The President of the United States has reemerged, more or less. After an absence from public view of six days — twice the length of Gorbachev’s disappearance in the 1991 Soviet coup — he was photographed reentering the White House yesterday, and will deliver a televised address this evening. Ordinarily an absence of this duration, especially during a vacation or an illness, would not be a particular public concern, except that during this time he announced his abdication and successor via tweet. The whole context and personnel of Constitutional Article II governance being overturned by an unverifiable pair of short memoranda was accepted with remarkable quiescence by regime-allied media, which is consistent with, well, everything about it.
This landed on the beautiful and properly sovereign Texas soil of my lawn yesterday, and it will be nonstop like this through November 5th:
Office-seeker seeks office, film at six. Understand what is happening here, because media is only a part of the larger mechanism at work. Periodically the regime abruptly decides to elevate elements of fixation and intensity, imparting upon them a surpassing urgency upon which, the populace is told, all else depends. You can think back across the past generation and come up with your own list. It was existential that we invade Iraq, existential that we impose a reparative structure of racial caste upon ordinary Americans, existential that schools and churches close but large businesses stay open, and so on. Those are the big items, and there are an array of smaller ones: the anti-Semitic cohorts in American life have labored to generate a comparable society-wide fixation since October 7th, 2023, but have enjoyed only niche success. You can even identify regime-allied elements aligning their marketing with this apparatus, which is how we got most Disney-produced content of the past half-decade. Everything is a reckoning, everything is essential, everything is imperative, everything is now.
This is the template for the full-tilt promotion and marketing reinvention of the Vice President of the United States, who is now the President of the United States in all but name. This is why the proper description of the former President’s actions across the past week remain squarely in the rhetoric of coup and abdication: the former because this outcome was forced upon him by elements within the regime, and the latter because he retains no real power. Prior to midday Sunday, it was eminently possible to imagine policy and decisions emanating from the Executive Branch with which Joseph Biden agreed, and Kamala Harris did not. After sometime on Monday, and especially after yesterday’s declaration that her formal nomination is assured, that is simply impossible. All policy and power now orient toward her. It is the choice of the regime to be sure, but not the choice of those actually empowered to decide in the Constitutional order.
Understand that this is not some lame-duck period well understood in American civics: George H.W. Bush running for President while Ronald Reagan still presides, for example. The qualitative difference now is that no previous President across two and half centuries of American history was ever publicly humiliated with back-to-back expositions of his own personal and political impotence in the way that President Biden has been. No previous President was ever positively compelled to exit public life and hand over his whole apparatus to his Vice President. President Biden therefore retains the form of the office without the substance. The substance is fully in possession of the prime beneficiary of his fall.
Kamala Harris is the de facto President of the United States. Why she is not in de jure possession of the office is a topic for speculation, befitting the opacity of this entire affair. We can guess that perhaps the Biden clique, down to its last holdouts, negotiated an exit on the condition that this final act in public life be the fiction of a dignified exit. (This is a problem for regime media, which went full-court on the narrative of his inability to hold office for the past thirty days, and now must endorse the opposite narrative for the remainder of the year, but one of its own making.) We can also guess that the various regime factions were unready to fully commit to the Vice President, knowing well her disastrous record as a national figure, consistently unsteady and unpopular. She knows they know it, which is why she and her own factions are rushing to terminate any uncertainties in a hurry, both with delegate pursuits and with a strange August 7th “virtual” nomination nearly two weeks before the actual Democratic National Convention. The timing has a purpose: the Harris faction knows that if she cannot establish a plausibly competitive candidacy in national polling by the week of August 12th, the DNC the following week has the potential to become genuinely deliberative and competitive. That’s the disaster scenario for her and for the regime — though not for what remains of the party’s popular base, which might actually benefit from a process they were effectively denied.
The alert reader will contrast this with the state of the Republican Party, which regime media routinely asserts is now an authoritarian vehicle, yet somehow held a genuinely competitive primary process and selected its nominee entirely in public view.
This is the state of American governance and civics through year’s end. We have a figurehead President with no real power, an actual President whose hold on power — and competence to wield it — is unsteady, and a regime-narrative mechanism that informs us that it is existential that we elect Kamala Harris. (The last item will become increasingly North-Korean in aesthetic as events unfold.) But Kamala Harris is already in power, unelected. One might say it is a setup for crisis.
But it’s worse than that: it is the crisis.