It is no longer a matter for debate that Joe Biden was forced by his party to abandon his 2024 re-election bid. Since July 21, the day he announced his decision to quit the campaign for a second term, the commander-in-chief has appeared to be on ceremonial duty only – when he’s not on retreat (or should that be in retreat?) at his Delaware home. Who’s really making the decisions at the White House right now – and from now until January 20, 2025 – is anyone’s guess. Americans should find that pretty terrifying.
According to reports from Politico, based on comments from “three people familiar with Biden’s thinking who are not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations,” the chief executive is resentful that he was pushed out by two senior party figures. They would be former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Biden is allegedly also disappointed that his old boss, Barack Obama, didn’t tell him face-to-face that he shouldn’t run for another four years in the White House.
The Democratic National Convention starts on August 19, and Biden will deliver a speech that evening. Politico Playbook reports that he “won’t be sticking around for the rest of the week’s festivities.” This would seem like a clear indication there’s some bad blood – and certainly a sign that the party is eager to move on from the Biden era. It is true that he is still the sitting president and should, in theory, have more pressing matters to attend to than hanging around at his party’s convention. Still, the opening-night speech suggests party bigwigs are eager to give him a hearty “well done and thanks for trying” – with a standing ovation – then shove him out the door so they can get down to the business of hyping everybody up for Kamala Harris and the November election.
A Very Un-Democratic White House
The whole sorry affair has been a huge embarrassment for the party that claims to be a defender of democracy. They ousted a sitting president who had already romped to victory in the 2024 primaries and replaced him with Harris, who suspended her 2020 presidential campaign before the Democratic Party primaries even began. Has the right to participate in the democratic process not been extend to primary voters in this cycle?
Still, Joe Biden is president for another five months, and it seems likely he will attempt to make an impression during that time – even though it is reasonable to assume the rest of the party would rather he keep as low a profile as possible. He may have ended his re-election bid – almost certainly under duress – but he hasn’t yet quit embarrassing himself in public. On August 13, he delivered remarks at a cancer event, during which he touted an effort to “cut American cancer deaths in half by 2020,” before haltingly correcting himself. Just a couple of days before that – still less than a month after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump – Biden, during an interview, described the former president and 2024 GOP nominee as “a genuine danger to American security.” Trump stood accused of inciting political violence for saying considerably less – and whether either president actually meant to hardly seemed to matter.
At this point, it’s hard to tell who is calling the shots at the White House – if anyone. Since Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump, Democrat politicians and their allies in the media have given up trying to conceal his cognitive decline. It seems likely that, because of this deterioration, someone other than Biden is issuing orders from the West Wing – someone who was never elected president. That’s another blow to democracy, courtesy of the very people who keep telling Americans they are fighting to preserve it.
