With Biden Out, We Effectively Have No President Right Now

There was a moment on Monday during Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee that brought into sharp focus the unsettling reality of our political situation.

At one point, Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat, took Cheatle to task for refusing to take full responsibility for the failure of her agency to prevent the assassination attempt on Trump. He said he and others were calling for Cheatle to resign or — and here’s the key part — “for the president to fire you.”

Ah, the president you say?

Congressmen in both parties might be calling for the president to fire Cheatle, but President Biden can’t do that, even if he were inclined to, because he is unavailable, unwell, or otherwise incapacitated. We’re not really sure. No one has seen or heard from him in days, even though he has apparently made the historic decision to end his reelection campaign and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris in his stead.

That is to say, there is no one to do the firing because we effectively have no president right now.

The danger this poses to America’s national security is obvious. But it’s also dangerous domestically, as we try to make sense of an assassination attempt that came within millimeters of killing President Trump last Saturday. At a moment when the relevant authorities have offered profoundly unsatisfactory explanations for their massive failure to protect the presidential front-runner, there is no executive in the Oval Office to which the American people might appeal or to whom the press might even ask questions. There is still an office of the president, but there is no one there. It is empty, devoid of agency, and, in a word, lifeless.

Under normal circumstances — that is to say, with a functioning White House helmed by an engaged president — an assassination attempt would be the focus of attention across the executive branch. It would merit sustained attention and commentary from the sitting U.S. president, and it would transcend party politics, even in an election year, because the failures of the Secret Service would call into question the safety of everyone under their protection, whether Republican or Democrat.

Instead, we have an eerie silence. Joe Biden is simply gone, ousted in what amounts to a coup d’état. As if on cue, the media have shifted to talking about Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democrat Party nominee, as if this is just ordinary horse race politics. She is reported to have hauled in $81 million in campaign donations in 24 hours, an unprecedented sum that obviously is not organic in origin. The change has been disorienting in its swiftness, reminiscent of the famous passage from George Orwell’s 1984, describing how the Party would change the past by mere proclamation: “The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

As things stand, it’s as if we are expected not to notice that Biden has been ousted, accept that Harris’ campaign is normal and natural, and play along with all the usual trappings of the campaign season, but swapping out Biden’s name for Harris’.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s a conspiratorial plot that’s been executed in plain sight. And the Democrat Party elites who engineered all this are now closing ranks swiftly around Harris, in part to lend legitimacy to what they have done, which isn’t just bring an abrupt end to Biden’s reelection campaign, but also to his presidency. 

World leaders who had scheduled meetings with Biden are canceling them. This includes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is traveling to Washington, D.C., this week and will address Congress on Wednesday. He was supposed to meet with the president, but there is no president to meet with.

What happens next? I’m not sure anyone really knows. We have stepped out of narrative and into history, and things are moving fast now. But what must not happen is that we the people simply trundle along and accept the narrative that we’re given by the coup plotters and the media. There has to be accountability for them as much as for the Secret Service and other deep-state actors who set the stage for an assassination attempt on Trump.

Republican officeholders, state and federal, should be pressured by their constituencies to use every available tool, every lawful power they have, to ensure justice is done and the truth of these matters comes to light. We can’t rely on the corporate press, who are as much a part of this charade as the DNC.

And we have to be clear-eyed about the fact that we have sailed into very dangerous waters. Whether we make it out is by no means certain.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.