Perhaps he regards his vice president the way Batman regards his enemies: I won’t kill you . . . but I don’t have to save you from yourself, either.
A quick note: Kamala Harris has had quite the unfortunate week in this final month of the 2024 campaign, and the bad news is that it’s still only Thursday. As Charlie Cooke noted earlier today, the bleak screwball comedy of her desperate, flailing attempt to inject herself into the Hurricane Milton news story has gotten to the point where hilarity curdles into cringe. One wonders if we are witnessing something special with this cartwheeling series of embarrassments, something we would be wise to properly appreciate in the moment while we have the chance: the worst performance yet of a generationally untalented candidate. After this, America understands that Kamala Harris is the last person anyone should be tasking with natural-disaster response; she is her own ongoing natural disaster.
Trump supporters should temper their excitement: Despite all of this, Harris is currently slightly favored to win the election. But if she doesn’t — and it is basically a coin-flip race — once the Left is done burning Harris in effigy, their angry gaze will turn to Joe Biden next, and he will be blamed. Not for his atrocious governing record and vain attempt to retain power, mind you, but rather for his repeated (and notable) failure to support Harris’s campaign messaging at several points throughout the final weeks.
I have already noted a few times here that Biden seems to be popping up at awfully inconvenient moments with notably off-message statements almost tailor-made to be unhelpful to Harris. Harris seeks to distance herself from the Biden administration’s record? Joe Biden goes on The View to tell America that he delegated every single task of the administration to her at times — she owns all of it, in other words. Kamala Harris tries to gin up a fight with Ron DeSantis to juice sagging numbers in the Sunbelt? Biden and DeSantis stage a professional, mutual lovefest via dueling press conferences in which DeSantis points out that Harris has no role to play whatsoever in storm response, and is wasting people’s time by trying to insert herself into the picture for political gain, and Biden pointedly refuses to tell reporters that DeSantis should take Harris’s calls.
Okay, granted that Joe Biden is a bit old these days, which means he’s no longer capable of throwing or tossing anybody anywhere. But let’s just say that this looks for all the world as if Biden is gently placing Kamala Harris underneath the bus and then allowing DeSantis to shift into reverse. Is Biden shivving Harris during hurricane season on purpose? The most obvious answer is that it’s impossible to know, at least right now. The other obvious answer is: I certainly hope so. Biden is the author of his own failure, but it is clear nevertheless that he feels personally betrayed, that he was stabbed in the back and replaced by Harris. So it would not surprise me at all to discover that he regards her the way Batman regards his enemies: I won’t kill you . . . but I don’t have to save you from yourself, either.