How soon will we get President Kamala?

“What am I doing here?” Good question, Mr President. Frankly, it’s what a growing number of us have been asking lately. President Joe Biden, on a recent trip to Houston, Texas, treated his audience to a classic example of his distinctive style of oratory; it may have lacked the rhetorical polish of John F Kennedy, but it bracingly challenged the intellectual acumen of his hearers, to decipher the cryptic message being conveyed.

“Good afternoon, actually it is evening, I want to thank you, Governor and Mrs Abbott, for your hospitality and friendship. And Senator Cornyn, I think he had to go back, I think he’s getting on a plane he told me a little last, he came in to see me last event… And representatives, uh, Shirley [Sheila] Jackson Lee (D-TX), Al Green, Sylvia Garcia, Lizzy Pinelli, uh, excuse me, uh, Pinell, and uh, what am I doing here? I’m gonna lose track here…”

Thank you for those challenging words, Mr President; there are almost certainly codebreakers in the Pentagon who can interpret them for us. If that gnostic utterance provokes nostalgia for the articulacy and limpid clarity of Donald Trump, you are obviously not on the right wavelength to receive the message of the new woke administration. The on-message media in the United States diligently protect the President from his worst gaffes; unfortunately, the same does not apply to the non-complicit media in other parts of the world.

Here, for example, is the unsympathetic analysis of Sky News Australia host, Rita Panahi, who said: “No matter how hard the Democrats and their allies in the media try, Biden’s cognitive issues can no longer be ignored… We’ve seen Biden appear confused about key facts, policies, dates and names, even forgetting Barack Obama’s name. There is simply too much footage of his muddled rants, inexplicably bizarre outbursts and Charlie Sheen levels of confusion to try and gaslight the American public.”

Right. So, the leader of the world’s greatest superpower is several sandwiches short of a picnic: how reassuring is that? For a select number of people, very reassuring, is the answer. Things are developing exactly as they planned. Joe Biden’s condition is hardly a secret among his own Party, still less so in GOP circles. This time last year there was more open discourse on the topic of Biden’s mental fragility and the real reason why he was kept hidden away in a basement for the duration of the presidential election campaign.

Biden’s promotion as Democratic presidential nominee commanded a broad, if conflicting, consensus within the Democratic camp. For the Democratic old guard he represented the best chance of keeping Bernie Sanders off the ticket; to the more intelligent members of the radical left he was the Trojan horse candidate, respectable enough to retain the core vote, obediently prepared to endorse radical policies, with the actual potential to implement them by being elected president. It made sense and, with the help of the most ruthless and unprincipled electoral machine in the Western world, it worked.

But where the radical left brought off a stroke of genius was in yoking Biden to Kamala Harris as vice-presidential nominee. Harris was unelectable, as her disastrous performance in the Democratic primaries demonstrated. But as the proposed successor not to Trump, but to Mike Pence, she was going to seem unthreatening. Despite the old cliché about vice-presidents being one heartbeat away from the Oval Office, and the precedents of Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford, the number two on the presidential ticket attracts relatively little scrutiny. In the case of Harris, Democratic voters regarded her sex and ethnicity – despite her radical politics – as a constructive concession to key constituencies.

For certain elements of the Democratic Party’s extreme left – now the dominant force in Democratic politics – the agenda was different. Biden was biddable, but ultimately unreliable: Harris would be their ideal president, her being a woman and from an ethnic minority would in itself mark a totemic victory for woke aspirations, while she could be relied on to deliver their programme to dismantle every American institution and replace it with a radical alternative. Biden’s mental fragility and cognitive issues offered the perfect path to power: let reassuring old Joe win the presidential election and then, after a suitable interval, denounce his incapacity and remove him from office to clear the way for President Kamala.

And yes – this is a conspiracy theory and therefore all the more credible, since anyone who knows about politics recognises that what we call “politics”, everywhere in the world, is actually an interlocking network of conspiracies. Look at huddled groups in the bar, late at night, during a political party conference; lobby groups and “advocacy” organisations; factions within institutions such as the 1922 Committee; and thousands of similar plotting, conniving, striving entities in every political system around the globe. Dismissive reactions to “conspiracy theories” simply reflect the desire of those running conspiracies to stay off the radar and the boundless credulousness of those who espouse lunatic theories propagated online.

But real conspiracies, throughout history, have shaped the course of the world, and seldom for the better. That is why the pro-Harris conspiracy, even if not centrally directed and controlled in back rooms, is a potentially potent force. If that is the plan, why, one might ask, is it not being implemented? Why are the radical Democrats and their media allies not beginning to denounce Biden’s incompetence, to start the process of ousting him from the presidency?

For two reasons. The lesser one is that even the woke fanatics recognise that to attack a president whom they endorsed as recently as his inauguration two months ago might seem somewhat shameless, even by their standards. The much more powerful reason to hold off, however, is the hurdle of the mid-term elections in two years’ time. At present, the Democrats, who lost seats in the House of Representatives at the last election, have a precarious majority of eight, with five vacancies; the Senate is tied, with legislation being forced through by the casting vote of Kamala Harris.

With Americans prone to punish White House incumbents at mid-term elections and preferring to keep the organs of power in the hands of different parties, the next mid-terms are going to be a white-knuckle ride for the Democrats. If controversial and unpopular Kamala Harris emerged as president in advance of the mid-term elections, that difficult challenge would be transformed into a GOP landslide, leaving President Harris isolated in the Oval Office, unable to pass any woke legislation and ruling petulantly by executive orders, which would be revoked, on the Trump/Biden model, on her successor’s first day in office.

That is not the irreversible revolution the woke fanatics want. So, we may rely on Joe Biden’s mental health remaining officially A1 until the polls close at the mid-terms. After that, expect him to go downhill spectacularly fast. Suddenly, video clips that only Fox News and conservative groups are broadcasting now will be blasting the public’s confidence in their commander-in-chief on CNN and all the other complicit news media. Enter, stage left, President Harris.

That is the answer to the question how soon will we get President Kamala? – after the mid-terms, for insuperable reasons. The structures to effect this coup are increasingly in place. Even during the Trump impeachment saga, when Democrats tried to promote new rules for removing a mentally unstable president – generally presumed to be aimed at Trump – the real target was their own candidate, once he had exhausted his usefulness.

The American media are now not just partisan, in the pro-Democrat sense, but aggressively committed to the extreme woke, i.e. cultural Marxist, agenda. In recent months there has been a purge of editors across the media. Take the case of Stan Wischnowski, editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, with 19 years’ service on the paper. Last June, when many buildings in the city had been destroyed by rioters, he allowed a headline in his paper that read “Buildings Matter, Too”.  For that mild remonstration he was forced to resign.

The cull is widespread. Citing “unforeseen challenges” (action against him by “anti-racist” staff), the executive editor of the Los Angeles Times resigned at the end of 2020 and the Washington Post editor last month. Reuters editor-in-chief will retire next month. The president of MSNBC left last year, the president of CNN will depart later this year. The leftist Vox and HuffPost outlets have both lost their editors. Among the unprecedented host of departures, some may have left because Trump – the journalists’ dripping roast – is no longer around, but the siege climate surrounding editorial offices is the main reason and the departures are being replaced by woke successors.

The editor of Press Watch, Dan Froomkin, a former Washington Post reporter, wrote recently: “A new generation of leaders is coming! And they have a lot of urgent repair work ahead of them. That includes abandoning the failed anachronistic notions of objectivity under which they have operated for so long, recognizing and rejecting establishment whiteness, and finding dramatically more effective ways to create an informed electorate.”

That is the new leadership of America’s media: committed to rejecting “anachronistic” objectivity, to demonising a particular race and culture, and to moulding the electorate through re-education – actually the well-trodden path of Pravda and the Chinese People’s Daily. They are geared up to sustain President Kamala and her cultural revolution, if Biden topples. How far America has fallen in an astonishingly short time; and how much further it could yet descend.