Universities' Nightmare Scenario

I ran across two articles yesterday, both at Real Clear Politics, that get the elite university problem either competely wrong, or they miss a whole lot. The first is at Semafor, Universities’ nightmare scenario: it’s not just federal funding cuts. Its premise:

The nightmare scenario for elite universities is here. The flood of White House actions aimed at private colleges can be hard to follow. But think of these universities as companies, and the math gets simpler — and the dangers become stark.

Top universities are financial titans, generating investment profits that mirror those of Wall Street firms.

. . . By revenue, UPenn is bigger than BNY Mellon; Columbia is as big as Coinbase. But these universities operate on profit margins thinner than those of a grocery store. In short, they make a lot of money but spend almost all of it.

This obscures a basic problem: for tax purposes, a university can't make a profit, strictly defined. It can collect revenues greater than its expenses, but those revenues must be reinvested in the university's primary activities, and they aren't taxed. For a profit-making company, the revenues greater than expenses are distributed to investors as income, and they are taxed. I'm scratching my head about why the writer just glosses over this distinction.

So the problem isn't that universities have a low profit margin. Universities aren't there to make a profit. So what are universities there for? Somerone might answer, to pursue truth, blah blah, and blah blah, thereby enlightening the world! Students! Research! Curing cancer! Actually, they're there for tax purposes. as I've outlined here, most recently on April 3 and April 5. Their endowments are creatures of the federal income tax, enacted via the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1913. In those posts, I quoted extensively from Ferdinand Lundberg's The Rich and the Super-Rich:

Prior to 1913 at least, the problem of taxes could not have influenced Rockefeller in his philanthropies because business and wealth were subject then only to piddling local taxes. Nor can it be held that the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation was a direct reflex to the advent of federal taxes in 1913 because the Foundation had long been planned, at least since 1905. . . . However, even though the advent of federal taxes did not influence the idea of the Foundation, it was gradually noticed by others that there were distinct tax advantages in making philanthropic allocations. This fact is now part of standard tax doctrine, set down in many tax treatises. Gifts to philanthropic funds pay no taxes, the income on such funds pay no taxes, and there is no inheritance tax on such funds. Furthermore, stocks placed in such endowments carry corporate voting power--a nice point. It should be recalled here that it is power really, rather than money or property, that we are concerned with.

In other words, the robber barons of the Gilded Age, their heirs, and their successors had plenty of money to squander on mansions and estates, to the point that they could afford to donate blocks of their companies' stock to universities and other charitable endowments, especially after 1913. They didn't get those dividends, but they could do without that money. Nor did they need the capital gains when the stock was traded. On the other hand, as major donors to the universities, they or their agents sat on the boards of trustees and voted that stock, even though they didn't directly own it.

The article at the link says that Harvard gets 45% of its revenue from endowment dividends and tax-free donations. But this doesn't reflect the utility the endowment provides to its donors and their descendants in its proxy corporate control on their behalf. Universities like Harvard have always been plutocratic institutions, and they will continue to be so. Recall that although we don't know all the details of Jeffrey Epstein's financial chicanery, even though he had no four-year degree himself, he was able to hitchhike on the prestige of Harvard and MIT by representing himself as a major donor with powerful influence at both universities.

The second of the articles I found is at Real Clear Education: What Happened to Harvard? Like the first, this completely overlooks the real function of universities, especially after the introduction of the income tax. Its premise is simply bizarre:

When Lord Acton, the great nineteenth-century historian and champion of liberty, visited Harvard in 1853, he found that the college’s philosophy was common sense realism. Acton wrote that by “the third year, Reid becomes a textbook.” The Reid in question was Thomas Reid, author of An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764). The common sense realist philosophers—especially Reid, Adam Smith, and Francis Hutcheson—fundamentally shaped the thinking of America’s Founders and provided the foundation for teaching and learning in American colleges until Acton’s visit and beyond.

But influential figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson (Harvard 1821), Nathaniel Hawthorne (Bowdoin 1825), Henry David Thoreau (Harvard 1837), and Henry Ward Beecher (Amherst 1834), were hardly common-sense realists. Emerson

led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking. . . Friedrich Nietzsche thought he was "the most gifted of the Americans," and Walt Whitman called Emerson his "master".

Hawthorne's

fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, dark romanticism. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity, and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity.

Thoreau

anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism.

. . . Thoreau is sometimes referred to retrospectively as an anarchist, but may perhaps be more properly regarded as a proto-anarchist.

Beecher

supported social reform causes such as women's suffrage and temperance. He also championed Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, stating that it was not incompatible with Christian beliefs. He was widely rumored to be an adulterer, and in 1872 the Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly published a story about his affair with Elizabeth Richards Tilton, the wife of his friend and former co-worker Theodore Tilton. In 1874, Tilton filed charges for "criminal conversation" against Beecher. The subsequent trial resulted in a hung jury and was one of the most widely reported trials of the century.

Frankly, it sounds like Harvard and other institutions of higher learning before Lord Acton's visit were producing graduates not all that much different from the graduates of Harvard and other such institutions we have now. Beyond that, we should keep firmly in mind that even more influential figures from the same period like Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain had limited formal education and didn't attend university at all. (Mark Twain made fun of the English visitors like Lord Acton or Mrs Trollope who purported to write with insight about their visits to the US.)

I think it's important to recognize that US colleges and universities in the 18th and 19th centuries were finishing schools for the upper classes, and most of the students were no more interested in what was in the formal curriculum than they are now. Emerson, Thoreau, and Beecher in particular seem to have taken away from their college years beliefs that were comfortable and convenient, not much common sense involved, no differrent from the students we see today.

UPDATE: On further reflection, the American Founders were on the whole Freemasons, freethinkers, or deists, influenced more by European radicals than Scottish common sense realism. George Washington did not attend university; neither did Benjamin Franklin. Thomas Jefferson attended the College of William & Mary, not Harvard, where he was influenced by Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton of the previous century, none Scots. More important, Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776) was published well past the time the US Founders had formed their ideas, as indeed was Reid's 1764 Inquiry.

On one hand, the writer at Real Clear Education seems to be looking back at an idealized Harvard that never existed, and in fact, he doesn't seem to be terribly familiar with the intellectual products of that university during the period he most admires. On the other hand, what we're also seeing is a mark-to-market on the value of a four-year degree overall.

Ferdinand Lundberg saw an inflection point in the position of Harvard and other universities as financial institutions in the enactment of the federal income tax. What intrigues me is that students of the selective admissions system at elite schools like Alan Dershowitz and Jerome Karabel also trace its development to the same period, about 1913. This comes roughly a generation after the late 19th century wave of Jewish immigration to the US, when the children of this wave began to apply for admission to these schools.

This suggests to me that the elite universities made adjustments, all highly favorable to the plutocracy they served, about a century ago in response to the rise of progressive policies, but their essential content and outlook didn't change. Contra the one writer at the last link, I don't think they ever purposely taught anything like common-sense realism, any more than they do now. But any rise of common-sense realism in current political discourse is now a major threat to their existence.

The Titan Sub Disaster And The Ivy Con

There's an intriguing counterpoint in the Discovery documentary Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster between the charismatic, patrician Stockton Rush and the more workaday Josh Gates, host of Expedition Unknown, who visits OceanGate in Everett, WA in an effort to produce an episode of his show based on Rush's project.

He recounts that after the visit, he felt so uncomfortable about Rush's slapdash approach to safety that he called the Discovery CEO and, as he put it, "fell on his sword", apologizing that even though money had been put into producing the episode, he was convinced something bad was going to happen, and he didn't want to put the show or Discovery in the position of appearing to publicize or endorse OceanGate. Clearly this was a prudent move.

So why has Princeton been so eager to promote Stockton Rush, before and after the Titan tragedy, especially when Josh Gates and Discovery foresaw a real downside to any potential link? A web search on "Stockton Rush" brings up several official Princeton eulogies, such as Big Dreams and Daring Marked the Life of Stockton Rush ’84 Princeton friends are mourning ‘Tock’ Rush, who died last week on a Titanic expedition. Oh, he was "Tock" Rush, I get it. Let's dig a little deeper:

Stockton Rush graduated from Princeton University in 1984 with a B.S.E. in mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE), maintaining a Princeton tradition that goes back to the beginning of the institution. His father, Richard “Tok” Rush, graduated from Princeton. Their predecessor, another Richard Stockton, was one of Princeton’s first graduates in 1748 and went on to sign the Declaration of Independence. His father, Robert Stockton, donated land in Princeton, New Jersey, to draw the college from its original location in Newark. Stockton’s son, Richard “Ben” Rush, would follow in his father’s footsteps with an MAE degree from Princeton in 2011, with a thesis on a robotic arm for a submersible vehicle.

He was a legacy. Those who follow this blog will recognize that legacies, the children of alumni, are a major exception to the perceived merit-based admissions policies of elite universities. According to the Daily Princetonian,

Opponents of legacy admissions have cited the high percentage legacy students make up in a class and the fact that a higher proportion of legacy applicants are admitted. Admissions data from Harvard, revealed by the affirmative action case, showed that between 2010 and 2015, legacy applicants had an acceptance rate of 33 percent (compared to the overall rate of 6 percent). The Class of 2022 at Princeton had a legacy admission rate of 31.7 percent. In the same ‘Inquirer’ interview, Eisgruber stated that “12.5 [percent] of students are children of alumni.”

This source puts Princeton's overall admissions rate for the class of 2028 at 4.62%. In other words, if you're a legacy, your chances of being admitted are more than six times greater than if you're just applying on the basis of grades, SATs, and extracurriculars. But the set-aside for legacies, as I've been pointing out here, is just one of perhaps two dozen that were, according to Jerome Karabel and Alan Dershowitz, originally developed to limit admissions of Jews without the need for a specific Jewish quota.

In other words, if elite-school admissions were based exclusively on merit -- traditionally meaning grades, SATs, and extracurriculars -- there'd be too many Jews and Asians, and not as many slots for the upper class. But each of the set-asides adds up. These include foreign students, who pay full freight, 20-30% at the ivies, a big set-aside indeed.

Then there are preppies; recruited athletes, including those for upper-class sports like rowing, fencing, and lacrosse; students from the plains and Rocky Mountain states; DEI candidates; and children of celebrities, politicians, and major donors. If you go looking for the percentages of each such set-aside in typical Ivy entering classes, you'll get something like 80% who've come in via set-asides. This has me questioning how Princeton comes up with an "overall" admissions rate of 4.62% if as many as 80% of its students come in via set-asides where the rate is much higher.

And here's where we get to the heart of the Ivy con: the perception that the Ivies admit only the best and brightest. In Harvard's defense, for instance, Catharine B. Hill, former president of Vassar College and provost of Williams College, writes,

At Harvard, about 25% of students are international. For institutions that are educating graduate students in Ph.D. programs, the goal is to train the next generation of researchers to contribute to making discoveries to solve the world’s challenging problems.

. . . Harvard historically has used its best judgment to recruit and educate the next generation of America’s and the world’s skilled workforce and innovators. And it has been tremendously successful in this endeavor so far.

Really? Here's another version of the same line:

Since the postwar era, America’s best universities have led the world. Harvard, Princeton, MIT, CalTech — these elite universities are the foundation of the American scientific supremacy that has in turn fueled decades of economic growth. But also, by virtue of their unparalleled ability to attract the best minds from around the world, these schools have given the US the educational privilege of being the magnet of global academic excellence.

. . . The ability to attract the best of the best, especially in the sciences, is what makes Harvard Harvard, which in turn has helped make the United States the United States.

The fact is that, if you look at the typical makeup of an Ivy entering class, well under half has been admitted purely on merit. But the universities use this relatively small group to promote an illusion of excellence: they're recruiting and educating the next generation of blah blah blah! They're the magnet of global academic blah blah blah! That may be so, but it applies to well under half of any entering class. The rest are, let's face it, well-bred coasters and con artists like "Tock" Rush.

Mike Rowe tells Chris Cuomo: "The Ivy League has beclowned themselves and Harvard has led the be-clowning." pic.twitter.com/6cMwTU4DZS

— JOSH DUNLAP (@JDunlap1974) May 29, 2025

It intrigues me that the low-to-middlebrow Discovery Channel and Josh Gates had enough insight to see past the Ivy glitz and glamour of "Tock" Rush, recognize the high potential threat to their reputations, and move to avert it, while the Ivies themselves don't seem able to look after the threats they themselves pose to their continued existence, by allowing people like Rush to use their brand to promote their own con games.

More On Obama's Impotence

Barack Obama's inability to control Joe Biden was evident nearly a year ago, on July 12, 2024:

Chris Whipple, an author and filmmaker who biographed the life of President Biden, indicated Friday that former President Obama may not even be able to convince Biden to exit the 2024 presidential race.

Whipple, in an interview with NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas Friday, said it was “nonsense” to think Obama would be the sole person to persuade the president to step aside.

“I just talked about reports that Obama is worried that Biden can’t win,” Vargas said. “The relationship between these two men is really complicated. A lot of people have been saying ‘The only person who could tell Biden to step aside is former President Obama.’ Not quite true.”

. . . The question around Obama’s influence was also brought up Thursday by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, who signaled that the president’s campaign believes Obama is behind increasing calls for Biden to withdraw from the White House race.

This appeared the day before the Butler, PA assassination attempt on Trump and several days before Joe's "COVID disgnosis" in Las Vegas, which sent him home to Delaware. But more recent reporting indicates that Obama himslf didn't think he could convince Joe to drop out, but maybe Sen Schumer could:

Following last June’s disastrous debate performance by President Joe Biden, Barack Obama urged then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to be the bearer of bad news and convince Biden to drop out of the race, saying his own “fragile relationship” with the president prevented him from being the “best messenger.”

According to a deep-dive investigation by The New York Times, which was adapted from an upcoming book by reporters Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater, Schumer sat down with Biden in the president’s Delaware house last summer and told him he’d “go down in American history as one of the darkest figures” if he stayed in and lost to Donald Trump.

“The roughly 45-minute conversation, which took place on a screened-in porch overlooking a pond, was more pointed and emotional than previously known, and helps to explain how Mr. Biden came to the decision just over a week later to end his campaign,” the Times reported.

Mevertheless, if this took place "just over a week" before Joe's July 21 announcement that he was withdrawing from the race, this must have put the meeting with Schumer on July 11 or 12, before both the Butler episode and the Las Vegas "COVID diagnosis". It wasn't until the call from Pelosi the following weekend that Joe made up his mind. I think I'm still correct in my view that Obama was never in a position to tell Joe to drop out -- he appears to have acknowledged this to Schumer himself -- and neither, as things fell out was Schumer. Pelosi was the last one standing, if only briefly.

David Manney at PJ Media comes closer, but he still overestimates Obama:

For more than a decade, the Democratic Party operated like a palace, ruled not by consensus but by decree. Its monarchs were familiar: President Barack Obama with his golden tongue and cool detachment, Nancy Pelosi with her iron gavel, and a press corps that never met a Democrat it couldn’t describe as “historic.”

Together, they built something. Not a movement but an illusion.

. . . There was a time when Barack Obama could end primary campaigns with a sentence and turn congressional tides with a smirk. His approval alone anointed candidates, even as his own policy legacy, Obamacare, Iran, and record-setting deficits, faded into dysfunction.

But in 2024, the man who once promised that oceans would stop rising could not even convince Joe Biden to step aside.

Reports now confirm Obama privately urged Biden not to run again. But he lacked either the courage or the leverage to say it publicly. He blinked. He defaulted to the back-channel whispering and careful leaks. And that hesitation was costly.

Biden stayed. The campaign withered. The debate disaster happened. Trump’s victory followed. Obama’s influence didn’t just wane; it evaporated.

Isn't this just the long way around of saying Obama never had the power to convince Joe to drop out? Both he and Schumer had to defer to Pelosi. So far, Pelosi has said she'll never disclose exactly what she said during the July 20 call to Biden, but I strongly suspect it was a message that the donors were going to cut him off. Since she basically controlled the party as a major fundraiser, it was a message only she could deliver.

Meanwhile, other people are claiming they know who was actually in control. David Hogg says it was Dr Jill's chief of staff, Anthony Bernal:

BREAKING: Undercover Meeting with DNC Leader @davidhogg111 Reveals who REALLY ran the Biden White House

“He wielded an enormous amount of power... I can’t stress to you enough how much power he had at the White House.”

"It was an open secret... I would avoid him, he was… pic.twitter.com/i7fskTwhNw

— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) May 28, 2025

Hogg's claim is that Bernal ran the White House -- but his power came from Dr Jill and indirectly from Joe. As soon as Pelosi took Joe out of the picture, Bernal was a lame duck just as much as Joe was. Nancy Pelosi, at least as of last july, ran the country. Remember, not only did she take Joe out, she named Joe's successor. Bernal could never do that.

Next we hear that Elizabeth Warren ran the country, because she had the autopen:

SHHH DON’T TELL JOE!@DavidSacks just said POCAHONTAS had the AUTOPEN and wasn’t afraid to use it! ✍🏼✍🏼✍🏼 pic.twitter.com/KSUL4WQ4i6

— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) May 28, 2025

At this point, we're in murky territory with which signatures done with the autopen are or aren't consitutional. but I'm not sure it matters. Elizabeth Warren, whatever she might have been able to do with the autopen, lost that ability pretty much as soon as Nancy Pelosi told Joe to drop out of the race. She was in exactly the same position as Anthony Bernal; as soon as Joe Biden's signature wasn't the president's signature, neither had any power at all. It was Nancy Pelosi who could take away any power they held.

The big difference is that right now, there's no issue over who is the shadowy power behind the throne.

Original Sin Is Just A Modified Limited Hangout

Last week, I revisited the term "modified limited hangout" and linked to this definition:

Coined on the fly by Nixon lawyer John Ehrlichman in 1973, . . . modified limited hangout is the public admission of a wrong in an attempt to hide a more serious wrong, while the media and prosecutors are investigating related crimes. It's a defensive tool in trying to cover-up a conspiracy.

The reviews of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's book find its revelations generally unsatisfying. For instance, at Columbia Journalism Review,

Now Original Sin, an eagerly awaited book from Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios, combs through post-election interviews to offer the most detailed accounting yet of what the book’s subtitle calls the “cover-up” of Biden’s decline—a “cover-up” of something that the American people knew all along.

. . . There is considerable reporting in Original Sin, and a largely chronological narrative, but not much of a coherent story. The authors seem unable to settle on clear answers to some key questions, including: when Biden began to decline, as opposed to how much he just became more like himself, as we all tend to as we age; how much of the “cover-up” was just a reelection strategy of insulating the president, and how much an active subterfuge with malice aforethought; and whether Biden was simply aging or suffering from some serious illness (Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are mentioned as possibilities). Even granting that the book was rushed into print—the reporting began in November—these seem to be important gaps.

In fact, there's been so much criticism of Jake Tapper that he's hired a crisis management firm to salvage his reputation -- but the word is, possibly from those same flacks, that Thompson did most of the writing, Tapper was just paid to add the prestige of his name to the project. But now, poor Tapper is taking all the heat! From Jesse Watters:

Jake just admitted he missed the biggest story of the century. Tapper basically admitted he's blind.

Because Watergate was a secret. There was no video. Reporters had to crack it.

Bidengate was on TV. Every day. Aren't news anchors supposed to know the news before the public?

Tapper is saying the public knew the news before he did. Journalists can't be the last ones to know the scandal. That means they're not a journalist.

Tapper should resign. If you missed Bidengate, or you covered it up, what else did you miss? What else did you cover up?

The border? Epstein? The lab leak?

. . . This is only the beginning. The FBI is opening up an investigation into the cover-ups of the White House cocaine, the DNC pipe bomb, and the Supreme Court abortion leaks. The last four years, one big cover-up.

Jerry Dunleavy at Just the News takes the implications a little farther:

The central contention of the best-selling book is that Joe Biden’s mental decline occurred most significantly years after Biden’s 2020 election — during the years of 2023 and 2024 —and resulted in a cover-up by the president’s inner circle and his allies which led to President Donald Trump’s own victory in 2024.

The book nevertheless contains numerous details suggesting that Biden’s lack of physical and mental fitness for the job was actually present as early as 2015, was documented and recorded in 2017, and was concealed — at times even by Tapper and his colleagues — as Biden ran to unseat Trump in 2020.

. . . The authors’ note for the book states that “readers who are convinced that Joe Biden was little more than a husk from the very beginning of his presidency, barely capable of stringing two sentences together, will not find support for that view here.”

But there's plenty of evidence in the book itself that Biden's staff had serious doubts about his ability to campaign effectively in 2020:

The book included a chapter subtitled “The Covid Cocoon” detailing how the deadly COVID-19 pandemic was a blessing for the Biden campaign, allowing a severely physically and mentally diminished candidate to run what was often derisively referred to as a “basement campaign.”

“It was terrible to admit, but Biden’s own aides would say that while the COVID-19 pandemic was one of the worst things to happen to the world, it was one of the best things to happen to Biden’s presidential hopes,” the book states.

“They doubted Biden could have otherwise kept up the pace of campaigning through November. As pandemic lockdowns became widespread in March 2020, Biden could avoid that grueling travel and campaign remotely from Wilmington. He could rest. Close aides pushed for events to start in the afternoon, if possible.”

It sounds as though Tapper could have done a better job defending the book if he'd been more familiar with what was actually in it, which may be the real story here -- Thompson wrote it, Tapper was paid for the use of his name.

But the takeaway is that Trump, who has never backed down on his claim that the 2020 election was "stolen", looks a little better on this count every day. "Stolen" means a lot of things, as in "he stole her heart", "she stole the scene", or "for $5 it was a steal". Was the 2020 election "stolen"? You betcha.

In any case, so far, the modified limited hangout strategy hasn't worked very well.

What Happened To Obama?

As a followup to my last post, where I asked why nobody seems to think Nancy Pelosi was running the country under Biden when she clearly was, I've got another puzzle: the conventional wisdom after Obama left office and bought a house in Washington was that he was just going to keep on running the country from there, rather than the White House. But the biggest news out of that new house, ever, had nothing to do with Obama:

The leafy Kalorama neighborhood normally wakes to the soft whir of motorcades, not the crack of knuckles. Yet in the predawn darkness of Wednesday, May 21, two members of the Secret Service’s Uniformed Division allegedly dispensed with protocol and settled a staffing dispute with fists outside the home of America’s forty‑fourth president. Sources inside the agency tell USA Herald the quarrel began when Officer A—whose name has not been officially released—waited nearly thirty minutes past her scheduled relief. When Officer B finally arrived, a verbal barrage escalated; Officer A keyed her encrypted handset and barked, “Send a supervisor immediately before I whoop this girl’s a**.” The handset was recording, as required under Secret Service policy, preserving a snippet of raw rage now ricocheting across X.

The same link then brought up a previous, similar episode:

In April 2024, agent Herczeg, then assigned to Vice President Kamala Harris’s protective detail, melted down in the Joint Base Andrews terminal. According to an internal incident report later leaked to Congress, Herczeg shoved her superior, hurled menstrual pads at colleagues, seized a fellow agent’s cell phone, and attempted to delete personal applications before three officers wrestled her to the floor and removed her firearm. She was handcuffed and transported by ambulance for psychiatric evaluation.

It's hard to avoid thinking the quality of Secret Service personnel quickly diminishes outside the presidential detail, and this suggests Obama as just one mere ex-president among several is no longer surrounded by the crème de la crème. And lately, his wife has been in the news more than he has:

Even after leaving the White House eight years ago, Michelle Obama continues to complain about how difficult it was to follow Barack as he rose to the top of the national hierarchy, as quoted in a report by The NY Post.

. . . Given that the Obamas have hardly been spotted together for months, Michelle Obama's grievances raise concerns about the state of their marriage.

Obama's role in the 2024 nomination process gives an idea of how far he was from any effecctive influence among Democrats:

How Obama handled the implosion of Joe Biden is a study in political malpractice. In interviews over their new book, “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” authors Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen paint a poor picture of the former president.

According to Parnes and Allen, Obama mounted a campaign to shunt Kamala Harris aside in some ersatz quickie primary, which he probably thought he could control. But there’s opinion and there’s political reality. The reality is and was (recognized far in advance) that pushing Harris aside was always a fool’s errand.

From the day she became vice president, Harris was the prohibitive favorite to be the next nominee. The idea that any VP could be passed over — much less the first black woman to serve as VP — was crazy. Only if Harris was going to meekly accept the lofty judgement of Obama would that work, and why would she do that?

Yes, she’s not that great a politician. But there are not exactly a ton of all-stars in the Democratic Party. According to Parnes and Allen, Obama was thinking that the next ticket should be Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. He seemed to think that these little-experienced, unfamiliar pols were going to blitz Harris and grab the nomination.

The fact that the mediocre Harris easily sunk this buffoonish plan shows how truly weak it was.

Obama advisers have also fallen into disrepute:

David Plouffe, long hailed as the brilliant architect of Obama’s 2008 victory, served in a key role in Harris’ campaign and is now among those tagged with a devastating defeat.

“The shine’s off Plouffe now. He was the golden boy,” [Democrat megadonor John] Morgan said. “Now he’s just an old broken-down boy, who lost. Big.”

. . . DNC Finance Chair Chris Korge lashed out at Plouffe in an interview with NBC News last week, saying he and other Obama alums shared the blame, chiding them as the “so-called gurus.”

“It’s time to re-evaluate the use of consultants and bring in new forward-looking people,” Korge also said in the interview. “The old Obama playbook no longer works.”

On one hand, we've been asking who really ran the country under Biden -- but it might be worthwhile also to raise the question of who really ran it under Obama. And was someone like David Plouffe a brilliant strategist, or did Obama just get lucky with two terrible Republican opponents? And it's looking less and less as if Obama was the "transformative" president he announced he would be. Charles R Kesler wrote in 2015:

He intended to be a president who made a big difference. “Let us transform this nation,” he demanded in 2007. “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” he proclaimed as Election Day approached in 2008. With a year and a half to go, Obama knows (he admitted as much to the New Yorker, his favorite confessional) that a fundamental transformation will not happen on his watch. But he remains hopeful that it is underway and will continue long after his presidency.

He isn't fading as badly as Biden, but he's definitely fading. And it's hard to argue that he was ever in a position to run the country from his Kalorama mansion.

"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.

That's Not A Bug -- It's A Feature!

One of the frequentlly cited illustrations of Joe's cognitive decline is this story from Speaker Mike Johnson:

An addled Biden insisted to the Louisiana lawmaker that he never issued the order to freeze new liquid natural gas export permits — even though he signed off on it less than a month earlier.

Johnson told the Free Press’ Bari Weiss he didn’t believe Biden was lying, but was left to believe the then-81-year-old leader “genuinely didn’t know what he had signed.”

The troubling encounter happened in the Oval Office in early 2024, when the two met to discuss the latest aid package for Ukraine.

Afterwards, Johnson asked Biden why he had inked an executive order pausing new permits for American liquid natural gas export to European allies — a crucial issue for his constituents in the Bayou State, which in 2023, handled 61% of the nation’s LNG exports, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

“Why would you do that? Cause you understand we just talked about Ukraine, you understand you are fueling Vladimir Putin’s war machine, because they gotta get their gas from him,” Johnson said he told Biden.

Biden was stunned, Johnson said.

“I didn’t do that,” the president said, according to Johnson.

“Sir, you paused it, I know. I have the export terminals in my state. I talked to those people in my state, I’ve talked to those people this morning, this is doing massive damage to our economy, national security,” Johnson said he told the commander-in-chief.

Biden continued to deny that he froze the exports — and then remembered he signed the executive order, which he said was simply to study the effects of the fuel.

“I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, ‘We are in serious trouble—who is running the country?’” Johnson said.

“Like, I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know,” he said.

Trump himself has also advanced the theory that Joe didn't know what he was signing:

In a rare, if backhanded, defense of his predecessor Tuesday night, Trump posted on Truth Social that Biden was never a true advocate for “open borders” before entering the White House, and implied that others around him must have pushed the agenda.

Trump also repeated a theory, without offering evidence, that Biden’s inner circle were aware he was “cognitively impaired” while in office and used that to “take over the autopen,” a device that replicates a person’s signature, allowing presidents to sign off on multiple bills and pieces of legislation.

. . . “The Joe Biden that everybody knew would never allow drug dealers, gang members, and the mentally insane to come into our Country totally unchecked and unvetted. All anyone has to do is look up his record. Something very severe should happen to these Treasonous Thugs that wanted to destroy our Country, but couldn’t, because I came along.”

Whether Joe's brain was actually fried in these cases is beside the point: his opponents are trying to hold him to account for what might be characterized as prevarications or inconsistences, and he's dodging them. I went looking for similar cases from Bill Clinton. a master of the political dodge:

Clinton faces a new challenge when the Wall Street Journal claims that during the Vietnam War, Clinton manipulated the system to avoid the draft. Clinton says that he did not dodge the draft and did nothing wrong. The next week on "Nightline" Ted Koppel reads to the nation a letter written by Bill Clinton to Colonel Eugene Holmes, director of the University of Arkansas ROTC program in 1969. In the letter Clinton thanks the colonel for saving him from the draft and outlines his beliefs about the war.

. . . News breaks that President Clinton may have had a sexual relationship with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. On PBS's "NewsHour" program, Clinton tells Jim Lehrer, "There is not a sexual relationship." The media wonders whether the president was using verb tense to be evasive. In a press conference on January 26th, Clinton makes a comment that will be repeated for the rest of his presidency. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

. . . Bill Clinton testifies to the grand jury in the White House. Later this same day, he makes a televised address to the nation in which he admits having had an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

. . . At the White House prayer breakfast, an apologetic Clinton tells the audience, "I don't think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned." That afternoon, the report of the Independent Counsel, commonly referred to as the Starr Report, is released to the public. On September 21, videotape of Clinton's grand jury testimony is released.

The difference between Clinton and Biden is mostly in style, not in intent. Caught in prevarications and inconsistencies, Clinton became Saturday night Bill-Sunday morning William, full of overdramatized, lip-biting repentance. Caught in the same thing, Biden's reaction is to plead senility, something Special Counsel Robert Hur recognized when he said Joe would come off to a jury as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”. But this isn't a new strategy:

Dubbed "The Oddfather" and "The Enigma in the Bathrobe" by the media, [Mafia boss Vincent] Gigante often wandered the streets of Greenwich Village in his bathrobe and slippers, mumbling incoherently to himself. He was indicted on federal racketeering charges in 1990, but was determined to be mentally unfit to stand trial. In 1997, he was tried and convicted of racketeering and conspiracy, and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Facing obstruction of justice charges in 2003, he pleaded guilty and admitted that his supposed insanity was an elaborate effort to avoid prosecution, as he was sentenced to an additional three years in prison.

This defense has been used in other high-profile trials, such as those of Robert Durst, the New York real estate heir accused of several murders, who used cancer diagnoses and mental health issues to delay and confuse his trials, or Joseph James DeAngelo, the so-called East Area Rapist, who allegedly feigned frailty and senility during investigation and trial for at least 13 murders, 51 rapes, and 120 burglaries across California between 1974 and 1986.

In Biden's case, confronted with any number of prevarications or inconsistencies, he's been able to avoid any direct accountability by potentially feigning cognitive decline. "I didn't sign that, I don't remember that." If you're Bill Clinton, that won't wash, you're too young and visibly alert. If you're Joe, you're in cognitive decline, you've just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, it will sorta-kinda work.

This strikes me as the dilemma the Pelosi Democrats face. Speaker Emerita Pelosi rose to become the most powerful Democrat through a strategy of appeasing the party's far left and convincing the centrists to go along. Joe Biden was the culmination of this srategy. He wanted above all to be president, policy was a distant second, although he'd acquired a reputation as a moderate, which the party was able to exploit in the 2020 election. But whatever the impression, he was going to appease the far left in concert with Nancy Pelosi, and if he was called on it, the easiest dodge would be he'd gone soft in the head.

The problem is that this is a terminal strategy. As a criminal defense, if it works at all, it works because the defendant is visibly old and feeble enough to convince judges and juries that it's true, which means you probably don't have much time left, in prison or out of it. As a political defense, it didn't work in Biden's case; age, frailty, and illness might gain sympathy from a jury, but the electorate was going to vote him out.

The problem for the Democrats is that Joe was the last unifying figure who could draw a beard of respectability over the party's appeasement of the far left. His technique was to feign senility, or at least to know enough to fall back on actual senility when it was convenient. But whichever it was, the originator of the strategy was Biden himself.

Trying to hold the Biden inner circle accountable is going to miss the point. The usual suspects, Ron Klain, Anita Dunn, Bob Bauer, Anthony Bernal, Tom Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Hunter, and Dr Jill, were all beneficiaries of Joe's reflected glory, and they were all doing what they were told.

The investigations of the Biden inner circle won't tell us much, not least because these people are neither smart nor competent at what they do. The problem for Biden is that the frailty-and-illness defense has a built-in expiration date, which looks like it's quickly approaching.

Let's Revisit Joe's July 17, 2024 "COVID Diagnosis"

Yesterday I briefly referred to the July 17, 2024 health episode in Las Vegas that brought about a sudden change in Joe's schedule and a swift return via Air Force One to his Rehoboth Beach house. The White House's version, then and afterward, was that there was no medical emerency, Joe had simply tested positive for COVID, as outlined in the exchange embedded above between Fox reporter Peter Doocy and Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Thursday, July 18:

Peter Doocy: There's this new Las Vegas police radio traffic that's published by The Daily Beast where officers were racing to secure a hospital emergency room on July 17th. They were under the impression thwt President Biden was having a medical enmergency. What was It?

Karine Jean-Pierre: He was not. As you know, the president when we were in Vegas tested positive for COVID. We let you all know, and then we flew back here. Outside of that, there was no medical emergency. People are still testing positive for COVID, but because of this president, he was able to put forth a comprehensive, a comprehensive way to move forward with this pandemic, and now we have vaccines. . .

In light of the new revelation that Joe has stage 4 prostate cancer, it's worth delving again into the reports of his medical episode in Las Vegas on July 17 and putting it into the context of his withdrawal from the presidential race less than a week later, while he was still recovering from whatever it was in Rehoboth the following weekend. Here is one report of a hospital being placed on alert in connection with the episode:

A Las Vegas hospital was on standby after being alerted about a possible medical issue with President Joe Biden Wednesday afternoon while he was visiting Southern Nevada.

Law enforcement and medical teams gathered outside the University Medical Center trauma room entrance on Wellness Way in case the President of the United States arrived after he canceled an appearance at the Unidos US Convention in Las Vegas due to testing positive for COVID-19.

. . . "I'm happy that commander-in-chief is safe and doing well," Mason Van Houweling, CEO of UMC, said. "We prepare the perimeter set, lots of security measures, lots of training with our staff."

Due to the hospital being the only Level 1 Trauma Center in Nevada, that's where the president will go during a medical emergency.

Van Houweling said the hospital was alerted around 2:15 p.m. about a possible medical issue with the president.

The UK Daily Mail reported the actual radio traffic mentioned by Peter Doocy in his question to Karine Jean-Pierre:

[P]olice recordings from July 17th, obtained by DailyMail.com, show the hospital was ready to receive the president as law enforcement noted: 'POTUS is 421,' which is police code for a sick or injured person.

'For everyone on the radio. Right now POTUS is 421. He's being seen so we're kind of waiting to see how this is shaping out,' the dispatcher said. 'He's 421 right now. We're just trying to figure out what is going on and we're going to go from there.'

. . . Calling for 'any available units to come down to Valley Hospital,' a police officer says on the recording.

'I have four units,' is a response.

'That's not enough,' the dispatcher responds.

Additional officers were asked to meet at the 'Valley Hospital ER parking lot.'

'We're going to meet behind the ER entrances, where the ambulances go. There's a little cul-du-sac back there,' is the order given.

At the time of the episode, Biden was at the Lindo Michoacan restaurant, where he greeted patrons and conducted a radio interview -- not the sort of place you'd get COVID test results. But then something happened, about which we've never been told. The Daily Mail continues,

But then he stayed for another 90 minutes. His next event - speaking at UnidosUS - was canceled.

From about 1:40 pm PT - when Biden wrapped his radio interview - to shortly after 3 pm - when the motorcade left, it was unclear why the president remained inside the restaurant.

Mason Van Houweling, CEO of the hospital, told local media they was alerted around 2:15 p.m. about a possible medical issue with the president.

Apparently while the Biden party was still at the restaurant, a decision was made not to go to the hospital, but to return immediately to Rehoboth Beach, and the motorcade, including reporters, went to the airport. Another Daily Mail story carries an account from a reporter on the return flight:

Air Force One was flying so fast that I was shaking in my seat.

Less than 30 minutes ago, my colleagues in the White House press corps and I had received word – just before the rest of the world – that President Biden had been diagnosed with COVID.

Now we were joining him on a mad rush back from Las Vegas to the Bidens' Rehoboth Beach getaway in Delaware.

Moments after fastening my seatbelt, the massive engines of the presidential Boeing 747 roared to life.

The flight attendants, in their custom blue uniforms, stumbled in the aisles as the jet's nose pointed skyward.

Tray tables shook. Reporters held up their water glasses so they wouldn't spill.

A doctor always travels with the President, but no word came on the type of care he was receiving or how ill he was.

Twice, we asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who was also onboard, to give us an update on Biden's condition.

Twice, we were denied.

Even if she had spoken to us, there would have been no way to know what was coming.

That the president wouldn't be seen again in public for nearly a week.

The reporter also described the scene at the Lindo Michoacan restaurant when Joe arrived for his visit:

Biden would enter through the kitchen, we were told. Photographers had their cameras ready, wanting to capture a stylish photo of the president framed in the glass window of the door between the kitchen and dining room.

But suddenly, the Secret Service covered the window with a towel.

'Hey,' we yelled at the agents. But they didn't listen. Why they wanted to block that specific shot, when Biden would be pictured moments later in the dining room regardless, we still don't know.

When he finally stepped through the door, his appearance was shocking.

He looked pale, weak, exhausted and shuffled slowly across the room.

'He looks bad,' one reporter muttered.

The scene at his arrival at Dover Air Force Base later that night was similar:

Touching down, we rushed into position once more on the tarmac to watch the president deplane. And as the steps of Air Force One were lowered, we waited anxiously under the wing.

He began his exit at 10:29pm (EST), still looking pale and frail. He stepped down gingerly, then paused and waved.

Half way down, and for a few seconds, he stared off into space, until a Secret Service agent gently tapped his shoulder.

The touch seemed to rouse him and he continued down, appearing so unsteady that I was worried he would fall.

But he sluggishly made it to his SUV and shakily climbed inside for the hour-long ride to Rehoboth.

And this is the sum total of what we know, other than Ms Jean-Pierre insisting that none of it actually happened. I'm a medical layman and can draw no conclusions, except to note that the 90-minute delay before leaving the Lindo Michoacan restaurant after alerting the hospital must certainly have involved anxiety about the risks of putting Joe in a hospital where the doctors weren't under White House control. We don't know directly, but I think we csn assume that the White House physician, Dr Kevin O'Connor, a member of the Biden inner circle and Joe's personal doctor since 2009, was with the party and would want to be in charge.

The problem would be, however, that O'Connor would not have had hospital privileges at Valley Hospital, which would mean that Joe's diagnosis and treatment would be in the hands of hospital staff and the hospital's public relations department, not O'Connor and the White House press staff. O'Connor, as I understand this, could basically remain in the room, answer questions, and offer background information and advice, but it would be Valley Hospital doctors and nurses who would be examining and treating Joe, with the hospital determining what news would be released.

Since the news of Joe's prostate cancer came out, my working theory has been that Kevin O'Connor's task was to prevent Joe from being formally diagnosed with anything at all. This is confirmed in the latest Biden press statement:

In a statement to NBC News, Reuters and CBS News on Tuesday, May 20, a spokesperson for the former president, 82, said he received his last Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test in 2014, when he would've been in his early 70s. The spokesperson confirmed that Biden was not diagnosed with cancer until Friday, May 16.

“President Biden’s last known PSA was in 2014. Prior to Friday, President Biden had never been diagnosed with prostate cancer,” the spokesperson said.

This is almnost certainly weasel-worded, up there with Bill Clinton's what the meaning of is is. O'Connor and the Bidens must certainly have recognized that Joe had symptoms consistent with prostate cancer -- as represented by occasional slips of the tongue from brother Frank and Joe himself -- but no doctor had formally diagnosed it, and the White House physician's job was to make sure no reputable doctor ever got close enough to make a diagnosis.

This would also apply to the symptoms of dementia, possible ministrokes, or even Dr Drew Pinsky's suggestion that there's something like Parkinson's involved. If no doctor makes a formal diagnosis, Joe's in perfect health. But if he goes to Valley Hospital, reputable doctors outside White House control are going to insist on taking blood pressure, oxygen saturation, EKG, CAT scans, MRI, and the whole game will be up -- or if O'Connor refuses to let them do it, the whole game will be up. Best hop on Air Force One and bundle Joe back to Rehoboth Beach.

Which brings me to the inevitable question: the calls with Schumer, Pelosi, Jeffries, and so forth started within days of Joe's return to Rehoboth Beach. We've been told they were about the polls. What was really said? I'll bet the calls were much more about Joe's medical condition than the state of the polls.

Way Too Many Unanswered Questions

There are too many unanswered questions about Joe Biden's presidential peregrinations: we saw yesterday, for instance, that Barack Obama prevailed on Joe not to run in 2016. Some sources claim that Obama had a private deal with Hillary that she would get the nomination that year, while yesterday's version was that Obama simply thought Joe wasn't up to it, especially after Beau's death. Certainly both could be true, and as information about Joe's true health after 2015 gradually leaks out, it seems entirely possible that Obama knew things we didn't. He was the president, after all.

We also know that after the June 2024 debate, Nancy Pelosi was able to force Joe to withdraw from the race. The reason must certainly be not that she or anyone else at that level was at all surprised by Joe's performance, but instead that the charade could no longer be maintained. This is just another way of saying that senior Democrats were forced to acknowledge what they'd known more or less since Joe's time as vice president, likely not that he was just soft in the head, but that he was sick with cancer and quite possibly Parkinson's as well.

Nor should we neglect, in the context of the latest revelations, the July 17, 2024 health episode that Joe allegedly suffered in Las Vegas, only days after the Butler assassination attempt on Trump. Snopes couldn't quite debunk this, despite trying:

In the months leading up to the November 2024 U.S. presidential election, an online rumor claimed U.S. President Joe Biden suffered a serious, undisclosed medical emergency during his stay in Las Vegas between July 15 and 17.

The timeline for this rumor began on July 17, when White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announced a COVID-19 diagnosis for Biden — the reason given for why the White House cut his trip short and canceled one of his planned speeches in Las Vegas.

Four days later, on July 21, Biden announced he would drop his reelection bid — a U.S. presidential decision not seen in decades.

. . . The rumor about Biden suffering an undisclosed medical emergency originated the following day — July 22 — on the X account for Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA. Kirk's post featured mentions of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, the U.S. Secret Service, University Medical Center Southern Nevada and the White House.

By email we contacted Kirk and all four of the aforementioned organizations or institutions named in the post but did not receive any details in response within several hours. The Secret Service simply responded, "We refer you to White House communication for this query."

So, given that both Obama and Pelosi demonstrably had the veto power over a Joe Biden candidacy, why did they allow him to run in 2020, much less 2024? We know almost nothing about any decision making process on this issue, except that we're beginning to learn that as of 2023, contingency planning had begun for Biden's death in office:

Democratic officials staged “hush-hush talks” to plan for Joe Biden’s withdrawal as the party’s presidential nominee as early as 2023, says a new book.

Citing two unnamed sources, authors Jonathan Allen’s and Amie Parnes’s account [in Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House] adds another twist to the torturous saga over the then president’s age and fitness that was not resolved until a disastrous debate against Donald Trump precipitated his exit in July 2024.

More startlingly still, the book also reports that aides to Kamala Harris, the vice-president who assumed the nomination then lost to Trump, “strategized around the possibility that Biden might die in office”.

Such planning was led by Jamal Simmons, Harris’s White House communications director, Parnes and Allen report, and went as far as the drawing up of a “death-pool roster” of federal judges who might swear Harris in.

Simmons “never told the vice president about the death-pool roster before leaving her camp in January 2023,” the authors write, “but he advised colleagues that he should be notified immediately if something happened to Biden, because he had worked out an entire communications strategy. And he left the spreadsheet with another Harris aide.”

Nevertheless, even with these behind-the-scenes concerns, Biden was somehow able to convince the people who could have vetoed a 2024 candidacy that he should run, despite the fact that he'd sold himself to those same people in 2020 as a one-termer:

President Biden's insistence on staying in the 2024 race has seemingly defied his own pledge to serve as a transitional president to a younger generation of Democratic leaders.

. . . Biden's disastrous debate performance and his team's handling of the fallout have churned anxiety among Democrats and angered White House and campaign staff as questions swirl about whether he should step aside.

. . . Biden acknowledged during an interview with BET News that aired July 17 that he had originally run for president as a "transitional candidate" and that he had expected to "pass it on to somebody else."

What changed? A possible answer has been suggested by Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers in The Drill Down podcast:

As Schweizer and Eggers note, the Democratic hierarchy realized early in Biden’s term that Harris was inadequate and would lose to virtually any Republican candidate, let alone the juggernaut of another Trump candidacy.

Democrats had realized Biden “would have to run for a second term because of the fear that Harris could not win a race against Donald Trump or against any Republican,” Schweizer says. The authors of The Truce “write that ‘Democrat after Democrat we interviewed, including members of Biden and Harris’s own teams, said Kamala’s not ready for prime time. She ain’t ready for this.’ They also said she has a lack of discipline, lack of focus or decisiveness.”

Some, he notes, even called her a “shallow narcissist.”

“It’s crazy to think that among the legacies of the summer of BLM and George Floyd is that that’s what locks in Kamala Harris’s position as the vice-presidential nominee, even though Joe Biden wanted to go in a different direction,” says Eggers. “The sort of identity politics that they want to impose on the rest of us is what ends up really biting them in the end.”

Nevertheless, it was those same "centrist" party leaders who ensured that potential centrist candidates like Dean Phillips and Robert Kennedy Jr couldn't be put on enough primary ballots to challenge the 2024 Biden-Harris ticket. They were also able to veto even the prospect of a quasi-prmary process after Joe withdrew, settling on Harris as the consensus choice. And the cabal that was in charge was in fact fully prepared for Harris to succeed to the presidency should Joe be unable to continue:

Was Joe Biden really unaware that he had metastatic prostate cancer and unlikely to survive when his team announced his reelection?

Or is it more likely the plan was for Joe Biden to win in 2024, then reveal the cancer, step down and Kamala Harris would be installed.

The problem that cropped up in their ‘best laid plans’ was not the cancer in 2024, but rather the scale of the cognitive decline becoming more obvious…. and that led to a quick change in approach.

Everyone in DC knew.

No one in Washington DC did not know.

So several things had to change to bring us to the state of affairs in July 2024: Obama had to withdraw his 2016 opposition to Joe running in 2020. Then Obama-Pelosi had to decide it was OK for Joe to run again in 2024, when he'd originally sold himself on the basis he wouldn't -- and this against the backdrop of the certainty that he wouldn't live out a second term, if indeed he could even finish his first. They were finally forced to change their minds only when they had to give up the whole game -- but then, couldn't they also have forced Joe to step down as president and let Kamala succeed to the office before the convention? Why didn't they?

There are still too many questions.

"SUBPOENA BIDEN'S DOCTOR!"

🚨 #BREAKING: The Biden team says the last time Joe Biden received a PSA test for prostate cancer was 2014

Absolute BULLSHT, and even CNN is calling it out!

"He was President of the United States and didn't get tested? I find this very surprising."

SUBPOENA BIDEN'S DOCTOR! pic.twitter.com/ImrPm7Wj1t

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) May 20, 2025

All I can say to that is good luck.

The real meat here that goes to the story arc is at the top of the tweet, "The Biden team says the last time Joe Biden received a PSA test for prostate cancer was 2014." Let's recall that for days, oncologists nad urologists have been saying on the news that the PSA test is "the gold standard in prostate cancer screening". On Megyn Kelly's podcast, urologist Dr David Samadi said "it is either medical malpractice or a lie that the former president did not know he had cancer".

But let's look at the timeline. We know, especially from various references on Hunter's laptop, that at least as of early 2015, Joe was weighing a run for president in 2016, but Barack Obama put that idea to rest later in the year, at least after Beau's death on May 30. The Hill reported in 2019,

Former President Obama in 2015 pushed former Vice President Joe Biden not to run for president in 2015, The New York Times reported Sunday.

According to the Times, Obama “gently pressed” Biden on his 2016 presidential ambitions over several weeks. He then ultimately had a strategist deliver a discouraging assessment to Biden of his odds in the race against then-front runner Hillary Clinton.

“The president was not encouraging,” Biden later said, according to the Times.

Obama believed at the time that Clinton, who would become the Democratic presidential nominee and lose to President Trump in the general election, had the best chance to win, according to the Times. Obama also didn’t think Biden was in the right state of mind to campaign for president following the death of his son, Beau, the newspaper reported.

Nevertheless, we now hear that, for whatever reason, Joe's doctor stopped doing PSA tests the prior year. It's hard to avoid thinking the numbers were already concerning, even for a 2016 presidential run, and if Joe decided, which he must have done, that he'd run in 2020 instead, there'd be only a downside to resuming them. But Joe would have to convince doctor after doctor not to run PSA tests, right, when it would be somethng verging on malpractice not to run them? Well, no. Joe has had the same doctor ever since he started as vice president in 2009:

Dr. Kevin O’Connor served as the 82-year-old’s official physician during his White House stint — and repeatedly insisted for years that Biden was in top mental shape despite his obvious cognitive decline.

O’Connor worked with Biden during his vice presidency, too.

After more than two decades in the Army, O’Connor joined the White House Medical Unit under then-President George W. Bush. He was only supposed to serve six months with the new vice president, Biden, but ended up staying on for years.

“That didn’t work out and, so, I ended up doing the whole eight years with him,” O’Connor joked in a rare 2023 interview with the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine.

He retired when Obama and Biden left office, but remained on as Biden’s personal physician. He was brought back as the top White House doctor when Biden was elected president.

The link continues,

Critics have, in the past, criticized the close relationship between the doctor and former prez — with Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) telling The Post just last month that “he’s part of the Biden family.”

“He would do or say anything to cover up and protect that family, regardless of what it meant professionally for him,” Jackson said at the time.

President Trump, for his part, honed in on O’Connor’s prior positive health assessments just after the cancer diagnosis came to light.

. . . “I think someone is going to have to speak to his doctor.”

This seems to be a pattern: Joe discovered during his time as vice president which people he could trust and brought them with him, or back into the fold, once he became president. Another was his Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle:

In the wake of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, the U.S. Secret Service has faced mounting scrutiny for its failure to prevent the attack.

Much of the criticism has been aimed at the agency's director, Kimberly Cheatle. Cheatle, who was appointed to the role by President Joe Biden in 2022, had previously been the senior director in global security at PepsiCo.

Prior to her time at PepsiCo, she had served with the Secret Service for more than 25 years, including on Biden's security detail while he was vice president.

. . . "When Kim served on my security detail when I was Vice President, we came to trust her judgement and counsel," Biden said. "She is a distinguished law enforcement professional with exceptional leadership skills, and was easily the best choice to lead the agency at a critical moment for the Secret Service."

Cheatle resigned in disgrace a little over a week after the Butler assassination attempt. There seems to be an impression, rightly or wrongly, that Joe could trust her to be competent when it involved protecting Joe's secrets but incompetent when it really counted. But back to why Joe needed Dr O'Connor:

A top Parkinson’s disease specialist held a meeting with President Joe Biden’s physician at the White House earlier this year, according to records, though the circumstances of the meeting are unclear.

Dr. Kevin Cannard, a neurologist at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, met with White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor at the White House in mid-January, according to White House visitor logs.

Cannard has visited the White House three times this year, according to the visitor logs: A January 17 meeting with O’Connor, and with another staffer on January 26 and March 28. Cannard has visited the White House at least eight times over the past year, according to the logs, beginning late July 2023 and ending with the March 28 meeting. Only the January 17 meeting lists O’Connor as the person who was visited.

O’Connor took the unusual step Monday night of releasing a letter offering some details about Cannard’s visits to the White House, following days of speculation about the president’s health, writing that “President Biden has not seen a neurologist outside of his annual physical.”

This was briefly picked up by the media after Biden's June 2024 debate performance, but so far, only Dr Drew Pinsky has raised the issue in the context of Joe's recent diagnosis, on the Viva Frei podcast below:

At 8:29:

If you have someone who's already Parkinsonian, which he was, that's not a debatable point, any medical student looking at a video of Joe Biden three years ago, if they could not diagnose Parkinsonism, they would be remediated. It's, it's, look, if I saw a picture of a rash I could tell you wnat it's likely to be, same thing is true in certain neurological conditions, you look at the video the way you would look at them across the room, it's the same thing. And Parkinsonism is what he has. Why does he have it? They never told us.

According to the Cleveland Clinic,

Parkinsonism is an umbrella term that refers to brain conditions that cause slowed movements, rigidity (stiffness) and tremors. These conditions can happen for many reasons, including genetic mutations, reactions to medications and infections.

Parkinsonism refers to several conditions — including Parkinson’s disease — that have similar symptoms and features. However, Parkinson’s disease makes up about 80% of all cases of parkinsonism, making it the most common form by far.

Parkinson's may also be a cause of Joe's generally observed "cognitive decline". According to the Alzheimer's Association:

Parkinson’s disease dementia is a decline in thinking and reasoning skills that develops in some people living with Parkinson’s at least a year after diagnosis. The brain changes caused by Parkinson’s disease begin in a region that plays a key role in movement, leading to early symptoms that include tremors and shakiness, muscle stiffness, a shuffling step, stooped posture, difficulty initiating movement and lack of facial expression.

It's hard to avoid thinking that Dr O'Connor was in his position as White House Physician specifically to prevent any formal diagnoses of dementia, prostate cancer, or even Parkinson's, and to discredit even informed questions about such conditions. That conditions like Stage 4 cancer or Parkinson's are incurable would inevitably raise the question of whether Joe was fit for office -- and in fact, if the public had been aware of them in 2020, it might well have changed the outcome of the election.

If nothing else, Joe's 2020 basement campaign was likely intended to prevent his medical conditions, which must have existed at the time, from coming to light.

But let's ask what might happen if Dr O'Connor is subpoenaed, per the demand in the tweet above. He'll likely cite medical confidentiality as a reason not to answer questions, but if it comes to that, he can even invoke the Fifth Amendment. I'm by no means sure we'll ever get good answers to necessary questions, at least from Dr O'Connor. Nor will we get them from Dr Jill, Hunter, or anyone else in the family.