Joe Biden Out in Apparent Palace Coup

At 7:16 pm on 20 July, the Joe Biden Twitter account posted that the upcoming election “is the most important … of our lifetimes” and said “I will win it.”

According to the New York Times, this tweet went up hours after Biden had already resolved to leave the presidential race. That article tells us the ageing president spent the afternoon and evening of Saturday with his close adviser Steve Richetti and his speechwriter and strategist Mike Donilon drafting a resignation letter. Throughout this time, Biden and his regents remained totally incommunicado.

The Joe Biden Twitter account finally posted this document to Twitter on Sunday afternoon, at 2:46 pm:

It is a very strange text. You’ll note that it’s not on official letterhead, and some have raised doubts about the authenticity of the signature, which indeed compares poorly to the many published authentic Biden signatures out there. Equally strange is the total absence of any endorsement for Kamala Harris. Perhaps this was a mere mistake, or perhaps it reflected early indecision. Either way, the Joe Biden Twitter account repaired the lapse with this Tweet a half hour later:

As I write this, Biden has yet to make any kind of personal statement before a camera to confirm that he is dropping out of the race. Press reports tell us only that he personally telephoned Kamala Harris, his chief of staff Jeff Zients and his campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon. Then, exactly one minute before his Twitter account posted his resignation, he notified some of his aides, via what means is unclear. Everybody else was in the dark. Since then, it is not Biden but Zients who has handled communication:

Biden’s post to X blindsided much of the rest of the staff at both the White House and the campaign, who had gotten no indication he was reconsidering his run. Since then, Zients has managed much of the communication across an anxious administration, holding calls Sunday afternoon with both the Cabinet and senior White House staffers. Zients is scheduled to hold an all-staff White House call on Monday morning, as well as a call with appointees across the executive branch.

It gets even stranger: Frank Biden, the president’s younger brother, gave an interview to CBS in which he said he was “incredibly proud” of Joe Biden and then added that “Selfishly, I will have him back to enjoy whatever time we have left.” I know that Biden is not a young man, but that makes it sound like he’s actually dying. Asked whether the president’s “overall health and vitality” figured largely in Biden’s decision to drop out of the race, his brother said “In my humble opinion, absolutely.” This is the same Joe Biden whom doctors declared to be “fit for duty” in February, who was insisting just a few weeks ago that he was “still in good shape,” and who claimed that none of his doctors thought he had any neurological or cognitive problems.

Media reports, like this long and extremely interesting Politico piece, cast the resignation as Biden’s decision; they quote anonymous White House sources to say that he “changed his mind” in the course of Saturday after being confronted with unfavourable polling data “which … showed his path to victory in November was gone.” There is no way to know whether these unconfirmed rumours are true. In fact, we have good reason to doubt at least some of their details. We’ve seen that Biden is not really in charge; rather, his presidency is controlled by an informal regency, and in cases like this, communication is everything. Remember that all of this is happening as the president is reportedly sick with the world’s dumbest virus and out of touch with nearly everybody. Never was there a more convenient time for Biden’s opponents to seize control and issue a resignation from his pen.

That Politico article abounds in intriguing details. They quote a “Democrat familiar with private conversations” who reports that Nancy Pelosi was the leading force behind those pushing Biden to drop out of the race:

“Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way … She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way” …

“We were giving him the respect of the weekend to make his decision. We were hopeful that this is the decision we would make,” the Democrat said …

On Capitol Hill, Democratic leadership sensed Biden’s decision was coming. A lawmaker close to leadership, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the president had “gone offline” in recent days …

To summarise: As Biden refused to step down voluntarily, panicked Democrats were devising how to force him out instead. This past weekend represented a crucial moment in this process. And “Democratic leadership” knew that Biden would step down, apparently before Biden did.

Further on, the article tells us that Biden’s course reversal was not even known to all of the staff with him in Delaware; “only his closest confidants had any sense.” The latter “had been dead set against [Biden’s] dropping out”; his wife Jill and his son Hunter “in particular seethed against the top Democrats … who they felt were betraying a loyal party leader and public servant.” And while Biden’s aides were drafting his campaign resignation letter, his “inner circle” were telling outsiders that no resignation was imminent:

On Saturday night, some in Biden’s inner circle insisted to one high-level Democrat that the president was determined to stay in the race, “no ifs, ands or buts.” When the Democrat checked in again Sunday morning, they told POLITICO, they were told there was no way that Biden would consider dropping out until after his planned meeting this week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The delayed endorsement of Harris, the confusion about whether Biden would make his decision after meeting with Netanyahu, the limited lines of communication now dominated by the defector Zients (who “had recently expressed privately that the party might need to go in a new direction”) – all of this smells powerfully of a disordered and opportunistic palace coup.