Let’s face it, we’ve known that Joe Biden isn’t all there for years now. Had it not been for the COVID pandemic, he wouldn’t have been able to hide it as much as he was able to, and the media wouldn’t have been so successful in pretending it wasn’t a problem.
Many have speculated that Joe Biden was never supposed to serve out a full term, let alone pursue a second one. Yet, here we are. Biden launched his 2024 campaign earlier this year, and while there’s no shortage of rumors about him dropping out, at the moment, he’s still in it and thinks he can win it.
But the polls aren’t exactly saying he can win it. Most polls show a tight race in a hypothetical matchup between Biden and Trump in 2024, which is a huge problem for Biden. That’s because in 2020, he consistently led Trump by a healthy margin — and even so, he grossly underperformed on Election Day.
Related: BREAKING: New Poll Shows Trump Crushing Biden by Double Digits
The latest NBC News poll shows that “a combined 74% of registered voters say they have major concerns (59%) or moderate concerns (15%) that Biden, at age 80, doesn’t have the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term.”
Are you surprised? You shouldn’t be. Various polls have shown for three years now that Americans are concerned that Biden is neither physically nor mentally capable of being president for another term. Biden and those around him knew this well before he launched his 2024 campaign, so it seems unlikely that he would willingly take himself out of the race. Dropping Kamala Harris isn’t much of an option, either. While replacing her with someone who has more than a handful of brain cells would help Biden in theory, the risk of offending the black community by dropping “the first black female vice president in history” is bound to backfire on him.
So, what are Democrats to do? Well, they don’t have to wait for Biden to make a move — if they don’t want to.
I’m old enough to remember when Democrats tried to push the narrative that Donald Trump wasn’t mentally fit to be president. Between the Russian collusion hoax and the impeachments, it can be easy to forget that the left, which includes Democrats in Washington and the mainstream media, desperately promoted this narrative, routinely floating the possibility that Trump could be ousted via the 25th Amendment.
In fact, the noise over Trump’s mental competence got so loud that he even took a cognitive test a year into his term to silence his critics. Naturally, he aced the exam, but of course, that did little to satisfy his critics. They were desperate to find some way to remove him from office, and talk about invoking the 25th Amendment persisted. The magazine Psychology Today even ran a story a month before the 2020 election that conjectured whether it was time to use the tactic, citing “experts” who had never properly evaluated Trump and rehashing their opinions as legitimate.
Biden’s polls are garbage, and most Americans don’t think he has the mental competence to continue on. If ever there were a pretext for invoking the 25th Amendment, this is it. It never worked with Trump because the accusations were stupid, but you don’t have to convince Americans that Biden isn’t competent.
So if Democrats are really concerned about Biden’s mental health and his political viability, why aren’t they attempting to remove him via the 25th Amendment?
The reason is likely Kamala Harris. And who can blame Democrats for hesitating? Elevating Harris to the presidency would force them to rally behind her as the de facto incumbent. And her poll numbers are even worse than Joe Biden’s.
The Democratic Party could potentially refuse to endorse any candidate until after a primary and give other Democrats an opening to run. If they really want to get rid of Biden, this might be the only way.
