The 25th Amendment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or this:

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

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

Or this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) June 28, 2024

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

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

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

This Morning's Polls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, if the shoe fits, wear it.

Real Clear Politics Changes The "Battlegrounds"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Shapes The Battlefield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But you know what wins? Calm and tough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Think I've Figured It Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That Brilliant PoliticalTactician Dr Jill Is Calling The Shots

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

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

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

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

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

One would assume wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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