“President Hillary Clinton” is the stuff of which nightmares are made, and I just had one that left me sitting straight up in a cold sweat last night.
And I hadn’t even been asleep.
I blame myself for the waking nightmare. I’d been relaxing in bed with a brandy, re-reading a Roger Kimball column before turning off the lamp for what I thought would be a pleasant night’s rest.
That’s when the shakes and the sweats began, and in the next moment, I shot straight upright, causing my wife to ask if I was OK.
“No,” I nearly shouted. “I might never be OK again.”
Let’s back up a moment to that Kimball piece.
“Exactly how it will happen I do not yet know,” he wrote for American Greatness on Sunday, but “I suspect that Joe Biden is being prepped for ejection” from the Oval Office.
The NYT finally admitting the truth of the Hunter Biden laptop story, Hunter’s likely indictment for tax fraud, Joe’s weird rant about blackmail porn, Biden’s record-breaking time spent underwater in the approval polls …
… add all these things together, and Kimball believes Democrats might just be desperate enough to defenestrate their own guy.
How would it all play out, showing Kamala the door and then Joe? Not even Roger Kimball — with a bigger brain than mine — could even pretend to know.
In the easiest scenario, Biden resigns for health reasons or similar. In the most difficult scenario, Biden is forced out via the 25th Amendment.
Sure the Deep State could muster enough Cabinet officers and congresscritters to make it work. They know which palms to grease and, more importantly, where the bodies are. Or … [he wrote in a more sinister tone] … where they could end up.
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I’ve never believed that the 25th would ever be used to its fullest extent, but the times might be a-changin’.
There is however the teensy little problem of Alleged Vice President Kamala Harris, who can’t be trusted not to bogart a joint, much less with the nuclear codes.
Kimball admits that getting rid of Harris is “more of a problem.” She’s incompetent and unpopular, sure, but not corrupt in an “easy-to-demonstrate sort of way” like Nixon’s veep, Spiro Agnew, had been.
As distasteful as I find Harris, I find it even more distasteful imagining how she might be made to leave office.
The Dems have people for that.
So if we assume that Biden and Harris are gone, are we really looking at President Nancy Pelosi?
The House Speaker is second in line only to the Vice President in the presidential succession, but there’s no way Pelosi would be made president.
She’s too old. She’s too polarizing. She’s too confused.
She’s Biden in a pants suit.
Ordinary Democrats would never rally to that sad cause.
But what if … bear with me here … Pelosi wasn’t the Speaker, if only for a little while?
It’s one of those “one weird tricks” kind of deal, but there’s nothing in the Constitution or even the House rules that the Speaker has to be a member of Congress.
I’ve toyed with the idea that the next GOP congress — presumably Jan. 6, 2023 — should make Donald Trump their Speaker. It would frustrate the Democrats to no end and give Trump a great bully pulpit. Who knows, he might enjoy it all so much that he clears the way for Ron DeSantis in 2024, avoiding an ugly fight.
This is all conjecture, of course.
But if Trump could be the Republican Speaker, surely Pelosi could step aside to make Hillary Clinton the Speaker … just long enough to become President Hillary Clinton.
Crazy, right? In a million years such a Byzantine scheme could never work.
And yet there I was, bolt upright in bed, covered in sweat on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday night.
It all sounds like a cheesy ’70s conspiracy thriller where Elliot Gould — or was it Donald Sutherland? — uncovers the Deep State plot to secretly take over the country and run it with their puppet.
Or didn’t that just happen already?
