Picture this unhappy scenario: Imagine a man leaves work and instead of going straight home to his adoring wife he heads out to dinner with a friend without telling his spouse about it. He arrives home two or three hours late and his wife is understandably distraught and unhappy: “Where have you been?” she asks. Instead of responding with a simple explanation (“I was out to dinner,”) he says: “What’s it to you?! I can do whatever I want! You don’t control me! Don’t ever ask me about this again, you psycho!” It would be entirely reasonable for the wife to assume that her husband had been up to no good—and it would be understandable if she worried about this incident more or less for the rest of this marriage. Always it would be an unanswered question pawing at her brain: “Where was he, and why wouldn’t he tell where he was? What was be doing?” Even if the husband offered a belated explanation, weeks or months or years later (“Oh yes, I was out to dinner and I was just feeling grumpy, sorry”), still the discordant fear and uncertainty would remain in some form, ever unknown, forever unresolved. “Why did he act like that? Even if he was grumpy there’s no reasonable explanation for it. It makes no sense! I can’t figure it out!”
That is effectively the pickle we find ourselves in with Joe Biden. The circumstances surrounding his resignation are so singularly bizarre and inexplicable that it will always be reasonable and defensible to wonder what happened here and to suspect something weird happened. To sum it up: Joe Biden repeatedly and strongly insisted that he would continue to stay in the 2024 race no matter how much Democrats and donors begged him to drop out; last week he disappeared from the public view and retreated to his home in Delaware, ostensibly with a COVID infection; virtually nothing was heard or seen from him for four days; on a Sunday afternoon he released a bizarre statement in which he said he would be dropping from the 2024 race but he didn’t he give a reason why; he vaguely indicated that he would “speak to the Nation later this week” about his decision; and he made no other public appearance or manifestation for, at the time of this writing, well over 24 hours. We have seen essentially nothing—not even a video or a photo—of the president of the United States after he issued an historic, unprecedented withdrawal from a presidential race roughly 12 weeks before the election.
This is not normal; it is so far beyond normal that it is difficult to quantify. Even if you are a diehard Democrat, even if you’re just completely wrapped up in your Democratic identity and you’re gung-ho for Kamala Harris to sweep into the White House this November like a violent easterly derecho, you cannot possibly look at this scenario—a U.S. president in 2024 comprehensively missing from the public eye for at least a full day after effectively resigning from office—and think, “Eh, this is fine. Nothing to worry about.” Something is deeply wrong here on a foundational level. This makes no sense.
It will always be reasonable to wonder if something happened here—if Joe Biden, already on the edge of dementia and perhaps flattened and weakened and confounded by a COVID infection, physically and mentally vulnerable like no other time in his life, was manipulated by desperate advisors into signing a resignation letter. Maybe he was barely conscious when he “signed” it; maybe he was cognizant but not coherent; maybe something else. But perhaps they somehow managed to get his signature in such a vulnerable state, lending a thin sheer of plausible deniability to the scheme, like a greasy oil slick on top of a Milwaukee puddle. Needless to say, they couldn’t wheel him out before the American people in such a state; it might be possible for them to cram an ink pen into his hand and use his bear paw to scrawl a rough signature onto a piece of paper, but they couldn’t photograph him like that, much less put him on video. They had to work with what they had. So the lid goes on. And then, of course, when he wakes up—as much as Joe Biden ever wakes up these days—they have two options: “Joe, don’t you remember? You resigned yesterday. Look, here’s the tweet.” Or: “Joe, we forced your hand and made you resign. If you go public with this you’ll plunge the nation into a constitutional crisis and maybe a civil war of some kind. Your choice.” In either case Biden keeps his mouth shut and the ruse continues.
Yes, it sounds like a wild conspiracy theory. You know what looks like a wild conspiracy theory? A president—one who has lately demonstrated severe and comprehensive cognitive decline—resigning via PDF on Twitter.com and holding no press conference, releasing no video, and offering no photograph or material proof that he’s upright, much less capable. If you had to write a plot for a hackneyed Grisham-style White House thriller, it could easily accommodate a scheme like this. Use the president’s own failing mind against him, keep a tight clamp on his public image long enough for the antivirals to wear off, and then proceed as if it was his idea all along.
I’m not saying this is at all what happened. I’m just saying: If you think that maybe this did happen, you are absolutely more than justified and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It is completely reasonable to imagine that something untoward and improper and potentially unconstitutional happened in Delaware last week. And the way these things work, it will essentially always be reasonable to suspect that. This kind of broken trust is very commonly fatal; it’s often how both marriages and nations fail. Our country is in a strange and dangerous place; we are right to feel unsettled and afraid of what is happening, and what is to come next.