The world may have been surprised by Biden's decision yesterday to drop out of the race for the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States. But there's one group who were not surprised readers of Strategic Intelligence and The Daily Reckoning.
Here's what I wrote in October 2023, almost 10 months ago:
The Democrats can’t wait to get rid of Biden. They’re preparing to tell him he has to step down or at least announce he’s not running. This will clear the way for Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Jay Pritzker or one of the other pretenders... DNC rules may have to be heavily revised since it is likely that Biden will control a large share of the delegates if this substitution process occurs late in the primary season. There may be other elements in the bargain including an agreed pardon for the Biden family by Harris (similar to the Ford-Nixon pardon). At the end of an ugly process, the Democrats will have what they believe is a viable candidate to face off against the Republican nominee.
There you have it. And here we are. In just over three weeks, we've gone through one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. political history. Beginning on June 27 with Biden's face-plant debate performance, continuing through the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, then the selection of J.D. Vance as Trump's VP candidate and the nomination of Trump July 15-18 and now the Biden announcement on July 21 that he's not seeking the nomination.
No incumbent president has ever dropped out of a presidential election campaign this close to Election Day just 106 days from now. We can hypothesize but no one really knows what happens next including the leaders of the Democratic Party.
That's more than most voters can digest in an entire campaign cycle let alone in a matter of weeks. And it's not over. Biden's endorsement of Kamala Harris as the Democrat
nominee for president doesn't resolve the issue of who the nominee will actually be. We're in for at least another month of political chaos, maybe more. Get ready.
There's more that we don't know than we know about what comes next. That's OK. It's not too soon to pose the key questions, frame possible outcomes and use our proprietary predictive analytic techniques to estimate the path ahead while being ready to pivot as and when key new facts emerge.
Biden's announcement came Sunday afternoon in a letter released on social media. The letter wasn't even on White House stationery; it was on Joe's personal letterhead. What an insult to the American people. Could he not come out and give an Oval Office address explaining his reasons for this decision?
In 1968, when Lyndon Johnson dropped out of the nomination race after the primaries had begun, LBJ gave a 4,000-word address to the American people on live TV. That's class. Biden stuck with his low-class style to the end.
By the way, who said Biden actually wrote the letter? It's almost certain he did not write it but did he read it or understand it before it was sent? We don't have to be conspiracy theorists to ask simple questions about the origins of the letter and the process of releasing it.
Are we witnessing a bloodless coup d'etat in America? I've seen the CIA push foreign leaders under the bus for decades. Have they finally turned their techniques to getting rid of a U.S. president?
You can't rule anything out these days. Who will win the Democratic nomination Kamala Harris or someone else?
I break it all down for you below. Read on.
By Jim Rickards
Biden promptly endorsed Kamala Harris as his preferred candidate for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. So what? We don't live in a hereditary monarchy. Harris should go through a process to secure the nomination. What's the process? Various ideas have been floated including "mini-primaries" in the next few weeks to get Kamala the delegates she needs. What if the delegates don't play along?
Harris has a favorability rating of only 29% in a recent CNN poll. That's lower than Joe Biden himself! Even Joe gets 39% in favorability ratings. Harris failed miserably as the "border czar" with a mission to control illegal immigration. Instead she went to Guatemala and babbled about "root causes" before washing her hands of the whole thing. The catastrophic results are all around us.
Harris cannot speak extemporaneously, a key skill for debaters and candidates. She resorts to third-grade baby talk about "big yellow school buses" and "the big moon up in the sky." She laughs in a high-pitched tone at inappropriate times, no doubt a nervous tick to cover for the fact that she can't think on her feet.
Biden may be demented but Harris is a dunce. The Democrats will have as much difficulty covering up her low IQ as they did covering up Biden's dementia.
Interestingly, Obama and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have not endorsed Harris so far and Pelosi did so only with a lag.
Party elites are trying to whip them into a quick vote for Kamala but there's no assurance that effort will work. Right now, the DNC is calling the 50 state party chairs asking them to caucus their state delegations and come back with a yes or not vote for Kamala. This process may collapse into chaos in the coming days.
Many others could jump into an open primary or an open convention. These officials include Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Jay Pritzker and Gina Raimondo. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin has already announced that he's interested in running. Even long-shot Marianne Williamson said she would like to be considered.
Hillary Clinton, anyone? Don't rule it out. She polls better against Trump than the other top Democrats despite her 2016 loss to Trump.
Biden said he's dropping out of the presidential nominating contest but will remain as president. The Republicans wasted no time in asking: If Biden is unfit to run, how can he be fit to serve? You'll be hearing that phrase over and over in the coming weeks. At a minimum, Biden is a lame duck as of now.
Lame-duck presidencies can be dangerous because foreign adversaries know the president's power is circumscribed as staffers bail out and hop on the next winning bandwagon. Government processes can grind to a halt. That's not what the country needs right now.
One strategy would be for Biden to resign the presidency in the days ahead, make Kamala the president and let her reap the benefits of running as an incumbent president instead of an anointed elite outsider. It's also a way for Biden to get presidential pardons for the Biden Crime Family without having to pardon himself. That's a smart strategy. For that reason, you can count on Biden not to do it.
There could be serious legal challenges to any "hand off" from Biden to Harris (or anyone else) as currently contemplated by the Democrats. Nominations are determined by party rules, but ballots are determined by state law. There may be states where a simple hand off from one candidate to another at the top of the ticket is prohibited. That means litigation and more uncertainty.
What about Democrats who totally supported Joe Biden until the end including Bernie Sanders and AOC? They've been hung out to dry. That may hurt Democrats in November in terms of reduced turnout from the left wing of the party, which is almost the only group the party has left.
Did Biden get a golden parachute in exchange for his decision (if it was his decision)? Promises of a pardon? Money for a Biden Presidential Library? Big-ticket consulting fees for Hunter and Jill over and above a presidential pension? Time will tell.
What about accountability for the scores of staff liars who told us for years that Biden was "sharp as a tack," "worked harder than any of us" and similar deceptions. I knew Biden was cognitively impaired in 2020 as did others. Before 2020, his impairment was not as pronounced but his low IQ and serial fables were well known as far back as the 1990s when I spent a lot of time on the Senate side of Capitol Hill.
The significance of the June 27 debate was not that Biden appeared mentally impaired (we already knew that) but that the Democrats realized they couldn't hide it anymore. That game was over. That's when the replacement game began. The Democrats don't care about the voters or democracy. They only care about power and they talk down to everyday Americans like they're children. We're not. We get it. Good luck trying to earn trust when you've squandered it for the last eight years.
Who will the Harris VP pick be? We don't know yet. Harris has to get the nomination locked down first. Then again, she may find that an early selection perhaps in the coming days will help her to lock down the nomination in the first place. We'll know soon.
It's not clear how the Democrats will continue to label Trump a "threat to democracy" when they just trashed their own democratic primary process and discarded 15 million votes for Biden cast by loyal Democrats. Still, the Democrats might just carry on with the same old slogans as before. At least there's some red meat for the true believers.
The next key date is Aug. 1. That's the day the Democrats plan to conduct their "digital roll call vote" in an effort to hand Kamala the nomination as quickly as possible. This means the Aug. 19 Democratic convention in Chicago will be just for show. One could make the case that the entire Democratic nominating process since 2023 has been just for show.
The policy implications of this coup d'etat in America are enormous. A Harris-Trump contest will impact everything from Ukraine to tax cuts, regulations and the Green New Scam. Trillions of dollars of subsidies are at stake one way or the other. I don't have space to cover all these policies today, but I'll certainly be discussing them in depth in future issues.
One last warning: Even if Trump goes on to win the election on Nov. 5, the Democrats still have one trick up their sleeves. On Jan. 6, 2025, they will introduce a resolution declaring Donald Trump an "insurrectionist" under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
If that passes, Trump's electoral votes can be discarded. Kamala (or whomever) will not have 270 votes to win. This means the election goes to the House of Representatives (the new House elected on Nov. 5, not the existing House). In that case, anything can happen including a compromise Nikki Haley presidency. Something like that did happen in 1800 and again in 1824.
As Yogi Berra said, "It ain't over 'til it's over."
The Daily Reckoning