Where Do We Go from Here?

Remember Jamaal Bowman? Neither do I; he lost his primary last week, and it was all anyone wanted to gripe (or chortle) about for two days . . . until Joe Biden tottered out onto a debate stage with skin the pallor of fine china and a face sagging like bad Claymation, and entered the annals of public political failure. Now Biden himself, and the future of the race, is all anyone can talk about, and with good reason. It’s not just on the pages of National Review — where the story of Biden’s public implosion has crowded out everything else as ten different writers each dash off their own infuriated “I told you so” pieces like an overcaffeinated Kermit the Frog furiously pounding his typewriter.

It’s happening in the real world as well. I live in deepest blue Chicago and have experienced authentic “guys in my coffee shop are saying” moments about Biden’s collapse every single day since the debate. This morning, a full six days after the debacle, I took my son to a dental appointment; in the other room, two technicians were debating whether Biden should drop out. On the way home, I darted into a 7-Eleven, and the guy changing out the cash register there was arguing with the storeowner about whether Biden would drop out. (I couldn’t help but add my piece this time: “He gawn. It’s gonna be Kamala, I’m pretty certain. Convention will be fun!” They didn’t seem as thrilled at the prospect.) We now head into an unusually protracted July 4 holiday weekend with only one political question on the minds of voters: Where do we go from here?

I am not sure. My instant reaction on Thursday night was that Biden was going to have to step down from the ticket if not the presidency altogether, and that Kamala Harris was the only possible replacement for him for several different reasons. The idea of an “open convention” is a fantasy, and a destructive one at that. (Forget the Democratic Party — which can collapse like the House of Usher for all I care — I’m thinking about my hometown.) Dan McLaughlin explained all the reasons why quite well today, but he neglected to mention one important issue: Only Harris, as Biden’s running mate, can legally use the Biden campaign’s fundraising war-chest.

I suppose I still see it that way: Biden will ultimately be compelled to step back from the race. There is too much time for recrimination left to go before the formal nomination, and the media is currently running a full-court press on Biden to capitulate and step down. (In fact, I agree vigorously with Michael Brendan Dougherty and join him in calling for Biden to resign the presidency immediately: His senility is a grave national-security crisis, not just a domestic political one. As grim as the idea of even six months of President Harris would be, I prefer the nation be run by someone who isn’t hopelessly incapacitated except between the hours of eleven and four.)

But Biden is the decider here, and he’s dug in, barricaded behind a wall of family and close advisers, burrowed into the presidency like an Irish sheep tick sucking out every last drop of blood until it bursts from overserving itself. It was Biden’s life’s dream to be president, after all — no man subjects himself to that much serial humiliation with his prior failed runs unless they truly believe themselves to have a calling — and much like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose mind at least never left her, he would seemingly prefer to die in office if it comes to that. (The other option, as far as he sees it, is joining the man he came to Washington to oppose, Richard Nixon, as one of only two men to resign the presidency.)

Now, with his drug-addled, feloniously inclined son Hunter whispering in his ear and making public appearances by his side, he has broadcast the message loud and clear: “I’m not leaving, and I will die on this hill.” (And of course, this is Joe Biden: When he makes a threat like that, you figure he has half a mind to do it literally.) For three-and-a-half years, we have been assured that Hunter Biden was just some random crackhead living in the White House with “zero professional contact” with the president. Now, of course, he is revealed to be perhaps the president’s closest and most influential adviser. Funny what the media is willing to reveal to us given certain incentives!

What happens next? Will we have candidate Kamala after we return from the holiday break? Does Biden seriously intend to brazen this out? (In that case, lifelong Democratic hack George Stephanopoulos walks into Friday’s taped interview with Biden for ABC’s This Week with the appointed role of mafia hitman: Take Biden out for the good of the family.) Most of all, how does the political media — which knew about Biden’s accelerating dementia and chose to cover it up out of a combination of bias, motivated incuriosity, professional incentive, and outright moral cowardice — ever expect to be trusted again?

It’s true that the media already forfeited almost all of its accumulated legacy credibility during the four years of “Resistance,” and then finished themselves off with their Covid coverage, but we’re about to find out just how low trust in professional news journalism can sink, because it’s not just Republicans who are horrified this time (we suffer no illusions about the media), it’s Democrats: average Democratic voters in the suburbs who don’t obsessively follow politics and who had no idea how bad things were until last Thursday. They’re the ones who have some right to feel betrayed, like they’ve been sold a pig in a poke. Nobody in the mainstream media has any right whatsoever to open their damn mouths. They were complicit and cowardly. And if Biden stays in the race past the point of replacement, you can bet they will forget all they recently “learned.” Their job, whatever its nominal description, requires fealty to the Democratic Party’s electoral line over all else. (Because it’s Trump, you see.)

It is a bit dizzying to see all of your priors confirmed so spectacularly — about Biden, about the fundamental corruption at the heart of the mainstream media — in an emperor-has-no-clothes moment with such high stakes for the nation. Sometimes you almost want to sit back instead of writing, and watch it all unfold like some grotesque kaleidoscope whose every twist reveals ever more complex patterns of rot. So if you will permit me the indulgence, I’d like to end this rant by quoting someone whose thinking on this matter I understand fairly well: myself.

One thing that has been on my mind for weeks now — brooding in the background as a potentially splenetic 4,000-word long-form blurt of acute psychological and civic discomfort — is the decay of President Joe Biden happening before our very eyes during the calendar year 2023. I went back to when I first joined National Review full-time to read what I was saying about it (as recently as February of this year) and to see how my references to it progressed to the present day, and two things were immediately clear: (1) I really had a lot to learn about writing back then, and (2) my concern — beyond partisan politics, just as observation — has been escalating from that time all along, not merely upward in a straight line, but accelerating exponentially. Not because I like Joe Biden, mind you, but because I like America. And when America’s president is currently already bobbing mentally like an untethered buoy out to sea, the idea of a major party renominating him is just an act of civic insanity.

I invite you to read the whole thing, all the way to the end. I imagine it will viscerally sting for you the way it does for me (and I wrote it); every paragraph now reads like the keening wail of a Cassandra rending her garments in horror over a prophecy of doom so obviously clear to her, yet so sneeringly dismissed by her betters. That was September of 2023. We all knew. Ah, but Karine Jean-Pierre assured us just today that Joe Biden is “as sharp as ever.” It occurs to me Jean-Pierre might not even be lying here, only telling a partial truth: He has, in fact, been this bad ever since the day he took office on January 30, 2021.

One month remains until Joe Biden is formally nominated by the Democratic Party. Four months until the election. Six months until the transition of power (if there is one). Four years in office afterward. On this Fourth of July weekend, may God help America.