America still doesn’t have a president.
We could argue about how long America has lacked an actual living, breathing, fully sentient president—was Joe Biden ever those things in his three years as commander-in-chief?—but what matters most is that, at this juncture and for the next four months, America still has and will have no leader. Or, rather, somebody else—singular or plural—is still doing the leading.
Don’t let the small matter of the election distract you, either: there’s plenty of leading to be done yet.
Of course, Biden could be replaced, in an attempt to give Kamala Harris a much needed “bounce” in the polls. At this stage, given everything that’s happened, it’s definitely possible. Nothing else is working to make Montel Williams’ ex-squeeze any less unlikeable. John Fetterman is warning Willie Brown’s mistress could lose Pennsylvania, and her running-mate Tim Walz is turning off the crucial independent voters of Minnesota, especially the white dudes, not one of whom is convinced by his down-home okey-dokey man-next-door routine. They know Walz is a gay race communist—a “Maoist to the core,” as one of his former students put it—a man who thinks tampons are essential health care for teenage boys and who may even have given American nuclear secrets to the Chinese.
The fact that America has no leader was underlined last week when Jill Biden sat at the head of a cabinet meeting in place of her husband. It was President Biden’s first cabinet meeting since 2 October 2023, and he wasn’t even in the driver’s seat.
The President, looking visibly exhausted as only a man who’s spent a quarter of his presidency on the beach eating ice cream can, turned the meeting over to his wife almost straight away.
“It’s all yours, kid,” he said.
Cute. Sort of.
Actually, not really.
Reaction to news coverage of the cabinet meeting was indignant.
“She’s literally Edith Wilson except right out in the open in a 24/7 news cycle and nobody in the media cares,” Tweeted Doug Price, in reference to the wife of President Woodrow Wilson, who secretly ran the presidency for two years when her husband suffered a stroke.
Edith Wilson called what she did “her stewardship.” Axios called Dr Jill Biden’s “the Biden Oligarchy,” and told us the names of some of the other people involved—Biden’s sister, his advisor Ted Kaufman and “a small band of White House advisers.”
After the palace coup that removed Joe Biden from the election race, we can be sure the Biden Oligarchy doesn’t occupy the same role in governing that it did before.
Other than that, however, we just don’t know who is actually holding the reins of executive power.
Should Americans be worried?
Yes, in a word. Here’s one reason I can think of: the looming threat of nuclear war with Russia.
On Friday, President Zelensky of Ukraine told the world’s media that he would soon be unveiling a “Final Victory” plan for the conflict in his country, which has ground on now for more than two years and cost the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, and more than a few Western soldiers too.
According to President Zelensky, the most important aspect of the Final Victory plan is obtaining authorization for long-range missile strikes deep inside Russia, using Western missiles and guidance systems. The Ukrainians have already struck inside Russia using weapons supplied to them by their Western allies, but the strikes have been limited to the immediate border regions of Russia. Zelensky believes his country must go further if it is to defeat Russia.
So far, Western leaders have refused to allow deep strikes against Russia, because the Russians have been very clear about what that would mean: nuclear war. Various current representatives of the Russian government have said this, former Russian president Dmitriy Medvedev has said it, and Vladimir Putin himself has all but said it.
There has been no deviation from the line by Moscow: If Ukraine starts shooting Western-made advanced weapons systems into the heart of Mother Russia, using Western advanced targeting systems, with Western approval, that will be considered a direct act of aggression by the West—and principally the US.
I’m no apologist for Russia, but the country has exercised remarkable restraint in tolerating the West’s support for Ukraine. Russia has tolerated this aggression because the West, i.e. the US and to a lesser extent the UK, has nuclear weapons, and Russia and the US both know the stakes of a direct confrontation. The two countries have spent the last seven decades gameplanning the insanity of a nuclear exchange. The acronym was “MAD” for a reason.
But American-made missiles hitting Moscow would be too much. There have to be red lines. (I think Barack Obama said that, didn’t he?)
Zelensky will meet with “Biden” on Thursday, in Washington. Note the inverted commas. Zelensky has assured “Biden” of a “place in history” if he grants his wish.
“Biden can strengthen Ukraine and make important decisions for Ukraine to become stronger and to protect its independence while he is US president,” Zelensky said.
“I think it is a historical mission.”
Don’t the American people deserve to know exactly whose authorization Zelensky will be seeking when he arrives in Washington?
Don’t the American people deserve to know who has decided, on their behalf, without the benefit of an electoral mandate, that victory in Ukraine may be worth the risk of thermonuclear war?
And what about the peoples of the rest of the world, since a nuclear war would affect them too?
Time is running out for the regime—by which I mean, their desperate efforts to stop Donald Trump becoming president again just aren’t working. So far Trump has proven unstoppable and indeed unkillable by conventional means, but that doesn’t mean the regime won’t keep trying. They could still try to kill Teflon Don, or they could try a real hail Mary.
And as far as hail Marys go, a direct war with Russia would be pretty far out there.
I hope I’m just being dramatic. But four months is a long time in politics, and the regime has everything to lose.
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