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Our Three Silent Mice

Biden

President Biden was forced, unceremoniously and unwillingly, to abdicate from his impending reelection nomination. Since then, we have neither seen nor heard much from our sitting President. He has vanished, poof, gone.

This is quite unusual if not alarming. Unlike prior to the June 27 debate, the left now makes no effort to hide Biden’s debility. Indeed, it accepts the reality that an infirm Biden might not be able to finish out his remaining six months. Yet it still cannot decide whether the nation’s exposure to a President Harris prior to November 5 would lend her the advantage of incumbency or (more likely) ensure her defeat given global exposure to her puerility.

In the past, when a vice president took over the party nomination from his sitting president boss, the lame duck president was nonetheless evident and in charge until the duration of his tenure.

When Lyndon Johnson belatedly decided not to run for reelection in 1968, he claimed that he needed to devote his full attention and remaining months to finding a solution to the then-raging Vietnam War. Indeed, Johnson sought to steal interest away from his often-underappreciated vice president, Hubert Humphrey, and the latter’s ongoing (and failed) bid as the Democratic nominee to replace Johnson.

Ronald Reagan was still very busy in 1988 in his last six months as president—even as his sitting “a thousand points of light” vice president, George H.W. Bush, became the Republican nominee and was fixated on campaigning to replace Reagan.

At times in late 2000, during the waning days of Bill Clinton’s administration, a restless, lame duck Clinton seemed almost to compete for the spotlight with his then vice president, party nominee, and would-be Democratic presidential replacement Al Gore.

The vanishing Biden caught another case of COVID in mid-July shortly after his disastrous and historically early presidential debate with Trump. And in the subsequent month, Biden simply disappeared.

He is rarely seen, more rarely heard, even as Iran has promised a theater-wide war against Israel, Putin has more frequently threatened to escalate Russian attacks to existential levels, and the economy has witnessed dramatic stock shocks, dismal job news, and increasing talk of an impending recession.

Americans have wondered what happened to their president. Apparently, Biden was deemed unfit by his party bosses and donors to remain its nominee but still considered hale enough to continue for half a year as America’s president.

Rumors swirled that a depressed, embittered, and unwell Biden was in seclusion licking his wounds, acidic over being betrayed by his erstwhile allies—the Obamas, former speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, the left-wing squad, a traditionally obsequious and in-the-tank left-wing media, and perhaps his replacement, the machinating Vice President Kamala Harris.

Biden gave a so-so endorsement of Harris. After that pro forma act, he has somehow evaporated in a fashion that has left the White House even more vacant than during the octogenarian Biden’s prior three years of customary three-day workweeks.

Will or can Biden campaign this summer and autumn for Harris?

And if he were mentally and physically able to do so, would it help or hurt her?

Are his policies—especially those toward Israel at the brink of a war with Iran—unchanged, or will he shift somewhat to help the Harris cause with pro-Hamas/anti-Israel voters in Michigan?

Or perhaps in his sullenness, will Biden remain indifferent to Harris, or at some point, reassert his lost authority even if, or perhaps because, it might prove injurious to her candidacy?

So, for the present, no one knows who is in charge of the United States.

Is it the three-year consortium headed by the omnipresent Obama tandem that had heretofore used Biden as a convenient waxen effigy?

Or is Jill Biden still playing the Edith Wilson role for a non compos mentis and invalid presidential husband?

Or is our de facto Commander-in-Chief the new presidential candidate Kamala Harris? She seems ebullient in welcoming to her team both Obama old-hands and Biden defectors eager for new jobs and billets, in “The king is dead; long live the king!” fashion.

The next six months may be the most dangerous in our modern history. Key geostrategic decisions concerning an opportunistic world eager to fill the widening American void will be made by whom, if anyone, and in what manner?

Harris

But stranger still is the month-long vaporization of Vice President and the now de facto Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. How weird that she sought to hog airtime and attention as vice president (although not via interviews or impromptu remarks), but once she gained an even wider portfolio as the Democratic presidential nominee, she recoiled from interviews and went into hibernation.

In the last month amid the frenzy of the Biden collapse, her coronation, and the selection of her running mate Tim Walz, a mute Harris has made up all the ground Biden lost as the prior nominee.

She is flooded with hundreds of millions of dollars in left-wing tech and Wall Street cash. All are eager to donate given their money will no longer be wasted on a sore loser but might now earn something in return from a future president.

So, a silent Harris is rising in the polls, once the Biden albatross was cut away and relieved Hollywood/Wall Street/Silicon Valley grandees poured in their riches.

Harris has been instructed to xerox the successful tripartite model of the 2020 Biden victory:

One, keep the incoherent and cackling Harris away from the public and journalists, and ration even her teleprompted and staged speeches.

Two, erase 30 years of left-wing demagoguery and socialist activism. Replace her radical chic with faux-centralism of the ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton sort.

In shameless fashion, Harris is now running ads bragging she will hire more border guards, and secure and stop illegal immigration—this from someone who called for ICE to disappear, championed illegal immigration and an open border, and demonized any who sought to secure it. In some sense, she is even appropriating much of the Trump agenda for the next three months.

So, her message to the public is simply, “Before June 27, I was for what you, the public, hated and never gave a damn about the consequences. And now I am going to fool you for 90 days into thinking I am your real border czar— on the expectation that I can delude you a third time once you naifs elect me and I destroy the border again.”

Three, count on 70 percent of the electorate not voting on Election Day without serious audit.

When will Harris give an unscripted interview? In a month as promised, two months, or after Election Day? When will she dare to speak to a neutral audience? Or mix it up with Donald Trump in no-holds-barred debates? When will she be asked, as incumbent vice president, why she doesn’t begin her promised agenda right now during the last six months of the Biden-Harris tenure?

No such candor will follow until she falls 5 points in the polls behind Trump and is thus forced to speak.

So far now, why would Harris confirm to the electorate that she indeed quickly exhausts her five-hundred-word vocabulary, turns off listeners with adolescent cackling, and is a puerile left-wing ideologue mouthing stale platitudes?

The Trump challenge then is to keep hammering her extremist record, her dangerous agenda for 2025 and beyond, and her weird, indeed historic refusal to mix it up with journalists and to speak ex tempore.

Harris knows that Biden thrived by remaining mute and when he could not, he crashed in the polls. So, she accepts that she too would rather be attacked as evasive, afraid, and cowardly than lose when confirmed as childishly incompetent—given the state media can far more successfully reconstruct her silence as incidental to her mellifluous oratory.

As for the objection that surely Harris cannot pull off such a surreptitious candidacy for 80 more days, Harris would surely answer, “If Biden pulled it off for over three years, I certainly can manage it for 10 weeks.”

Walz

Ostensibly, Tim Walz is a boon to the Trump campaign. His home state Minnesota will likely not be in play in 2024. His strange selection only confirms that Harris is proudly “woke” and a far-left “woke” “radical”—as she herself once put it.

Otherwise, we are learning very quickly that Walz is as erratic, error-prone, and dishonest as Harris. He too is already heading for seclusion from the media. The man of the people from the countryside has scoffed, in self-incriminating Mike Bloomberg fashion, that rural Minnesota is little more than “rocks and cows.”

In mere hours after his nomination, he has grown mute about his past and politics except for teleprompted rah-rah speeches—avoiding reporters, interviews, and unscripted moments.

Why?

Because, in less than a week, the nation learned that Walz lied about his military rank, lied that he had deployed to Iraq, and lied that he had carried a weapon in war. The more we learn about Walz’s record as governor in Minnesota, the more it trumps even the disastrous tenure of Gavin Newsom in his imploding doom-loop state that Walz apparently saw as a model for a once can-do stable Minnesota.

The Insurrectionary Radical Mind

Add it all up, and the president, the vice president, the Democratic presidential candidate, and the vice presidential nominee all either cannot or will not speak casually and publicly to elected representatives, reporters, or the people themselves.

Worse still, they retire from their responsibilities of public engagement because these selected officials accept that the alternative of transparency is nearly suicidal to their own agendas. No one is now in charge of America—neither the ghosted president nor the campaigning vice president candidate who both act as if they hold no office.

It gets far worse still. Joe Biden was created by a soft coup of sorts in March 2020 when all his unpalatable left-wing radical rivals mysteriously vanished in unison at a time when an inert “centrist” Biden had not yet won a single primary.

Then Biden was dethroned abruptly 38 months later by the same inside plotters who deemed his sock puppet role was no longer viable—but only after their sure loser in November had become more a liability to the left than any longer a useful, empty vessel of governance. But as for his fitness as a man of the left to continue ruling us, he was just fine.

It continues to get even worse.

Then the same donors, the same politicos, and the same obsequious media grandees pivoted yet a third time. On the morning of June 27, a fit-as-a-fiddle Biden needed not to step down both because of his brilliance and dynamism—and the unthinkable succession of the Harris mediocrity.

By late night June 27, it was decided that a now suddenly enfeebled and unelectable Biden could be forcibly removed. Harris was Phoenix-like just as quickly reborn as the second coming of Obama—glib, in control, cool, and competent.

We are now witnessing yet a fourth coup from the party that warns us that democracy dies in darkness.

They have removed their once robust now demented nominee, nullified 14 million primary voters, repackaged and selected Harris in his place who has never won a single primary—and now plan to continue in power for another four years by silencing the outgoing president, secluding the vice president and muting the Democratic ticket itself.

In sum, leftists endlessly conspire not only because they have little confidence in the people, but because they have absolutely none in themselves.

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About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent  The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.

Photo: (From left to right) President Joe Biden, Vice President and Democratic Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris, Vice Presidential Nominee Tim Walz. (GettyImages)

Notable Replies

  1. Avatar for task task says:

    They may be silent but even Harris with her 500 word child like vocabulary understands that silence is the best political offense when her historical ineptitude doesn’t just make Joe Biden appear like a dead Albatross as much as it makes their new dream team appear like a resurrected Dodo. Joe Biden could not be easily grounded. These fools will never get off the ground. They have a record and it is a record which spells more war, more inflation, more crime, more drug deaths, more suffering, more morbidity, more mortality and less of the America we once new where peace, prosperity and happiness was part of everyday life and where people could dream and expect more of the same for themselves, their fellow Americans and their posterity. American, as we once new her, will never survive another four years of the same.

  2. There are at least two typo’s in the column. Reagan’s final year as President was 1988 - not 1980. Biden’s opponents magically disappeared in March 2020 - not March 2000.

    On substance, again the Dems are conducting a quasi-psyop of a campaign ahead of their convention. They are lying and hiding their true positions on the issues. Everything about their campaign is fake includingsome of the photos shared on social media.

  3. I keep expecting Joe to slip the leash for a moment, get to a mic and let rip a tirade about situation. After decades of lusting after his current position, you know he has to be furious about being thrown under the bus by his own party, when he remembers it.

  4. Should Harris win in November, is she going to giggle her way through her Presidency? Has the USA become how Charles De Gaulle characterized Brazil as “Not a serious country?” I can only imagine the delight that our foreign adversaries must have at the thought of Harris as POTUS and the devastation that her Presidency will have for us. As that Czech editorial noted when Obama was inaugurated, “America will survive the Obama Presidency, but it will not survive those who elected him.” In hindsight, I would suggest the editor have said, “America will survive the FIRST Obama Presidency, but it won’t survive the following ones.” Obama and his fellow communists are destroying our nation. What are the cabal of wealthy corporate elites going to do when the USA implodes as a result of the Biden and now the potential Harris Presidencies?

  5. Irrational exuberance has carried Harris through her first three weeks of campaigning, but like the Olympic Medals of the Paris games, it is beginning to tarnish. The press has done its job of carrying her along, but their shoulders are beginning to tie. She won’t be able to duck an interview much longer, and I suspect, her default to word salads will come to the fore again.

    Too, the media had even less success in hiding the true Tim Walz from the public. The burning of Minneapolis, the Trans agenda, the Covid restriction, and his obvious stolen valor are just too much for the media to hide. Legacy media forgets or ignores the power of the internet, that when coupled with a curious electorate, negates its once powerful ability to gaslight the population.

    After her meteoric rise in the polls, her momentum is leveling out and will soon decline. Policy positions can be ignored only so long before the public demands to see behind the curtain. Happily, the Gigler and the Snitch have long public records that after even a cursory examination will torpedo both their and the media’s attempts to rewrite history in their favor.

    Another clash the media will be unable to hide is the growing split in the Democrat Party between the Pro-Hamas and Pro-Israel factions that threaten to tear the Party apart. Does anyone expect we won’t see the two sides in major clashes during the DNC convention in Chicago? I expect it will be 1968 all over again with the added enhancements of thousands of smart phones broadcasting the clashes to millions of viewers.

    All in all, though the last few weeks have been irritating to watch, the next few weeks will be must see TV and we will be ready to embrace the new possibilities unburdened by what has come before.

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