Patrick Lawrence: Power for the Sake of Power 

When I awoke Saturday morning, I found my thoughts wandering back a decade, when my siblings and I plotted to get our father’s car keys out of his frail, unsteady hands. Watching Joe Biden in a television interview will do this to you. “I am running the world,” was one of the more unfathomable remarks our burbling president made when he sat Friday evening for a 22–minute exchange with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. It is a frightening thought, and thank goodness it is delusory. But anyone this out of touch with the world he thinks he runs should not be running anything. 

If I were Jill Biden—Dr. Jill Biden—I would seize the keys to the ’67 Corvette and hide them at the back of a kitchen drawer. 

The Stephanopoulos interview was supposed to begin mending the all-but-fatal damage wreaked during Biden’s June 27 “debate” with Donald Trump. It was supposed to make Americans believe him when he said, “It was a bad episode. No indication of any serious condition.” It was supposed to make him credible as the only guy who can beat Trump this November, the only guy who can hold NATO together, who can bring peace to the Middle East, the only guy who can grow the economy, who, can “save democracy,” who can get everyone health care—the only guy, the only guy.

I have long thought that Biden’s tragic flaw as a public figure is his assumption that he can lie, misrepresent, and simply bullshit extravagantly and get people to believe him so long as he keeps on lying, misrepresenting and bullshitting. But I never had him down as the Walter Mitty of our time—a man who lives enveloped in the conjured dreams he prefers to reality. Now I do. 

This man is altogether gone. He now proposes to lie, misrepresent, and bullshit his way through what 50 million people saw during his encounter with Trump—and, on the hustings again last weekend, what they saw when he sat with Stephanopoulos in the library of a Wisconsin middle school. 

 “And—did you ever watch the debate afterwards?” Stephanopoulos asked early in their encounter. Biden: “I don’t think I did, no.”

Why would he? We have now seen firsthand who Biden has been the whole of his political career. For every made-up version of who he has been or is—civil rights marcher, anti-apartheid hero, driver of an 18–wheeler for heaven’s sake—there is an implicit denial, a refusal simply to admit or let us see who he actually is. Biden, out of some buried sense of inferiority, has spent his life proving himself—to himself as well as others. Viewed one way, what we witness now is a long-time-coming comeuppance. He stands before us as he is.   

“I took on Big Pharma. I beat them,” Biden told his interlocutor. And later: “I’m the guy that shut Putin down.” And further on: “Who’s going to be able to be in a position where I’m able to keep the Pacific Basin in a position where we’re—we’re at least checkmating China now? Who’s going to—who’s going to do that? Who has that reach?”

I invite into the comment thread anyone who can find a single true thing in these quotations. The best that can be said is that it is a matter of time, and one hopes not much, before the American public will no longer have to put up with the relentless stream of fabrications on which Biden has traveled for half a century in public life. 

Paul Krugman, who has descended from Nobel laureate to Democratic Party sycophant, called Biden “the best president of my adult life” in his New York Times column the morning after the June 27 debate. Tom Friedman, in the same space: “Biden is a good man and a good president.” And among the reported upon rather than the reporting, Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez calls Biden “one of the most successful presidents in modern American history.” They all then followed by urging Biden to surrender his car keys. 

Hell’s bells. These people are as into denial as Biden. Some humoring is often in order in these kinds of cases, O.K., but not in Biden’s. He is already responsible for a six-figure fatality rate in Ukraine and for bringing the U.S. into direct participation in the genocide of the Palestinian people. What the Krugmans and Friedmans among us are doing is the very zenith of irresponsibility considering what remains at issue. 

The best president of our time? A good man and a good president? This is tap-dancing to Yankee Doodle Dandy—standard stuff for the media whenever a president is about to depart the stage, but in this case, it is a disgraceful use of the considerable influence these people wield. Let us be clear as to what they are doing, and in my read, with full intent: This is how those paid well to comment in mainstream media deflect from the public’s view the record of—I shall say it—the worst president to serve in my lifetime, and I am aware of the competition for this distinction. 

Biden has led the world to the brink of a Third World War he insists he is intent on preventing. He has brought the U.S. to a reckless shoot-the-moon moment in its long effort to destroy the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation. His regime is force-marching clients in the Pacific—the Koreans, the Japanese, the Filipinos, the Australians—toward a catastrophic confrontation with China. He has dragged America and its people into a moral gutter as he, well-compensated by the Israel lobby, actively encourages—never mind the professions of disapproval—the world’s most barbarous nation as it proceeds to slaughter an entire people. 

This inventory of mistakes and failures should lead sensible, uncompromised minds to two conclusions. One, Joe Biden should not be this nation’s next president; he should be removed from politics as quickly as possible, and two, Joe Biden should never have been this nation’s president in the first place. Dishonest hacks such as Paul Krugman, and these are legion, have no business now glossing the extensive damage this man has done to America, to Americans and to the world.

It is astonishing to watch and listen as the Democratic Party and the media closely aligned with it, sweaty brows across the board, fret hourly over how to resolve the absolute mess they have made by backing the Biden presidency and pretending—this since the 2020 campaign season—that an incipiently addled man was fit to assume the world’s most powerful office. Should he stay or go? Who should decide this? Who will come next? Who gets the campaign donations? The New Yorker just published a piece under the headline, “This is what the 25^th Amendment was designed for.” 

And this is what America’s public discourse has come to. 

No shame, no embarrassment in these mainstream quarters for having foolishly overinvested in an unqualified political figure because the Democratic machine settled on Biden four years ago for reasons few of us will ever fully understand. And none for covering up Biden’s unfitness for office in the years since he was elected. I have already noted the instant flood of post-debate editorials and opinion pieces calling for Biden to resign or be removed. And, to go with them, we are now served as many news stories suddenly reporting that, yes, the infirmities not heretofore mentioned were a long time coming.  

What does this overnight volte-face tell us? If you know how to read these things,  it will be obvious: Too many mainstream reporters and editors, having little respect for themselves or their profession, to say nothing of their readers and viewers, were consciously, purposefully withholding what they knew and now they report what they have all along known because they have been told it is all right to do so.  

“I feel like I have been deceived,” Whitney Tilson, one of those hedge-fund billionaires who think flooding the political process with money is a righteous form of free speech, told  the New York Post on July 2. “Biden and the people around him have been deceiving the American people.” Twenty-four hours before the debate, this would have been heresy. Now Tilson’s truth is obvious. 

But note: The reality of our mass deceit at the hands of the Democratic machine and corporate media—just you watch—will not be acknowledged or even mentioned. At this very, very large moment in the American story, each truth it is now acceptable to speak requires that another one be obscured.  

The Associated Press ran a headline the evening of July 3 that tells us a lot more than intended. Let’s set aside that “Biden at 81: Often sharp and focused but sometimes confused and forgetful” is preposterously nonsensical, a sign of journalism’s decline in our late-imperial days. It is the subtext I find compelling: The power elites in this country are spluttering. With a few exceptions, they have no idea what to say in this treacherous passage for the simple reason there is too much to say and it is of too much moment. If there are antecedents to this floundering and turmoil in high places, they did not occur in my lifetime.

I have mentioned the power elite, using C. Wright Mills’s well-known phrase from his 1956 book of this title. It seems to me Joe Biden’s dramatic fall from political favor gives us an unusually clear view of a goodly part of these densely woven interests. Those who de facto run the United States—liberal authoritarians in the Democratic Party, the ever-present, ever-unseen Deep State, and “the donor class,” as mainstream media refer to the people who buy candidates and elections—are startlingly visible now, operating in the open as they determine what is next. It is remarkable how casually this process is reported, as if there is nothing wrong, nothing amiss, nothing that should disturb us.  

As the process of getting Joe Biden out of office proceeds, I do not think it will any longer be possible, absent more of the compulsive self-deception abroad among us, to pretend the United States is the democracy it purports to be according to the documents those in power purport to uphold. It is too evident now that the frantic deliberations of the donor class—this phrase repeated daily now by perfectly straight-faced journalists—are what determines who will hold the high offices of our land. Stop worrying about Russia’s oligarchs, for heaven’s sake. They are none of our concern. Let us now forthrightly address the presence of our own atop us.

David Sirota, an inside-the-tent liberal who is good on the Democrats’ many corruptions, published a comment on “X” the other day that goes straight to a corollary question: 

It’s wild how the Democratic Party has all these democratic processes—contested primaries, open conventions, etc.—that the party is always trying to completely shut down, block, and circumvent… while campaigning as the party that wants to “protect democracy.”

Pithily to the point. Having eviscerated the party’s customary primaries this past spring so Joe Biden would not end up stumbling and slurring before Democratic voters, the prospect now of an open convention in Chicago this August, at which a new candidate would be chosen, is now cast as foolishly dreamy or irresponsible or an open door to “chaos” and “mayhem.” How well I recall the party conventions I watched on television when young: 50 delegations, each with placards on polls indicating the candidate it wanted to see in the White House. Lively debate, authentic contention, cheers and tears: These the sounds of a properly boisterous democracy. 

Not this time and maybe never again. All must be cast in iron before the Chicago convention, everything set. I see two reasons for this, and in them the Democratic Party’s undemocratic machinations and the undemocratic place of large donors in the American political system are joined as one.

First, the Democrats exhibit an extreme case of the addiction to zero-risk certainty that has taken root among Americans since the 1945 victories and the nation began its pursuit of global dominance. Power is the ultimate in risk-aversity, you will find if you study the matter. In the present instance, party elites and those who write checks to them must must must exert control over political outcomes. They do not accept the risk inherent in precisely the democratic politics they profess to honor.  

Second, in my read this insistence on total control of the nominating process reflects the Democrats’ determination to hold the White House at whatever cost this exacts on the democratic process. I find this very worrisome. We have already seen the Democrats’ willingness to corrupt the judicial system, state and federal, in this cause. We have seen them purposely pollute public discourse, to the point they more or less destroyed it, during the Russiagate years. And more recently there are the internal corruptions David Sirota notes. Does this make you confident the party will enter this election come November altogether cleanly? I have no such confidence, cursed as I am with that regrettably rare faculty called memory. 

A lot of names are currently floated as potential candidates to replace Biden once he resigns or gets the vaudeville cane. The New York Times has published a list as comprehensive as any around. Look at these names. Gavin Newsom, “an accomplished campaigner.” Gretchen Whitmer, a vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee. J.B. Pritzker, and here a member of the donor class gets right to it.  Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary. Josh Shapiro, who is given to playing the antisemitism card at every opportunity. What these candidates have in common is the effectiveness of their attacks on Donald Trump and so the prospect they could defeat him in November. Pritzker, heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, is a standout “for his knife-twisting insults against Mr. Trump,” as The Times puts it. 

Can he or she triumph over Trump Nov. 5? Can he or she be sold to the voting public? These are the make-or-break criteria as the replacement search proceeds. 

Consider who these people are. They are all governors, Raimondo having served as Rhode Island’s before Biden brought her to Washington only three years ago. Now consider the circumstances, just the large, perilous ones, Biden will leave to  whomever follows him. Statecraft, anyone?

Joe Biden, having held the Ukraine portfolio as vice-president during the Obama administration, was instrumental in the coup the U.S. cultivated in Ukraine 10 years ago and subsequently provided American support as an illegitimate regime attacked its own civilian populations in the eastern provinces for eight years. He then rejected Russia’s proposals to negotiate post–Cold War security agreements. 

Having cynically provoked Russia into its military intervention two years ago, the U.S. is now backing an extravagantly corrupt regime whose military is dependent on neo–Nazi leadership as it wages an unwinnable war—a war already lost in my read—that has us closer to a nuclear exchange than it ever before in history, counting the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

Biden’s China policy has been one mess after another since he came to office, when Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, his secretary of state and national security adviser, set about alienating the Xi government so efficiently you would think this was their intent. As things stand, Beijing wants as little to do with the U.S. as possible. The Biden regime’s blunders, born of inexperience, ignorance and hubris, have a great deal to do with China’s new determination to turn away from the West—as Russia has, too—in favor of constructing a new world order.

Are Gretchen Witmer or J.B. Pritzker or any of the others whose names are now current up to these questions? The crisis in the Middle East is of the same magnitude. Are they the caliber of people the U.S. needs to navigate past what now amounts to the threat of yet another war?

I do not see it. And while I am not seeing it, I do not hear anyone in the media or the upper reaches of the power elite even raising these questions. The narcissism is beyond belief. If this country needs to take Joe Biden’s keys away for him, it will be wrenchingly obvious there is no one there to whom it is sensible to hand them. 

I come to the case of Kamala Harris. I am astonished there is any such thing as the case of Kamala Harris, to be honest. A woman and a woman of color and an Asian–American woman all in one: This is where “identity politics” leads, I say to those who fell or still fall for it. It leads to a political mannequin who is by all appearances visionless. She so far gives no indication she harbors even a single conviction not subject to opportunistic change or abandonment. 

Just parenthetically, my favorite Kamala Harris moment was during her state visit to Vietnam three years ago next month. There she was in front of the old “Hanoi Hilton” honoring John McCain, who resided in Vietnam’s wartime prison because he was shot down while bombing factories and civilian populations. 

Given that Harris is touted among many donors and party figures as the likeliest and best candidate to replace the burbling Biden, you have to conclude she represents the Democrats’ idea of what American statecraft ought to look like: Change nothing, continue doing what has already been done, no need to respond to new circumstances, oblige the national-security state. There are various things to conclude from this. Straight off the top, the Democratic power structure, if it gives the nomination to Harris, will clean up one mess while creating another that could—almost certainly will, indeed—prove worse. 

On the political side, I cannot see that a Harris ticket—and goodness knows who would stand as her veep—has any chance of prevailing over Trump in November. While I am not a pollster or a professional reader of the national mood, “Vote blue no matter who,” mindless enough as it is, does not seem to me compelling enough to carry Kamala Harris to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

More important than any such miscalculation, can we read a Harris nomination as anything other than an admission that the Deep State now runs the United States and the president is not much more than a figurehead preserving the illusion of American democracy? A lot of people made this argument prior to the Biden mess, especially as the national-security state and its various appendages conspired to subvert Trump the candidate and then Trump the president. “President Kamala Harris” would effectively institutionalize this reality. 

The hermetic nature of the Democratic mainstream’s discourse as the post–Biden era arrives is measure enough that what these people are fighting for is power for the sake of power. The U.S. will continue to go from one failure to another as the Deep State under a Harris regime, should one come to be, operates with yet more freedom from political oversight than it has now. As to Harris-as-figurehead, at what point will the world’s impatience with “America’s global leadership” subside into bitter laughter?

With all these questions in view, I recall thinking, as soon as Biden announced that he would seek a second term, in April of last year, that he would never make it to Election Day: He wasn’t up to the demands of a campaign, his people were already shielding him from the public gaze, and, most of all, I simply could not see how he would hold up during a presidential debate, and there would have to be at least one. 

What was the plan? This seemed the obvious question. Among other things, I considered the possibility that Biden’s run for another four years was a ruse, a feint. Could it be that Biden would declare and at some point, by design, withdraw, so acting as the Trojan horse from whose innards Kamala Harris would spring?

“Could it be?” is as far as I will take this line of inquiry, but I defend the legitimacy of the question. It would certainly explain, among other things, the instant pile-on after the June 27 debate: Ready, set, action.

Joe Biden advertised himself as a transitional president, and so he will prove. A new chapter in America’s decline now opens, the quality of the nation’s purported leaders reaches a new low, an oligarchy now operates openly. What is left, what remains? “America is the only nation founded on a creed,” G.K. Chesterton, the English journalist, novelist, and critic, observed in What I Saw in America. That book came out in 1922. Does America have one to live by  any longer?