On the menu today: This is the last Morning Jolt until Monday, July 8. I hope you have a terrific Independence Day and weekend, but I almost wish we were on the regular publishing schedule, because since the debate, every morning has brought something new and weird and worth discussing. As our Audrey Fahlberg reports, among Democrats, it’s now “knives out” for Joe Biden. The party’s elected officials are teetering on the edge of calling for Kamala Harris to replace Biden, seething that Biden and his family hid his true condition for so long and have thereby put the 2024 election at risk, up and down the ticket.
But Now America Has to Deal with It
It’s not just that Joe Biden had a terrible debate, likely the worst debate performance ever. It’s that despite his team’s insistence that it was just an off night spurred by a cold, Biden and his team have been running a version of the “basement campaign” ever since — with the president reading off teleprompters at rallies, refusing to take questions, spending the weekend at Camp David. Apparently, the president and his top aides have not reached out to concerned Democrats on Capitol Hill.
On Tuesday, President Biden attended a fundraiser at a home in McLean, Va., and offered a new excuse for his abysmal performance on the debate stage:
He noted that in the days before the debate, he made a trip to France for a D-Day commemoration and Italy for Group of Seven summit.
“I wasn’t very smart,” he said. “I decided to travel around the world a couple times, going through I don’t know how many time zones — for real, I think it was 15 time zones. . . . I didn’t listen to my staff. And then I came back and nearly fell asleep onstage. At any rate, that’s no excuse, but it is an explanation.”
The phrase “in the days before the debate” is misleading. President Biden returned from overseas in the early morning hours of June 15. (You can peruse the president’s daily schedule here.) After a short stop at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, Air Force One continued to Los Angeles, where Biden attended a campaign fundraiser at the Peacock Theater hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. By 4:30 p.m. local time June 16, Biden departed Los Angeles to return to the White House.
The debate was at 9 p.m. on June 27.
That’s twelve days after the overseas trip, and eleven days after the Los Angeles trip — closer to two weeks than mere days. This leaves us three options:
- Joe Biden is just grasping for excuses.
- Joe Biden really does suffer from exhausting and debilitating jet lag for weeks after an overseas trip. If this is the case, he should not be president any longer, as he can no longer perform his duties.
- Joe Biden cannot remember how much time passed between the France trip and the debate. If this is the case, he should not be president any longer, as he can no longer perform his duties.
Oh, and Biden spoke at the McLean house for . . . six minutes.
The Biden family’s decision to blame the staff for insufficient debate preparation had its inevitable consequence, with the staff leaking to the New York Times that Biden’s debate preparation had to work around the limited capacities of a man who turns 82 shortly after Election Day:
Mr. Biden was drained enough from the back-to-back trips to Europe that his team cut his planned debate preparation by two days so he could rest at his house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., before joining advisers at Camp David for rehearsals. The preparations, which took place over six days, never started before 11 a.m. and Mr. Biden was given time for an afternoon nap each day, according to a person familiar with the process. [Emphasis added.]
If Biden cannot get going before 11 a.m. and requires an afternoon nap each day, he should not be president any longer, as he can no longer perform his duties. (Are you noticing a recurring pattern here?)
Also note this curious section of the Times article:
White House officials have said the president is in excellent shape and that his debate performance, while disappointing, was an aberration. Kevin C. O’Connor, the White House physician, said as recently as February that despite minor ailments like sleep apnea and peripheral neuropathy in his feet, the president was “fit for duty.” He said tests had turned up “no findings which would be consistent with” Parkinson’s disease. The White House has declined to make Dr. O’Connor available for questions and did not respond to detailed health questions from The New York Times earlier this year.
Responding to questions from The New York Times, Mr. Bates, the White House spokesman, said Tuesday that Dr. O’Connor had found no reason to re-evaluate Mr. Biden for Parkinson’s disease and that he showed no signs of Parkinson’s and had never taken Levodopa or other drugs for that condition.
Are we supposed to read something between the lines here? Here’s Vinson Cunningham, writing in the New Yorker, about Biden’s facial expressions during the debate:
Of course, it’s possible, given Biden’s age, that there is some simple explanation for his facial trouble. Some observers mentioned “masked face,” a symptom of Parkinson’s characterized by decreased facial expressiveness. But, absent a diagnosis, we are left with a possible fate: everybody knows by now that Biden’s performance has damaged his prospects against Trump, perhaps irrevocably.
At this point, we have no evidence that President Biden has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. We haven’t seen accounts of Biden having a tremor in his limbs. The other common symptoms of Parkinson’s disease — stiffness, slurred speech, not blinking for long periods, impaired balance — are also fairly common among octogenarians and those suffering from other ailments. But it’s odd how writers who are sympathetic to Biden keep bringing up Parkinson’s.
Joe Biden suffered two brain aneurysms back in the late 1980s, as well as a blood clot in his lung. But by all accounts, Biden was back to his usual self, with no discernible impairment, within weeks. Medical researchers are still studying the long-term effects of brain aneurysms, but the long-term consequences of a ruptured brain aneurysm can include fatigue, speech difficulties, impaired short-term memory, perception changes, an inability to concentrate, and personality and behavioral changes.
Biden will sit down for an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Friday. (Another sign that Biden is not well, in that presidents rarely avoid on-camera interviews for more than a week after a debate.)
Over in that other place I write for, I make an argument I never thought I would write. Vice President Kamala Harris really ought to be sworn in as president, as soon as possible:
We all know why Biden doesn’t do lengthy press conferences: It’s because he can’t. What we saw on Thursday night is now par for the course for him.
I say this as no fan of Harris’s politics; as a president, she would be a progressive Democrat moving policies in the opposite direction of what I generally prefer. But what we saw from Biden last week — and his general minimal appearances since then — affirm that we have an administration full of Edith Wilsons. Biden is not mentally or physically capable of doing the job anymore. Harris is. By that fact alone, she should be taking the oath of office as soon as possible.
A braver Democratic Party would recognize the undeniable with Biden, nominate Harris and have her select some normal, bland, pleasant Democrat such as Sen. Michael Bennet (Colo.) or Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Is that a surefire formula for beating Trump in November? No. But Democrats are all out of good options. Nominating Harris is the least-bad option.
In the comments section, you’ll find quite a few people insisting that because I’m a Trump lover (Ha!) I’m engaging in reverse psychology and trying to trick the Democrats into making the terrible mistake of dumping Biden.
No, I don’t want to have a senile commander in chief who can only be semi-lucid between the hours of ten and four, in a dangerous world with an aggressive and ambitious China, Russia, Iran, Hamas, the Houthis, etc.
I have no particular faith in the judgment of Kamala Harris. But she’s not senile, and right now that would make her a slightly better choice to be commander in chief until January 20.
ADDENDUM: Our Dan McLaughlin writes of the 2024 Republican presidential primary that it
was a democratic process. More than 4 million people cast votes against Trump, but at the end of the day, he won and won decisively.
The Democratic Party, as an institution, was determined to avoid anything like this, and they succeeded.
In fact, one of the underreported and supremely consequential decisions of 2023 was the Democratic National Committee’s rejiggering of the primary schedule to maximize the odds that Joe Biden would cruise to the nomination.
Democrats could have had a serious primary and opened up the door to the possibility of someone not named Joe Biden becoming the party’s nominee. Instead, the party’s leaders closed the door, locked it, deadbolted it, used the chain lock, and propped a chair under the doorknob.
It’s not just that Democrats as a whole chose this; they more or less rigged the primary process to ensure this.