

ELEX MICHAELSON, FOX 11: What is the state of the race right now? Is Donald Trump ahead?

TOM BEVAN, REALCLEARPOLITICS: He is, and you know what? Actually, his lead has been remarkably stable. . . . We take an average of those big seven battleground states and look at that over time, and Trump's lead has been around three points -- it's at 3.2 right now -- for the last eight months. It really hasn't changed that much.

I don't undesatand. If the race is "remarkably stable", how can RCP keep estimating there are 117 Electoral College tossups? But he goes on,

As you mentioned, at the national level, he's up one point. That is a close race. But just to put that in perspective, on this day four years ago, during the 2020 election, Joe Biden was up ten points in that race. So Trump is in a much stronger position this time around than he was four years ago. But again, in this race, there's a lot that can happen between now and Election Day.

Except that the national poll is meaningless, the popular vote doesn't elect the president, the Electoral College does. And if the race is "remarkably stable", isn't there less likelihood that anything will change between now and Election Day? And then we have that question of the disparity between the 2020 polls and the polls now, something like thirteen points when Trump was down 10 then and is up 3 now.

I'm not sure how Bevan makes his money, but it must have something to do with readers going to his poll aggregates to get some sort of insight into what's going on -- except that. with the auguries in just those polls showing Minnesota and Virginia in play, Trump behind by only single digits in New Jersey and New York, and Trump 13 points ahead of his close-race performance in 2020, this is looking less and less like a close race.

So I'm still left with the question of how Bevan makes his money. It really sounds like his customers don't want to hear Trump is winning, and potentially starting to win by a lot. Bevan, co-founder and president of RCP, is staying with the line that it's gonna be a close race, and apparently there are people willing to keep paying for what he's putting out.

Even when he's more or less forced to change his list of "battlegrounds", he does it in the most minimal possible way, adding safe Republican states to the list just to muddy up the pcture. And somebody's happy enough with this to keep buying whatever it is he's selling.

I'm back to Rush Limbaugh's insight that the polls aren't meant to report the news, they're meant to shape it. Real Clear Politics indeed.

Trump Shapes The Battlefield

Another piece of the conventional wisdom that's been puzzling me ever since Trump came on the political scene is the view even among Republicans that he's a narcissist, an immature mental 12-year-old who can't control himself. His own attorney general William Barr said last year,

I'm not his lawyer, generally I think it's a bad idea to go on the stand. And I think it's a particularly bad idea for Trump because he lacks all self-control, and it would be very difficult to prepare him and keep him testifying in a prudent fashion.

Republicans of that ilk, let alone Democrats, continued to wring their hands and furrow their brows over whether he'd take the stand right up to the last days of the New York trial, when in fact he didn't take the stand -- and likely never intended to. Let's face it, Trump is a a shrewd guy. He had one successful career as a real estate developer, another successful career in entertainment, and now a career in politics that right now looks to be about as successful as, oh, I don't know, Benjamin Disraeli, who himslf had a separate career as a novelist.

Nevertheless, all the adults are convinced he's gonna go all James Dean or something, turn into a rebel without a cause, and blow Thursday's debate. Just yesterday, the New York Post editorial board admonished,

You know the first debate in 2020 went awry. You were too angry, too hot, and interrupted too much.

. . . A Trump rally is full of people angry about where the country is today. But most Americans don’t just want someone who shares their anger, they want the promise of a happy future and stability.

They want someone who can deliver a little normalcy. Government that isn’t pushing radical change. An economy that works for them. Optimism.

. . . You have a chance to take the high ground here, and Americans — exhausted by the prospect of an endless cycle of tit-for-tat lawfare — are desperate for it.

. . . You shouldn’t be tough and nasty. We don’t expect you to be nice and calm.

But you know what wins? Calm and tough.

In other words, keep this winning formula in mind, young man: channel Mitt Romney! Luckily, Trump is instinctively an entertainer, not an editorial writer. He knows from muscle memory that people watch hockey games because they want to see fights, they watch NASCAR because they want to see crashes. People are going to tune into Thursday's debate for entertainment, and Trump is going to provide it. He's setting Joe, Jake, and Dana up to be his patsies, and Jake and Dana are going to play right into his hands.

Recent comments from Trump and his supporters make it plain that Trump knows he's debating Jake and Dana just as much, if not more, than Joe himself. Having his mike turned off while Joe speaks will likely raise the tone somewhat, but we're starting to see that's not where the fun will come from. Trump may well insist that Joe can't finish a sentence, and Joe may or may not confirm it himself, but the hockey fight, the NASCAR crash, is going to come with Jake and Dana.

But let's first listen to the conventional wisdom from Brent Baker, vice president of research and publications for the Media Research Center, referring to yesterday's episode when CNN's Kasie Hunt muted Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt's mike during an interview:

Not a good sign for Donald Trump and his supporters ahead of CNN’s debate. If Hunt’s aggressiveness is any guide, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash won’t be reluctant to use their power to kill the podium microphones to silence the candidate who says things they have a long record of denouncing and condemning. Trump may well regret agreeing to allow CNN to host a debate.

Absolutely they won't regret it. If anything, Leavitt's interview was a military-style raid designed to gauge CNN's own debate strategy. As Wikipedia puts it,

Raiding, also known as depredation, is a military tactic or operational warfare "smash and grab" mission which has a specific purpose. Raiders do not capture and hold a location, but quickly retreat to a previous defended position before enemy forces can respond in a coordinated manner or formulate a counter-attack.

Trump's people were already telegraphing over prior days their own likely strategy, which would be to debate Tapper and Bash, if anything more than Biden. For instance, Eric Trump told Maria Bartiromo Sunday morning,

Jake Tapper has compared my father to Hitler before. Jake Tapper is the guy who would yell at his control room, saying, "Turn this man off! I don't want to hear what he has to say!" when my father is giving press conferences. . . . So understand, he's not going to be debating just Joe Biden, he's going to be debating CNN.

Karoline Leavitt, who must certainly be in on that strategy, in effect conducted a raid on CNN via Kasie Hunt's show that simply confirmed what CNN's response would be: more than likely, they'll mute Trump's mike if they think they need to "correct a lie" or even stop a Leavitt-style attack on themselves.

Let's recall that a big part of Trump's 2024 strategy overall is a version of the "Chicago Seven defense", in which Abbie Hoffman and his codefendants, charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democrat convention, recognized that the trial was rigged against them, much like Trump's New York civil and criminal trials in 2023-24. Their response was to turn the trial itself into a circus and win an immediate battle for public opinion, while also baiting the judge into committing reversible errors they could win on appeal.

So far, this part of Trump's overall campaign strategy has been remarkably successful; his comeback over the past year has been characterized as "the greatest in history". In large part, this is because Judges Engoron and Merchan, along with other figures like Fani Willis, Nathan Wade, Joe's son Hunter, Merrick Garland, and Jack Smith, have played right into Trump's hands all along by facilitating his Chicago Seven-style tactics.

Trump is going to turn the debate into a circus, or maybe more accurately, he's threatening to do it. He's setting CNN up for a spectacular overreaction. Whatever Joe does, the likely impression with the public will be that Tapper and Bash had to intervene to save Joe.

Not a good look, but this overlooks the possibility that Joe himself will commit his own blunder or blunders -- but that's likely to be a sideshow to the main circus, the flaming car crash with Jake and Dana. That makes Joe a minor player standing feebly on the sidelines. That also says a great deal about Trump.

I Think I've Figured It Out

As I mentioned yesterday, I''ve been gnawing for days over the question why, among other things, the Biden campaign came up with the ides of a June debate. In fact, let's remember, this was one of several non-negotiable terms Trump had to accept if he wanted to debate at all, incluiding muted microphones when the other guy was talking. Trump accepted all those terms right away, even though it's generally thought they put him at a disadvantage. Why?

I might be the only person besides Chrlamagne tha God who's asking why the Biden campaign ever thought this up. I think the answer is that the Biden people had a plan, and they're sticking to it. According to their plan, the debate is going to be the final blow that puts the election out of Trump's reach.

In fact, they selected the June debate not to give the Democrats time to find a replacement if Joe performs badly, but to give the Republicans time to replace Trump at their own convention when he falls flat on his face during the debate -- I'm not sure what they have in mind, maybe the Dr Strangelove moment where he blurts, "Mein Fuehrer! I can walk!" But nobody replaces Caesar, count on it. Replacing Joe wasn't, and isn't a contingency.

Let's reason back from this hypothetical Biden scenario. A lot of Republican commentators are actually nervous that Trump, who is mentally and emotionally a 12-year-old, will lose control -- remember when the same guys were nervous that he'd take the witness stand in New York and lose it? -- and he'll blow the whole campaign right there, maybe an n-word, maybe an enraged growl that Jeff Davis had a point, whatever, that'll put the whole game away for Biden in June. For Joe's handlers, this isn't just a remote possibility, it's the likely event.

So let's back up. Joe's campaign scheduled the debate for a date two weeks after what they knew would be a busy time for Joe himself on the world stage, in France for the D-Dsy commemoration, back home for an early Juneteenth to solidify his black support, then back to Europe for the G7, then back to Hollywood for a triumphal rally with Obama -- all of this leading up to a culminating victory over Trump in an early first debate, the timing and the rules forced on Trump in a script he couldn't refuse.

For anyone to ask within the White House if Joe had the stamina to bring all this off would, we've learned, risk ostracism by the cool kids in the inner circle. As far as I can see, the whole idea would be for Joe to sprint for a few weeks in June looking presidential on the world stage, come home and rest up for a week, and then put the coup de grâce on the whole Trump campaign at the debate. In fact, Joe can just stand by and let Trump do the job himself without an audience to roar Sieg Heil! on his behalf.

That's the plan. For anyone like me who's wondering why Joe's campaign would envision putting an octogenarian through not just a traditional campaign that starts on Labor Day but doesnm't really heat up until the World Series is over, much less a campaign with a first debate im June, that's not the plan. Joe sprints in June, maybe a little much for the big guy, but he can pull it off, he finishes the job at the first debate, and then he coasts to reelection in November, probably after the Republicans bring back Mitt Romney as their candidate in Milwaukee. No need even to break a sweat after June, he can campaign from Rehoboth Beach.

That's the only explanation I've been able to come up with for the timing of the debate -- which again was 100% the Biden campaign's idea, forced on Trump if he wanted a debate at all -- that it will end the campaign even before the traditional campaign season begins. Here and there, an observer will pipe up in some place like Australia and ask why, leading up to the debate, Trump is running a campaign and rallying in Philadelphia, while Biden isn't campaigning at all, he's resting in Camp David.

Tha's not a bug, it's a feature. The point is for Joe not to have to campaign, he isn't up to it. At leasst, that's the plan.

That Brilliant PoliticalTactician Dr Jill Is Calling The Shots

In yesterday's post I found myself scratching my head about key decisions Joe's handlers have made leading up to Thursday's debate. The biggest puzzle was why they made Trump the take-it-or-leave-it offer for the historically early first debate in June, when debates have normally taken place much later in the campaign. This will have the effect of tiring Joe out months earlier than would normally happen, but they also scheduled the debate for just two weeks after exhausting trips to Europe for the D-Day commemoration and G7, items they were fully aware of before offering the June 27 date.

But I also noted that the handlers seem deliberately to have set up Thursday's video scene of Joe shuffling from Air Force One to Marine One en route to his debate prep at Camp David, when two months before, they'd made the decision to have White House staff escort Joe on those same walks to Marine One and surround him to shield the view of precisely his same shuffling gait. In other words, someone is making remarkably self-defeating decisions. It reminds me of an old standup line:

Yesterday, the Polish defense ministry announced they had successfully tested Poland's first nuclear bomb over Warsaw. Asked why they would test a nuclear weapon over their own capital city, they replied, "Exactly. That's why we did it at night."

But this morning, via the Gateway Pundit, I read of another inexplicable move:

Given how much former President Donald Trump loves to get the final word in on any issue, one would assume that President Joe Biden would cherish the chance to strip his predecessor of getting a last word in, especially in a debate setting.

One would assume wrong.

According to CNN, which will host the first debate, Biden won a crucial coin flip ahead of the June 27 debate.

The coin, which turned up tails, gave Team Biden the option to choose between either podium position or the order in which closing remarks are delivered.

The incumbent, apparently, opted to lock in his podium position — a seemingly far lesser advantage than choosing the order of closing statements.

. . . Team Trump then chose to have Biden deliver the first set of closing remarks, giving the former president the true last word for the upcoming debate.

Jim Messina, who was the former campaign manager for Barack Obama and someone “in close contact with Biden’s team,” explained why Biden chose the podium position, per ABC News.

“As to why Biden chose the right-side podium after winning the coin flip, Messina said Biden just ‘likes’ that side and it’s a ‘personal preference,'” the outlet noted.

Exactly. That's why we did it at night.

So who are Joe's handlers, the "Biden's team" who make these key decisions? Nick Arama at Red State raises the likeliest possibility. He cites CBS reporter Weijia Jiang, who says, "I'm told that we should expect some surprises." But Arama asks,

She mentioned how he was prepping with his closest advisors. But these are the same guys who have advised him forever. Translation: These are the same guys who have been producing the mess that is Joe Biden that we've already seen every day.

Or put another way, how is same-old-same-old going to come up with "surprises"? And more to the point, who are these people? Nobody says much about this, but the closest I've been able to find is a story at Axios from Wednesday:

Biden's inner circle is cohesive but insular: Aides joke that there's an unofficial "no new friends rule."

The group includes First Lady Jill Biden's top aide, Anthony Bernal, and new Deputy Chief of Staff Annie Tomasini — low-profile but powerful aides who have worked mostly for the Bidens since 2008 and are known for their focus on loyalty.

When Tomasini was still head of Oval Office operations last year, she and Bernal surprised people by sitting in on interviews for Biden's campaign manager, a person involved in the process told Axios. A source familiar with the interviews told Axios: "This was not a surprise. Annie and Anthony are part of the senior advisers group, and every senior adviser was part of the interviews."

The name Anthony Bernal had a familiar ring. Via the New York Post,

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre refused to say Thursday if first lady Jill Biden is shielding her “work husband” Anthony Bernal from verbal sexual harassment and bullying allegations — while saying she respects Bernal and considers him a “friend,” outraging his accusers.

Jean-Pierre defended Bernal — widely regarded as one of the most powerful White House officials — when a Post reporter pressed her about accusations from Democratic aides who have worked with him, including a trio of sources who said Bernal often speculates on the penis sizes of coworkers in a #MeToo power play.

Wait a moment -- I thought Second Dude Doug Emhoff was Dr Jill's "work husband", or at least that's how it seemed when they French kissed each other at last year's State of the Union. So I looked up the term and found this thread on reddit:

When I hear "work spouse", I think of a couple that is closer with one another than with anyone else in the company, that spends a lot of time together, that is very familiar with each others' private lives etc. And when I hear "they had an affair", my first reaction is "I am Jack's complete lack of surprise".

. . . Had a coworker tell me she’s my work wife and I’m her work husband. I shut that down real quick. Sounds creepy and weird and not platonic at all.

. . . That’s sounds like some dumb [redacted] people come up with when they have too much time in their hands. Doesn’t seem like a good idea either way. You can just say work friend or friend. Why put a layer of weird on it.

All I can conclude is that Joe's inner circle involves "work spouses", they're making the big decisions, it isn't platonic at all, and there's a layer of weird on it. I suspect Joe is normally too out of it even to be consulted on any of this stuff.

Any surprises that come out of Thursday's debate aren't going to be good at all.

About That Video

Something bothered me about the most recent video of Joe, the one where he shuffles from Air Force One to Marine One at the Hagerstown airport en route to his derbate prep at Camp David. As Jesse Watters puts it,

Joe Biden is seen shuffling at the speed of an elderly man with a poor memory as he gingerly makes his way across the tarmac to Camp David.

There is a longer version of the same video, which Fox has edited for this segment. In the longer version, Joe is descending the stairs from Air Force One actually displaying basic physical competence, and as he reaches the tarmac, he returns the salutes of the marines there. But in the segment on the Fox show, he tires visibly as he crosses the 50 yards or so to the helicopter, and by the time he reaches the steps, he's clearly too tired to return the salutes of those marines. This is visible in the Fox edit.

(I checked the protocols for presidents returning military salutes -- civilians in general do not salute, including presidents. Reagan instituted a tradition of presidents returning military salutes, which his successors have tended to follow, although they aren't required to do so. Biden didn't violate any protocol in not returning the salute of the marines at the helicopter, but the fact he did return the salutes of the marines at Air Force One but didn't at the helicopter simply suggests he'd become too tired after his brief walk.)

Another aspect of the scene bothered me. As of this past April,

President Biden has introduced a change to his White House departure and return routine. Instead of walking across the South Lawn to and from Marine One by himself, he's now often surrounded by aides.

. . . Some Biden advisers have told Axios they're concerned that videos of Biden walking and shuffling alone — especially across the grass — have highlighted his age.

. . . Since the change, some advisers think the images of Biden's walks to and from the helicopter are better, and they expect him to continue to have aides join him.

So this video reverses the policy of the past two months, which had been instituted specifically to avoid the appearance of Joe's shuffling gait. But right on cue, Jesse Waters picked it up and pointed out Joe's shuffling gait, but on top of that, I think there are other grounds for concern that a 50-yard walk across the tarmac is visibly tiring for the big guy. Even more, if you compare Joe's tummy in the photo at the top of yesterday's post here with what we see in the video above, Joe's tummy is perceptibly flatter -- he's losing weight, which confirms my earlier observation that his suits don't fit.

But let's look at the context of how this video reached the public. It clearly was taken by someone standing near the Air Force One stairs, in other words, by someone well inside the Secret Service bubble around the president. That person was authorized to be there, and he or she was visibly holding a camera and filming the whole vignette. The Secret Service and Joe's handlers were clearly on board with this -- I've got to surmise the handlers believed releasing this footage would put Joe in a positive light, showing him active and capable, striding toward his next big challenge.

Or something like that. I briefly toyed with the idea that maybe there was a Secret Service agent who surreptitiously filmed this with the intent of showing the world the real shape the big guy is in, but if such a film got out, given the angle from which it was taken, whoever took it can be clearly identified, and if it were in any way pirated, unauthorized, or manipulated, that person would be committing career suicide. This was meant to be.

So it looks like Joe's handlers thought, contra their own determination two months ago, that showing Joe walking alone to the helicopter would put him in a positive light. It's actually pretty plain that, had he been able to make the walk surrounded by aides and holding Dr Jill's hand as well, his difficulty would have been much more successfully concealed -- and there probably wouldn't have been someone there designated to film the whole process.

But this is a feature of Joe's campaign I've begun to notice -- not only do the handlers seem not even to be trying to conceal Joe's decline, but in effect, they're putting him in situations that can't help but emphasize it. They scheduled him for two highly stressful European trips this month, as well as the Juneteenth celebration and the Hollywood fundraiser, all of which put Joe in circumstances where he had ample opportunities to falter during lengthy and highly publicized appearances, exactly the kind of situation they'd previously said they needed to avoid. As far as I can tell, they seem to have thought this would turn the campaign around!

Now, in a performance apparently calculated to put him in the best possible light going into next Thursday's debate, it shows him not only less than focused and energetic, but displaying new symptoms of poor health -- he faded visibly over the course of a 50-yard walk. Let's keep in mind that the people who cooked this up are also prepping him for the debate, and they're even teasing a big surprise.

In yesterday's post, I noted that the circumstances of the early sustained 2024 campaign are proving exhausting for Joe -- it was entirely his handlers' choice to challenge Trump to the June debate, the earliest ever, and Trump quickly accepted, even granting terms like no live audience and muted microphones that most thought would disadvantage him. But this is clearly forcing Joe into another early and tiring must-win campaign event months earlier than usual.

The problem for Joe is that even legacy media commentators are saying Joe must try to do something to "win" the debate, but nobody is claiming Trump has to do the same. Trump is in fact shaping the battlefield; he's making the point that he's got to debate not just Joe but the CNN moderators as well, while all Joe needs to do to "win" is not fall down. But this is just reinforcing the context that Trump doesn't need to "win", and the media will claim he "lost" no matter what -- except that, win or lose, Joe needs to keep campaigning for another four months and more.

And his handlers set this up. Is Trump just lucky, or is he a lot brighter than we give him credit for?

Vox On The State Of The Campaign

The feature of this year's presidential campaign that I've found most remarkable is how early key events have been taking place vis-a-vis campaigns in the past that I think are similar. Nobody saw Reagan's landslide over Carter coming in 1980 -- at least nobody in legacy media. George H W Bush's come-from-behind victory over Michael Dukakis in 1988 came only after he called Dukakis a "liberal" at the Republican convention, and it was cemented only by mid-October when Dukakis rode on a tank.

Dubya's more predictable victory over John Kerry in 2004 nevertheless wasn't tacitly acknowledged in legacy media until the Bush campaign's windsurfing ad in late September, after which anonymous Democrats began leaking their complaints about the Kerry campaign. As I've been noting here, though, prominent Democrats have been complaining about the Biden campaign, both anonymously and for attribution, since late last year, and if anything, there have been more of them in recent weeks. I linked to just one such at Axios yesterday, Top Dems: Biden has losing strategy.

Yet again, this is over four months before the election, and even more significant, fully two months before the Democrat convention, to be held August 19-22. The complaints about prior losing campaigns, like Dukakis and Gore, didn't emerge until after the conventions, while Carter's and Hillary's defeats were never on the radar.

A second new, and I think even more perceptive, complaint came Wednesday from Eric Levitz at Vox:

President Joe Biden’s odds of reelection may be worse than they look. And they don’t look great.

. . . As of late May, the Biden campaign was airing $13.6 million worth of ads, while the Trump campaign had yet to spend a single penny on TV spots, according to the Wesleyan Media Project.

This does not mean that there are no pro-Trump ads airing in the US. Outside groups supportive of the GOP candidate have bought $8 million in advertising. But even when you factor in such spending, pro-Biden ads have been outnumbering pro-Trump ads by slightly more than two-to-one.

The problem is, as Levitz points out, that even though the Biden campaign has massively outspent Republicans, all of this money hasn't moved the polls one iota. But Levitz makes an even more important point -- the campaign still has months to go:

Critically, there is little reason to think that Democrats can maintain such supremacy on the airwaves through November. Although Biden has enjoyed a fundraising advantage in the campaign’s first months, Trump and the Republican National Committee have closed the gap in recent weeks, not least because the GOP candidate’s criminal conviction triggered an avalanche of contributions to his campaign. The reason that Trump hasn’t spent any money on ads thus far isn’t because he can’t afford them. Rather, it seems that his team is choosing to hold its fire until the election grows closer.

Therefore, if current polls are accurate, Biden will need to increase his support even as his share of swing-state advertisements declines.

Levitz divines a potential change in Biden's thinking that may lead to a recalibration of his strategy -- he cites

the Biden campaign’s $50 million June ad buy includes a spot that declares, “In the courtroom, we see Donald Trump for who he is. He’s been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and he committed financial fraud.”

On the other hand, Trump's fundraising is now outpacing Biden's for the final stretch:

President Joe Biden’s reelection effort and the Democratic National Committee raised a combined $85 million in May, according to exclusive data provided to CNBC by the Biden campaign.

. . . Still, it trailed significantly behind the $141 million that former President Donald Trump’s political operation and the Republican National Committee claim to have raised the same month.

But Levitz misses what I think is a much bigger point: presidential campaigns traditionally started only after Labor Day, and as Nixon once pointed out, nobody paid much attention until after the World Series. This year, the Biden campaign has spent big money on ads all spring, but it will need to keep spending all summer, before the traditional campaign season starts at all. The big observation about Joe's Hollywood fundraiser last weekend was that it raised $30 million, but that will pay for only part of the campaign's new $50 million ad buy.

Except that the Hollywood fundraiser also provided the Trump campaign with the visual of Obama having almost to shove Joe off the stage after yet another freezing episode, which went viral with YouTubers effectively running Trump campaign ads that cost Trump's campaign nothing. How much was that vignette worth?

But this leads to another, but not the final, implication of the extended campaign: it's proving exhausting to Joe. We can see its effect in the video clip of his difficulty climbing into the presidential SUV in Delaware Tuesday night, as well as the stiffness and frailty apparent in his gait as he transferred from Air Force One to Marine One en route to Camp David yesterday. This continues to work in Trump's favor, especially since every recent public appearance by Biden contains some evidence of his increasing fatigue.

But the biggest problem for the Biden campaign is that Levitz, and nearly all his colleagues across the spectrum, are assuming that the polls are static, when even Frank Luntz, who is nothing if not obtuse, is noticing that it's incorrect to say Democrat ad buys aren't moving the needle. The needle is in fact moving, just not toward Biden:

Minnesota is a reliable democratic state and votes Democrat in every presidential campaign and poll after poll. I see Trump within two or three points in Minnesota. I don't think the media understands exactly what's going on right now.

Several recent polls, in fact, have Trump narrowly ahead in Minnesota, like Hill/Emerson. The needle is in fact moving, but the unique factors in this year's campaign continue to favor Trump. I'm still trying to work out what the cause is for this, but at minimum for Trump, it's better to be lucky than good -- but I have a suspicion this gives too little credit to Trump.

How Does Joe Bring Off The Debate?

As of two weeks ago, and even up until this morning, plans for Joe's debate prep leadingup to the June 27 debate were vague. Here's a June 10 story from AP:

After back-to-back trips to Europe, President Joe Biden plans to head to Camp David next week to prepare for his first 2024 debate with former President Donald Trump, hunkering down at the woodsy Maryland hideaway that has hosted many similar cram sessions in the past.

.. . A person with knowledge of the president’s plans, who insisted on anonymity to more freely discuss them, suggested Biden could spend the better part of a week at Camp David getting ready for the first debate.

But others involved in the planning said Monday that details were still being worked out, including how many days Biden would devote to prep. They said exactly where he’d be doing it, at Camp David or elsewhere, had not been finalized.

But now we know! As of this morning, according to ABC News,

With a week to go until the first presidential debate, President Joe Biden heads to Camp David on Thursday to prepare for his critical matchup with former President Donald Trump.

. . . According to a campaign official, Ron Klain, Biden's former chief of staff, is leading the debate preparations. Other senior campaign aides and longtime advisers, including Cedric Richmond, a former White House aide and current campaign co-chair, will also be on hand.

This won't be Klain's first time in a leading role. In addition to assisting Biden in his 2020 debate prep, he led Hillary Clinton's preparation in 2016, Barack Obama's in 2008 and 2012 and John Kerry's in 2004.

In 2020, Biden said his debate prep strategy involved "going over what [Trump] has said and multiple lies he's told," in an interview with NBC News. This year, Biden's debate prep could look similar with his facing the same opponent.

This leaves two open questions, first whether the 2020 strategy will work, and then the bigger question of whether Joe can allay doubts about his cognitive abilities. As to the first, acccording to Axios,

Senior Democrats, including some of President Biden's aides, are increasingly dubious about his theory for victory in November, which relies on voter concerns about Jan. 6, political violence, democracy and Donald Trump's character.

. . . A Democratic strategist in touch with the campaign told Axios: "It is unclear to many of us watching from the outside whether the president and his core team realize how dire the situation is right now, and whether they even have a plan to fix it. That is scary."

. . . Longtime Democratic strategist Howard Wolfson, who worked for former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the 2020 primary against Biden, told Axios: "If the election were today, we would lose. Can that change? Yes. Is it on the path to do so? I don't see that yet."

"The stakes for the debate" on June 27 between Biden and Trump "are sky high," he said.

The accounts we've seen suggest that debate prep for Joe will involve programming him with talking points that refer to prior Trump remarks ranging from the "fine people" at Charlottesville to injecting bleach to cure COVID to the "bloodbath" if he loses in 2024, as well as his status as a "convicted felon". A good example of this strategy was in the 2020 debate where Joe was able to pull out a rehearsed reference to the since-discredited letter from 51 former intelligence officials claiming Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation.

We might expect Joe to do something similar this year -- but I have my doubts, even if that's his handlers' intent. This brings up the bigger question that people will have about the debate, Joe's condition. As of last year, there were reports that Joe has adopted a reduced work schedule:

Days after the 80-year-old formally announced he would run for re-election in 2024, Axios reported Friday that aides say it’s tough to schedule “public or private events” with Biden at certain times of day — namely weekends, mornings, and evenings.

In fact, the report adds, most of Biden’s public events happen between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.

. . . The report added that while Biden’s close advisers insist he’s mentally sharp and other officials say the president has great stamina “for his age,” some aides have compared Biden to an aging monarch protected by courtiers at all costs.

This will inevitably limit the time available for debate prep. In addition, the reports from unnamed diplomats at the G7 that Joe is unfocused at meetings suggest that the prep sessions may suffer from the same problem. In addition, the 90-minute debate format works against the handlers' strategy of limiting the time he has available in the public eye to make mistakes:

The approach also has the appearance of a strategy aimed at minimizing the potential for Biden to make mistakes in a razor-close election. Some of Biden’s verbal missteps have occurred when he’s talking at length, veers off the prepared text or answers a reporter’s question when that wasn’t part of the plan.

And there's still the problem that no matter how much prep Joe gets, his memory may still not follow through. Just the day before yesterday,

President Biden appeared to freeze up and temporarily forget the name of his Homeland Security Secretary during a White House event Tuesday.

. . . He thanked Congress and Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, but seemed to trail off when trying to remember Mayorkas’ name.

"I’m not sure I’m going to be able to introduce you all the way," Biden said, eliciting laughter from the audience.

There's the additional problem that Joe's handlers scheduled him for back-to-back trips to Europe, with the Juneteenth interlude, followed immediately by cross-country flights to the Hollywood fundraiser. Joe wound up with highly problematic visuals across all of them, when I suspect the handlers' intent instead was to set him up with a triumphal progress leading to the June 27 debate.

I've got to surmise that what they didn't factor in was the level of fatigue this would produce in an octogenarian. This must certainly have been a factor in his repeated gaffes and freezeups over the whole period. Even Byron York was forced to conclude,

One thing is certain: If the Juneteenth event showed some sort of problem with the president, it will happen again. The White House will not be able to say “This did not happen” whenever something does indeed happen.

Let's keep in mind that Joe's handlers were completely responsible for his exhausting schedule throughout this month. He probably needed at least a week to unwind between the D-Day trip snd the G7, which he didn't get -- but then they added extra events like Juneteenth, the fundraiser, the amnesty announcement Tuesday, followed by yet another fundraiser that hight, which culminated in problems getting into his SUV.

I dont think a week of enrforced rest alone at Camp David would be enough to perk Joe up -- but at least in theory, he's supposed to prepping for the debate. This takes me back to my days in tech, where the project team, which had been falling behind schedule for months and had a final deadline coming up on Monday, said they'd just work all weekend to get caught up. Right.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Joe Biden?

Ever since the G7 "cheap fake" vignettes, outlets across the board have been spitballing new strategies to replace Joe on the November ballot. Via the UK Daily Mail,

[I]t seems no matter how much cold water the Biden campaign or Democratic Party throw on this raging fire of speculation, Americans will not be put off the Great Joe Biden Replacement Theory.

It's the idea that somehow, some way the President will be swapped out as the Democratic Party's candidate ahead of the 2024 election.

But the obstacle is always Kamala, who is the other horn of the dilemma. The Daily Mail points this out:

[The substitute] would not be Vice President Kamala Harris, according to sources, who observed that Harris has already had to fend off a push to replace her on the ticket.

'It doesn't just become Kamala. Kamala only becomes the nominee if Biden dies,' one blunt consultant said.

Another Democratic political insider believes that Harris has failed so badly as vice president that she has made it nearly impossible for Biden to step aside – because the party would have to contend with progressive blowback over passing over the potential first black woman president.

The "only if Biden dies" scenario isn't completely accurate. If Biden is forced to resign as president before Inauguration Day 2025, or if the 25th Amendment is invoked, Kamala becomes president, for however short a time. My own feeling is that the likelihood of this is at least non-trivial, and it's the only realistic way Joe can be replaced on the ticket short of him dying.

How bad is Joe's condition, really? One indication is the White House's extreme unwillingness to release the tapes of Special Counsel Robert Hur's interview of Joe last October:

House Republicans are demanding the [Justice] department turn over audio recordings of the interview special counsel Hur conducted with Biden in October 2023, about Biden's handling of classified documents after leaving the Obama administration.

. . . At a hearing Thursday, Chairman Jordan of the Judiciary Committee asserted the recordings are necessary because "the transcripts alone are not sufficient evidence of the state of the president's memory."

The implication is that the written transcripts have been redacted to minimize evidence of Biden's deteriorating mental state, which could well be much more evident in the tapes, and the White House's subsequent efforts to discredit videos of Joe freezing at the Juneteenth event and the Hollywood fundraiser, as well as him wandering away from the group at the G7, indicate the extreme sensitivity with which it views the issue.

It's worth noting that Senate Minority Leader McConnell had two similar public episodes of freezing last year:

For the second time this summer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell froze up while answering questions during a press conference. The Republican stared blankly for about 30 seconds Wednesday afternoon in Kentucky. There was a similar moment for the Senator on Capitol Hill last month.

McConnell announced his retirement as Republican leader this past February, sayiong at the time,

One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter, so I stand before you today, Mr. President and my colleagues, to say this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.

It was speculated that health concerns led to his decision:

Health issues for McConnell, 82, almost certainly played a role in his decision. Last March, he sustained a concussion and fractured a rib when he took a bad fall at a private dinner at a Washington hotel, sidelining him for six weeks.

Then in July, McConnell froze for 19 seconds at a news conference in the Capitol, worrying colleagues who said they had noticed a change in the longtime leader and they believed the fall had taken a toll. He appeared to freeze a second time at a Kentucky event the following month.

I continue to wonder how much the White House has been concealing the actual extent of Biden's decline, which has been hinted at in the foreign press more than here:

“Biden isn’t the man he used to be,” a June editorial story from The Independent, a U.K. newspaper, reads. “A failure to take the mounting evidence seriously risks not only a collapse of trust in the White House that will affect future presidents but the specter of real crises during a second Biden term.”

. . . International media outlets especially covered concerns surrounding Biden after Department of Justice Special Counsel Robert Hur released a report in February regarding Biden’s possible mishandling of classified documents. The report recommended not pursuing charges against Biden because he presented himself as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and a jury would likely find him not guilty.

Biden held a press conference the same day the report was released and criticized Hur’s report, but made a series of slip-ups during remarks and shouted at reporters, which some media outlets claimed highlighted Hur’s findings.

. . . “The numerous references in the report to Joe Biden’s failing memory. . . give unprecedented force to questions about his physical and mental capacity to stand again,” a news story from French outlet Le Monde wrote about the Hur report. “The worrying episodes are increasing.”

To some extent, the references to Joe's ability to run for re-election are polite. The November election is still over four months away, but Joe's campaign is clearly faltering long before traditional presidential campaigns even start. On one hand, the possibility of some new crisis demanding the president's full attention can't be ruled out, while on the other, Joe can't stand an infinite number of new episodes that call his condition into question.

It's likely that Sen McConnell's resignation as Republican leader was prompted by behind-the-scenes pressure, as well as Trump's statement, only a week before the senator's announcement, that he "wasn't sure" if he could work with McConnell. Right now, we don't know what sort of pressure may be happening for Joe behind the scenes already. Nevertheless, as of 2024, Trump is displaying far greater political strength out of office, for instance in his ability to force McConnell's retirement, than he had during his actual term.

For Kamala to succeed to the presidency between now and Inauguration Day presents a problem for national leadership in both parties, and even its potential represents a constitutional crisis. I suspect a few people close to Trump are gaming this out, and I think the likelihood of something like this happening is greater than anyone expects. I think the current situation is neither stable nor sustainable for long.

The Low-Bar Problem

YIKES: Watch Joe Biden incoherently babble at his Hollywood fundraiser as Obama looks on in SHOCK.

This is so bad…

pic.twitter.com/W7WsF74zvM

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 17, 2024

The conventional wisdom, even before the 2024 presidential debate dates were set, has been that Joe's handlers will be able to prep him well enough for the first debate, now a little over a week away, that he'll surpass a low-bar standard and "win" the debate against Trump simply by avoiding major embarrassments. For instance,

Biden’s performance at his State of the Union address — which went over largely well and led to many public reconsiderations of whether he was too diminished to run for a second term — is very much on the minds of some Trump aides. They expect that Biden’s team will get him into similar shape ahead of the debate.

As of now, even though I'm a contrarian in any case, I have serious doubts about this. The CNN story at the link was written last month, and it uses the history of both Biden's and Trump's past debate preps to try to predict the future. The piece continues,

People who have been in previous debate preps sessions with [Biden] said they can be exhausting and, for long stretches, not productive. He prefers sitting around a table covered in policy binders, trying to explain himself in long answers in ways that he feels like he hasn’t gotten to do and asking whoever he can make eye contact with, “How would you do it?”

Much of the work goes into focusing him, these people who have been in prep with him said, pulling him back to the key point or narrative that aides have identified.

And that was Joe in 2020. There seems to be a consensus that he's not like that in 2024, he has good days and bad; he checks in, and he checks out.

But multiple prominent Democrats said they worry Biden can’t come off as robust next to Trump. They live a daily nightmare imagining some kind of trip up, literal or verbal, that becomes the one Biden can’t come back from, and they think the debate stage seems like the obvious place where this could happen.

On the other hand, there's an expectation in some quarters that Trump won't be able to control himself. Here's a think piece at Real Clear Politics yesterday:

Every question from pro-Democrat moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash and every taunting response from President Biden about threats to democracy will be an opportunity for Trump to lose his temper or to alienate moderate voters with intemperate replies.

. . . Remember, this debate and another one in early September were proposed by Biden at a time when he was trending badly behind Trump in the polls, especially in battleground states. Presumably, the Biden campaign believed the early debates would shore up his support and hurdle him over the much indicted, and now convicted, former president.

Is this guy trying to imply that something has changed since then, that Joe's doing much better in the polls? If anything, the polls in the artificially designated "battleground" states have remained the same, while Trump is starting to pull ahead in other states like Minnesota and Virginia. It's also starting to look like Biden's staff had expected his trips to Europe for the D-Day commemoration and G7 would make him look presidential going into the debate, when the visuals turned out to be disastrous. But the guy continues,

If Trump remembers to act presidential, and not like an attack dog, there is every reason to believe he will attract voters eager for a change.

This repeats the idea that Trump is basically out of control, a perpetual adolescent who's his own worst enemy. This isn't the Trump we're seeing. He's been pretty clearly following the advice of his counsel, although some part of his legal strategy is also what Alan Dershowitz has recognized is the Chicago Seven defense, deliberately baiting some of the judges and prosecutors into making errors -- and in fact, this has been remarkably effective over the past year. As his indictments have mounted up and verdicts have gone against him, he's just risen in the polls.

This isn't someone who's out of control. He's also very good ex tempore, and he has a standup comic's sense of timing -- but that leaves aside that he simply has a sense of humor, which Biden completely lacks.

Still, even this omits the new inflection of the campaign. The line up to now has been that Biden's "age" is a major campaign issue. But that's putting it politely. The visuals from G7 and the Hollywood fundraiser raise an entirely different question, to which Piers Morgan gave voice yesterday:

I watched the viral clip of Barack Obama taking a frozen Joe Biden by the arm and leading him off stage at their star-studded $30 million LA fundraiser, and posted on X what I suspect everyone who watched it was thinking: “So embarrassing. The Democrats can’t let this go on, surely?”

Within a few hours, a staggering 7.5 million people had viewed my post and many thousands of those had liked, reposted or commented on it.

As I thought, the vast majority shared my honestly held opinion that President Biden is no longer fit for the highest office in America.

The question really is no longer, "Will Joe be able to make it through another four years?" That's been overtaken by events. The question has become, "He really shouldn't be president now, should he?" This has an urgency that in some ways overrides the election. It's an issue that he likely can't be removed from office before next January, and he almost certainly will lose the November election. What can we do to feel comfortable in the meantime?

Piers Morgan continues with the real question:

Biden is supposed to be America’s commander-in-chief but, at what is a very dangerous time for the world, I wouldn’t trust him now to order a restaurant meal let alone a military strike.

So why is he still running?

What I've been seeing, especially since the G7, is that Biden is capable of losing situational awareness at any time and either behaving completely inappropriately, as he did with the Pope Francis headbump, or simply freezing. That suggests to me that as of now, even more than in 2020, any attempt at debate prep is likely to be a futile endeavor. But there's also now absolutely no assurance that he won't simply lose situational awareness during the debate itself. That, of course, raises questions beyond just the debate.

I don't think the low bar scenario is remotely applicable as things now stand. I've been saying for a while that events are going to move more rapidly than people think.