There is no grand plan to replace Biden

A week before the CNN presidential debate, I laid out four options for how the rematch between President Biden and former President Donald Trump would play out. One is that it will be a terrible night for Biden, leading to calls for the incumbent candidate to step down.

Clearly, that is what ultimately happened last week: it was a complete disaster that no one could have predicted, casting a dangerous and uncertain future for the Democratic Party and America itself.

I pointed out that the Democratic establishment’s choice to move the first debate from September to June was in some ways strategic: It forced the issue of competence: If Biden did well, he could silence his critics, and if he failed, it would give the party time to come up with a workable solution.

But I probably overestimated the Democrats. As we’ve seen this week, Biden’s cognitive decline is alarming and replacing him is a natural inevitability. But there’s no coordination. There’s no strategy. There’s no plan, which is glaring and a bit shocking.

This also applies to reporting. Under Trump, the mainstream media enjoyed a true look at what goes on behind the scenes with the president, with all the dramatic detail. But under Biden, the media ( Wall Street Journal Criticism (In retrospect, this seems prescient.) They don’t seem remotely interested in what the president is like behind closed doors.

Now that the debate has revealed the reality, the door is open for criticism. The New York Times Highlight warnings More on debate preparations: Biden kicked off the debate at 11 a.m. and took a break for his daily afternoon nap. Axios Point out Biden is less engaged and effective before 10 a.m. and after 4 p.m. Politico Pulling out the knife Because of his “close aides,” he noted, aides were afraid to explain the situation to Biden, who was quick-tempered and unpredictable.

Atlantic’s Mackay Coppins Pushed back There has been a growing chorus of voices this week buying into the idea that the media knew Biden was such a terrible person and deliberately hid it from the public in order to get him elected. This suggests that there was some kind of master plan, a conspiracy, to deceive the public. In some ways it would be simpler and easier to understand if there had been a coordinated effort by elite forces in the government and media to force lies on the public about Biden’s declining cognitive abilities and then expose it all at once to force changes in the campaign.

Instead, it all seems less coordinated and much more boring. There was no grand plan. Members of Acela Media willfully ignored obvious facts, lied to their audience, and thought they could continue that tactic in their post-debate coverage. Unfortunately, the debate was a disaster, far beyond any possible advertising. And the June runway gave them an opportunity to push Biden’s replacement as the candidate, and possibly the president.

It’s cluttered and disorganized, and no one looks like a 6-dimensional chess champion.

But now we see this strange introspection among some media outlets. They are acting as if they witnessed a shocking event last Thursday. They are mostly well-sourced journalists based in Washington DC, and belong to the same community as the Biden campaign. Either all their sources lied to them (in which case they should fire them immediately) or the journalists lied to the public. Either way, this is a dereliction of the media’s duty to serve the public.

But there was no grand plan at the heart of it all, and the resulting chaos makes that clear. Last week was a choppy, awkward one. How will Biden be replaced? Will he be replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris? Will she become president first and then run as the incumbent? Or will it be contested in a convention instead?

There is no agreement, no strategy, and confusion and panic in the media and political establishment alike.

Perhaps what these forces were hoping for was to just cross their fingers and hope that no one would question or make a fuss about what Biden was really like behind the scenes. For a while, this worked. Biden rarely gave interviews outside of the occasional sycophantic chat with figures like Howard Stern. His team and the media gleefully dismissed any uncomfortable senior moments as “cheap fakes.”

The secret weapon was the threat that negative reporting about Biden’s age would increase the chances of a Trump victory and thus lead to the undermining of democracy itself. But intellectual and social intimidation is not an effective plan, at least not in the long term.

Biden’s advisers, who knew the truth and yet lied to themselves and to us, never had a plan. There was no plan for “What if the truth gets exposed at the debate?” There was no plan for “What if we stop lying?” There was no plan for “What if our colleagues in the mainstream media stop covering us anymore simply because Trump is so terrible?”

It was all just a pretense, just “praying through gritted teeth,” and totally thoughtless.

So what’s going to happen now? Will Biden be replaced as a candidate or as president? Who knows. We’ll all find out. It’s scary in a way. But we’ll be OK, no matter what happens in the election. It’s actually kind of comforting to know that the elites might be even more panicked than you and I are.

Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, wrote,Exposed: How the media succumbed to power, abandoned principles and lost the people” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.