The US presidential election came and went. Trump got re-elected. One of the reasons Kamala Harris lost – not a key reason, but one of them – is that she’d had just three months to campaign.
If you’re reading this way after 2024 (you lucky bastards) or if you just didn’t pay that much attention (I don’t blame you), Harris got her party’s nomination during the convention in August, after it became clear to all that Joe Biden started experiencing a noticeable mental decline. How did we get there? Well…
The thing about conspiracies is that they’re hard to pull off. Not impossible, but hard. Conspiracists get a lot of bad press and ridicule, but some of the things they banged their drum about are now part of established history. The Tonkin Bay incident, used as the reason for the United States to send troops to Vietnam, was never real: that was decried as a conspiracy until much later, when the truth came out. Snowden’s revelations about the full extent of the NSA’s domestic spying confirmed – and exceeded – the biggest claims that had been written off as conspiracy theories earlier. Covid-19 was allegedly just a bad case of flu, but the folks who paid attention learned about it as far back as in December 2019. (That r/collapse subreddit can be a bit sensationalist, but they called it, and they were correct.)
Mocking every single last unusual statement and calling them all baseless conspiracy theories is like permanently gluing a set of blinders on your own head. Sure, you won’t get distracted by all that pesky peripheral vision anymore, but you also won’t jump away when something comes at you from the side.
I will preface this by saying I’m not a right-winger. Right-wingers get mocked for all their conspiracy theories, but they were completely, absolutely, 100% correct in 2023-24 when they claimed that Biden was going senile, that the conspicuous lack of press conferences and public appearances meant his handlers and his cabinet members could not control him. Depending on how far in the future (ya lucky bastards) you’re reading this, you might not be able to find all the context or all the social media posts from that timeframe, but take my word for it: there was a lot of mockery, and there were a lot of otherwise respectable left-wingers inventing a million reasons for why nobody has seen the president of the United States of America in person in months. In many, many months.
Something unusual happened in the summer of 2024. Normally, the presidential debates start after both parties have their conventions. Not before. As the incumbent, Biden had his party’s nomination by default, because incumbents typically (though not always) win. That’s despite his 2020 promises that, if elected, he’d serve only one term. (That was in response to the concerns about his age: on the 2024 election day, Biden, just weeks shy of his 82nd birthday, was the oldest US president in history.)
The presidential debate between Biden and Trump was held on June 26, 2024. It did not go well for Biden: he stammered, he lost his train of thought, he sounded and appeared weak and confused. The news and the social media lit up: he was quite different from the way he appeared back in 2020. That was followed by a few media appearances and interviews, during which his cognitive decline became even more apparent. The party insiders panicked. The richest donors grew concerned.
With mere weeks to go until the Democratic Party’s convention in 2024, Biden was convinced to make an announcement: he would not run for a re-election (despite his assurance that he would run, just days earlier) and he endorsed his VP, Kamala Harris, instead. The rest was history: the party united around Harris, gave her the nomination, and then, less than three months later, she lost.
There’s been an awful lot of finger-pointing after the election, but nobody (that I have seen, at least) bothered to look back and ask one single question: was Harris involved in the massive, multi-year cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline?
There’s not a lot of subtlety there: it’s a binary choice. Did she know, and did she participate in the cover-up? Or is there a plausible argument that she’d spent over a year without any personal content with Biden and his cabinet? If such an argument exists, then I have yet to hear it.
The 25th Amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1967) accounts for this situation in section 4: if the president is no longer capable of doing their job, then a simple majority vote can transfer the president’s power to the VP. (The majority vote = the VP + most of the cabinet, or the VP + most of whomever the Congress designates instead of the cabinet.) Unfortunately, that provision doesn’t account for human empathy. It did not get invoked during Reagan’s second term, when the signs of his cognitive decline became apparent. It also did not get invoked during the year when Biden’s decline was concealed from the public – or even after his decline became apparent to the entire world.
In my book, as an American and as someone with a degree in political science (hey, I was into the 25th Amendment before it was cool!), if you participated in the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline, you should not be allowed anywhere near the halls of power. No taxpayer-funded salary, no elections, no consulting gigs. Shoo. Unfortunately, I don’t run the world, so they’ll all go on to enjoy nice and cushy lives.
If Harris did know about Biden’s decline, and if she was part of that cover-up (which is almost certain), then the unusual decision to hold the first presidential debate before the convention becomes a lot more interesting. There are two explanations. The first is hubris. The second is a deliberate tactical move.
If the extra-early debate was due to hubris, it’s possible – just possible – that Biden’s cabinet had decided that he could be medicated and motivated enough for just one public appearance, that he would crush the debate, and help dispel all doubts. (That did not happen.) The second, more cynical explanation, is that Harris’s allies within the cabinet were too afraid to go with the 25th Amendment option, so they deliberately staged the debate before the convention, which made Biden’s mental state apparent, and resulted in Harris winning the nomination less than two months later.
The irony here, of course, is if they hadn’t done that, if Biden had refused to do public appearances, if he’d gotten the party nomination by default (with Harris still as his VP), then he might have defeated Trump, and Harris would’ve just had to wait a bit until Biden died, or resigned, or got 25th-Amendement’ed out of office.
There was at least one conspiracy going on at the time – the cabinet’s year-long (if not longer) charade that Biden was still fully competent, going so far as to stage tightly scripted and orchestrated cabinet meetings where everyone knew their lines and parroted them off in front of cameras.
The election happened more than seven weeks ago. By now, there are probably quite a few tell-all memoirs from Biden’s cabinet making their way through the publishing pipeline. There’s a really good chance that Bob Woodward will publish his own book of insider info, just like he did about Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic – but months after that could’ve done any good. I expect most of those memoirs (especially Harris’s) to gloss over the topic of Biden’s mental decline. I expect at least one of those books to share ugly firsthand accounts of what Biden’s average day looked like, of how they hid him from the public each day, each week, each month…
Either way, the cash-grabbing, most likely ghost-written tell-all books will be ugly: they tell either too many lies or too much truth.
And, just like with Reagan, just like with Biden, just like with whomever else America will elect far past the mandatory retirement age for air traffic controllers (56) or airline pilots (60-65). Because we learn nothing. And because sometimes, just sometimes, conspiracy theories are true.
