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.