Inside the plot to replace elderly Joe Biden
On February 8, a US special counsel report fell like a bombshell on the White House. It rejected criminal charges against Joe Biden for his mishandling of classified documents, which was good. But some of the reasons underpinning the decision were highly embarrassing.
The leader of the free world, special counsel Robert Hur warned in the report, “would likely present himself to a jury… as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.
Biden added self-injury to this insult with a cantankerous press conference at which he shouted down questions about his age and, to prove how with it he really is, took credit for persuading the “president of Mexico” to allow aid into Gaza.
“Geography buffs,” comedian Jon Stewart subsequently observed, “might have noticed Gaza and Mexico do not share a border.” He dryly added that Biden, at 81, is the oldest man ever to run for president – “breaking, by only four years, a record that [he] set”.
The counsel’s report, veteran journalist Michael Wolff tells us, is “a devastating blow which obviously the Trump people are delighted about. They can’t believe their luck.” (Wolff should know: he wrote an inside account of the Trump White House, Fire and Fury.)
Many Democrats, on the other hand, are furious. They feel that their party’s establishment, lacking the courage to replace Biden when they could, has saddled them with the one presidential candidate who can’t win, because he’s so doddery that he makes a lunatic facing 91 criminal charges seem like a competent professional.
How did this come about? And what are the party’s bigwigs planning to do about it?
Team Trump worries that they’ll swap Biden for a younger model at the August convention in Chicago – but this conspiracy theory contains one major hole: Biden likes his job. If the Democratic establishment wants someone else to do it, they’ll have to drag Biden out of the White House kicking and screaming.
‘Indiscipline and indecision’
Health and vanity have long bedevilled the US presidency. Franklin Roosevelt, who was plainly ill in 1944, should not have run for a fourth term in office, did so and died just four months after inauguration.
Ronald Reagan, as Wolff elegantly puts it, likely ran the country from “the foothills of dementia”. Both presidents deployed charisma and wit to paper over the cracks, qualities Biden has never enjoyed. “He always was just a terrible public speaker,” says Wolff, “mangling up sentences and words for the past 40 years.”
Friends and allies pin the blame on his stammer; in The Last Politician, a relatively sympathetic biography, Franklin Foer identifies a career-long pattern of “indiscipline and indecision”. He pulled out of the 1988 presidential run after being caught plagiarising Neil Kinnock.
His campaign for the 2008 presidential nomination took a hit when he said that there were so many Indian-Americans in his home state that “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent”.
The Washington consensus is that Biden is an incorrigible windbag, leavened by kindness, empathy and negotiating skills honed in the Senate.
Unlike most of us, he’s become more left-wing as he’s grown older – and as president he has spent trillions, backed unions, expanded welfare and reduced American military deployment.
He’s got away with it precisely because voters can’t believe that this bumbling old Catholic, who refers to his affection for nuns, is one of the most radical and consequential presidents of our times – an apparently genial contrast to the chaotic administration that came before.
One reason why it’s hard to discern what’s happening in the Oval Office is that his ultra-loyal staff rarely leaks. They’ve formed a protective wall around the old man, limiting access and appearances, even rewriting the 2024 presidential primary calendar so that he’d enjoy an easy first win in friendly South Carolina.
Trump has long mocked “sleepy Joe” for “hiding in his basement”, but it worked in 2020 – and letting Trump car-crash through various court cases while Biden gets on with the job seemed like a sound strategy for re-election, too.
But then last year a set of polls showed Trump creeping into the lead nationally and notably ahead in critical swing states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania. Unemployment is low; inflation is down. Why, asked grassroots Democrats, isn’t our guy far more popular?
Age concerns
The question of the president’s age, once dismissed by Democrats, is now becoming unignorable.
Biden confused Emmanuel Macron with the long-dead Francois Mitterrand, and called him the president of Germany. He claimed to have discussed the Capitol Hill riots with Helmut Kohl – deceased for four years.
He reassured the world that Putin is losing in Iraq. He struggled to pronounce Rishi Sunak’s name, titled him “Mr President” and declared “God Save the Queen” (to make matters stranger, he was addressing an audience about gun control).
“Where’s Jackie?!” he cried during a speech, inviting congresswoman Jackie Walorski to give us a twirl – improbable given her recent death in a car accident. In one attempt to climb the steps of his plane, Biden fell down three times. (Trump does a mean, and amusing, impersonation of his rival attempting to locate the exit from a podium).
While Reagan laughed senior moments off with his famous line “I will not exploit my opponent’s youth and inexperience…”, Biden’s response to press scrutiny betrays a thinner skin: “You think I don’t know how f—--- old I am?” he told an aide, according to Politico.
His adjutants are left to clean up around him: at the end of a speech in Warsaw, Biden adlibbed a line that Putin “cannot remain in power”. By the time he got in his car, his dutiful staff were already scrambling to insist the president was not calling for regime change in Russia.
‘Old and delusional’
According to Foer, Biden has asked indignantly: “Was John Kennedy ever babied like that?” Kennedy made Americans imagine a brighter future, whereas Biden reminds them of the depressing present.
The pollster Frank Luntz has run a focus group of individuals who voted Democrat in 2020 but might not do so again. They described the Biden of four years ago as “normal”, “sane” and “civilised”; they perceive Biden today as “geriatric”, “sick”, “old and delusional”.
Luntz explains: “The latest polling has over 80pc of the public concerned about Biden’s age. And they say age, they don’t say health.” It’s a “proxy for a loss of activism” in government “and get-it-done-ism… It’s about how he makes them feel.”
We might infer that Americans feel trapped. Biden was elected in 2020 to end the Trump era and then, preferably, step aside for fresh leadership; yet here the two men still are, monopolising the field.
Luntz continues: “Seventy per cent of Americans don’t want Trump or Biden…. So people throw up their hands in desperation and say, how can a country of 337 million people give us these two choices?”
Watching Biden slide about nervously, one sometimes fears not that his hand is on the nuclear button, but that he might forget where he left it.
The White House dismisses attacks on Biden’s age as inaccurate and “desperate”. In meetings, vice-president Kamala Harris has said her boss is dynamic; “in front of and on top of it all”. (If true, replied Jon Stewart, why doesn’t anyone film that?)
Wolff’s contacts assure him that “behind closed doors” Biden does remain “efficient, analytical” with a “remarkable focus” – albeit “in a foreshortened day”. (According to the president’s diary, there are few events before 9am and most meetings are in the afternoon).
The challenge is turning a private story – that he’s great when we’re not watching – into a narrative that convinces voters who might never see the evidence.
Conspiracy fears
Trump is also slowing down, note the president’s supporters: why doesn’t the media obsess about that?
Seeking an answer, the New York Times reminded readers of the cruel superficiality of politics: Biden is pale and balding, Trump big, tanned and with a head of hair that defies the laws of nature. His frequent flubs – he recently boasted that he beat Obama in 2016 – come across as bravado; Biden’s land as awkward errors.
The reality is setting in on the Left. The Times has proclaimed a “dark moment for Mr Biden’s presidency”, declaring: “He needs to do more to show the public that he is fully capable of holding office until age 86.”
Welcome to the party, conservatives say to the liberal paper of record, but why are you only mentioning this now? Republicans smell a conspiracy, suspecting that the plan was always to let Biden sweep an uncontested presidential primary then swap him out at the last minute for someone else. Their favourite deus ex machina is former first lady Michelle Obama.
Trump’s gaffe about beating her husband likely betrayed a subconscious bias; some of the Right believe the conspiracy that Biden is merely Barack’s puppet. (Biden can’t be behind the “persecution” of me, reasoned Trump at a rally, “because I don’t think he knows he’s alive.”)
They’ve seized upon the criticisms of the president by David Axelrod, one of the architects of Obama’s 2008 campaign, who described the special counsel report as “another log on a raging fire” of concerns about Biden’s competence.
If the plot is to drop the president, and the president hasn’t been playing ball, then maybe the goal of all this sudden, very negative coverage is to humiliate Biden out of office – to create such a chorus of insult that he’ll have to quit to maintain the last vestiges of his dignity.
Dennis Lennox, a GOP consultant and executive director of the Republican Party in the Virgin Islands, says: “There’s no question that the powers that be both within the Democratic Party and [the] so-called deep state in Washington are doing everything they can to push Joe Biden out of the race before it’s too late, because Democrats know [he] is the only Democrat who can lose to Donald Trump.”
How Biden could be ousted
How would a change of candidate happen? This is where the conspiracy theories hit a snag. As Garry South, a longtime Democrat strategist and commentator from California, points out: “There’s no process where a sitting president of the United States could be removed from the ticket and replaced with someone else at this stage of the game… It’s not going to happen. We’re stuck with Joe Biden, for better or worse.”
Scenario one: someone enters the primaries to challenge Biden.
Two candidates have already tried this – Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips, the latter running explicitly on the health issue – and received negligible percentages; Biden won South Carolina this week with almost 100pc of the vote (close to his age, joked comedian Stephen Colbert).
Filing deadlines for about 80pc of the rest of the contests have passed, so it’s literally impossible for a bigger name to enter the contest at this stage and win more delegates than the president. He heads into Chicago as the unstoppable frontrunner.
Scenario two: the party tries to remove him involuntarily. This only can be done, theoretically, if a candidate is incapacitated.
Former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Donna Brazile revealed that she considered setting the ball rolling in 2016, when Hillary Clinton fell ill at a 9/11 memorial, but dropped the idea because she knew it would tear the party apart.
The DNC is hierarchical, disciplined and packed with Biden supporters; there’s no mechanism in place to move against the president if he doesn’t want to go, which means the only practicable step is…
Scenario three: Biden is persuaded to release his delegates at the convention, allowing them to pick whichever candidate they like.
This is what Republicans are predicting. Lennox, the GOP strategist, regards it as “entirely plausible [that] somebody not named Joe Biden emerges as the Democratic nominee, whether that’s JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, who’s a billionaire and could self-fund a campaign overnight… or [California governor] Gavin Newsom, or the governor of Maryland [Wes Moore] who many believe is the next Obama.”
Alternatively, the Democrats could try “a more moderate figure like Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania”.
But what Republicans imagine as a well-oiled coup, Democrats see as a recipe for disaster. “It would open up the whole field,” explains South, “and you would have multiple candidates in August running for the nomination” in a “messy process that would almost guarantee we lose in November”.
The idea revives memories of the Democratic convention of 1968, when the party was divided by the Vietnam War, or the infamously chaotic process of 1972 – in which the nomination roll call for president was as long as the telephone book, and included a vote for Mao Zedong.
On the other hand, such an event would be TV gold, a rare convention that people actually watch and a chance to reset the race heading into the autumn campaign.
But casting around for a usurper brings up challenges, too. The return of Hillary Clinton is a topic of dinner party gossip – an idea so absurd as to make one choke on their grits.
As for Michelle Obama’s ascendancy, even Karl Rove – the genius consultant who gave us George W Bush – called that theory “pure lunacy”, pointing to the hatred of politics evident in her memoir. “She didn’t want her husband to run for the state Senate. She didn’t want him to run for the presidency. She is not a political animal.”
Rivals’ loyalty
Technically the person best positioned to replace Biden, because it’s her constitutional role in case of emergency, is his VP, Harris. Yet she is likely to perform no better than her boss. Luntz says every Democrat he has polled does better against Trump than Biden, with the one exception of Kamala.
Rumoured to be disliked even by her own staff – an aide to her 2020 campaign reportedly said “this person should not be president of the United States” – she has demonstrated that one doesn’t need to be old to be underwhelming.
Consider her incisive contribution to a roundtable discussion on transport: “This issue of transportation is fundamentally about just making sure that people have the ability to get where they need to go. It’s that basic.” Only 40pc of the US has a positive view of the VP; 55pc, negative.
Moreover, current thinking is she’s lining up for a run in four years’ time, perhaps in partnership with her friend and transport secretary Pete Buttigieg. This kind of forward-planning deters even stronger candidates from manoeuvring against the incumbent.
Take Newsom, the handsome, 56-year-old governor of California, who seemed to launch an unofficial exploratory campaign last year, enjoying a cross-country tour that culminated in a TV debate against then-Republican contender Ron DeSantis.
It made little impact: Newsom polled no better at that time than Biden, possibly because of California’s reputation of left-wing wokery. (A conspicuous amount of his energy also went into promoting not himself but the president, telling journalists: “I’ll go to the ends of the earth for this guy.”)
There’s also Gretchen Whitmer, the popular 52-year-old governor of Michigan, another pro-union liberal who has the advantage of leading Trump in her critical home state. She has publicly denied she’ll run, while launching a campaign, Fight Like Hell, that is officially designed to boost Biden.
Both Newsom and Whitmer have obviously concluded that their best path to 2028 is to define themselves as ultra-loyal in 2024. Though they would presumably accept the nomination were it handed to them in Chicago, they’re not going to be the ones to push Biden on to his sword.
No walking away
It’s a testament to how imperial the US presidency is that regardless of what the voters think, or even what ambitious officials secretly want, the fate of the nation rests firmly in the hands of its commander-in-chief – along with his number one fan and defender, first lady Dr Jill Biden.
At 72, the former classroom teacher is indispensable to the administration, often found in the room where decisions are made, sitting quietly to one side making notes till Joe shouts, “Hey Jill, what do you think?” She thinks her husband is the only man who can do his job.
She might have been reluctant to return to the White House in 2020 but has since grown comfortable with her role and certain of Joe’s abilities. After all, the flip side of crawling past 80 is that one does have decades of experience to draw upon, years peppered with ambitions – and so little time to fulfil them.
The president is ferociously ambitious: he ran for his office three times. And he is stubborn. You might think he did the wrong thing in pulling out of Afghanistan, for instance, but he’s taken full responsibility for the decision – borne, writes Foer, from a “swaggering faith in himself”.
One problem with Obama, Joe apparently said, was that he was too easily pushed around and didn’t know how to say “f— you” properly – “with the right elongation of vowels and the necessary hardness of his consonants”.
This is not a man who would walk away from a job he believes is his by right. The fact that the only alternative on the November ballot will be Trump will stiffen his resolve.
Writing for Politico, the journalist Jonathan Martin made an astute observation: it is Trump, above all, that keeps Biden in the game. Trump unites left and centre of the party, young and old, in terror of his victory, and thus “the proverbial moat around the Biden White House is stocked with very classy, Trump-branded alligators”.
No one of weight will question Biden if it risks helping Trump in any way – even though, and this is the sad irony of the situation, Biden is probably the weakest person to run against the much-indicted billionaire.
As Wolff says, one never ceases to be amazed by “Trump’s ineffable luck”.
