After Joe, the Deluge

Once he shuffles off the stage, the blame game will go thermonuclear

So how do I break it to him…?

---

It’s anybody’s guess whether former Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s account of his history-making one-on-one conversation with President Joe Biden is true, sort of true, or b.s. of the purest ray serene—the gentleman in question being known to have a transactional relationship with the truth. But this much seems clear from the eye-opening New York Times story in which Schumer’s tale is told: He and many other Senate and House Democrats knew quite well that Biden was losing his marbles, was unfit to serve as president, and would lose in a rout if he ran for reelection.

Schumer met with the President on July 13, 2024, a little over two weeks after Biden’s disastrous showing in his debate with Donald Trump on June 27. He claims to have told Biden that if a secret ballot were taken, no more than five Senate Democrats would support his run for reelection, and that his own campaign pollsters gave him no more than a five percent chance of beating Donald Trump.

“If you run and you lose to Trump, and we lose the Senate, and we don’t get back the House, that fifty years of amazing, beautiful work goes out the window,” Schumer claims to have told Biden. “But worse—you go down in American history as one of the darkest figures.” And he added, “If I were you, I wouldn’t run, and I’m urging you not to run.”

Dramatic stuff! Can we believe Schumer, though? For what it’s worth, I believe that something of the sort did pass between the Majority Leader and the President—though perhaps the former exaggerated for effect. Certainly Schumer had good reason to fear that if Biden stayed in the race, the debacle he forecast would come to pass. That Biden did drop out but the debacle came to pass anyway is a delicious irony for which the Democrats have nobody to blame but themselves. They’d known for a long time that Joe Biden was in mental and physical decline, yet they kicked the can down the road until it came to dead end. And then they found themselves in the ludicrous position of replacing one dud candidate with another dud candidate.

On today’s Commentary Magazine Podcast, John Podhoretz fretted that we may never get a full account of all this, perhaps the greatest scandal in American political history. I’m not so sure. There are so many book contracts just waiting to be inked, so many reputations in need of salvage, so many bruised egos in need of salve! In a city like Washington DC, secrets don’t exist to be kept: They’re a form of hard currency. Loyalty on the other hand is a wasting asset, like the Venezuelan bolívar. The story—most of it, anyway—is bound to come out.

As for Chuck Schumer, a notable feature of the NYT piece is that all unwittingly, he unmasked himself as an abject coward:

[W]ith the Republican messaging machine deriding him [Biden] relentlessly as old and senile, Democrats were hard pressed to land any attacks on Mr. Trump. Long before the president’s disastrous debate performance, Mr. Schumer had privately concluded that the barrier of Mr. Biden’s age was too much for him to overcome.

Still, the Senate majority leader felt he was in a box. If he tried to convene a group to discuss other candidates, made calls or expressed his discontent in any semiprivate way, it might leak out, only weakening the president more. Not to mention how deeply unpleasant it was to offer unsolicited advice to the commander in chief about his political future. Instead Mr. Schumer, like every other Democrat in a position of power, had chosen to do nothing.

Schumer encourages the reader to believe that though he had concerns about the President’s age as a political issue, he had no worries that Biden might not be up to the job—until the June 27 debate. That seems most unlikely. We now know that members of Biden’s own staff were concerned about his stamina and mental acuity as early as 2021. Is it plausible to think that Schumer never noticed what was obvious to others? I think not. What happened was that he took counsel of his fears—which reduced him to paralysis. And to be fair, that’s a normal human reaction to an unpleasant situation—though on the other hand, the American people are entitled to better than that from a person of Schumer’s prominence. It says something not at all reassuring about this country’s political class that so many people knew the truth about Joe Biden, yet stayed silent and did nothing.

It so happens that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was proposed and ratified to deal with just such a situation as the cognitive decline of a sitting president. But no constitutional amendment can add spine to the spineless. One man only, Representative Dean Phillips, Democrat of Minnesota, had the guts to stand up and pronounce the obvious: that Joe Biden could not prevail in his bid for reelection. His primary challenge to Biden was a forlorn hope—for which his fellow Democrats excoriated him. I wonder what they’re thinking now.

In three days, Joe Biden will be out of the White House, out of Washington DC, off the national stage—and good riddance. But the cohort of enablers who played to his vanity, stoked his hubris, and covered up his senile decay aren’t going anywhere. That’s the bad news. The good news is that they’re very likely to turn on one another as the Democrat/progressive blame game shifts into high gear. Chuck Schumer’s self-serving tale of his chat with Joe Biden was just the overture.