GOP Scrambles to Face New Presidential Opponent

President Joe Biden shocked the nation on Sunday when he announced in a letter posted on social media that he was ending his bid for a second term. It’s the end of the beginning for a chaotic summer that Democrats can ill afford heading into the general election cycle this November. Just over 100 days out from the presidential election on November 5, Democrats are scrambling to name a candidate, restructure their presidential campaign, and elect a presidential and vice presidential nominee. With so much uncertainty across the aisle, the right is also having to rethink and reposition its efforts to elect Trump and Republicans down ballot come November.

Democrats across the media and political landscape started calling for the president to end his bid for the presidency after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against the former President Donald Trump three weeks ago. On Sunday, they got their wish. Though Biden has not been seen since dropping out of the race, Biden’s social media released a statement that read, “While it has been my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

The first question Republicans have, according to sources familiar with discussions on Capitol Hill, is Where is President Joe Biden? Biden, recently diagnosed with a case of Covid-19, was last seen getting off of Air Force One in Delaware four days before he withdrew from the race. While Biden has promised to address the nation with more details of his decision to not run for reelection in the coming days, the president’s schedule remains empty. Republicans are left speculating whether the president’s silence is because he is profoundly upset at his own party, which has been reported elsewhere, or his health is preventing him from doing so, which Vice President Kamala Harris denied in her first public appearance since Biden dropped out.

Before Biden’s Sunday announcement, nearly 40 elected Democrats had called on Biden to step aside. Democratic power players, such as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, orchestrated the pressure campaign to force Biden out of the race despite the wishes of Democratic primary voters. Despite Democrats finding themselves in uncharted territory just weeks before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Biden and many of his detractors are coalescing behind Harris to be the Democrats’ nominee for president.

Shortly after Biden’s social media accounts posted the letter, a subsequent post endorsed Harris. 

“My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President,” the Biden post read. “And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats—it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.” 

Pelosi and 200 other elected Democrats obliged and have endorsed Harris since Biden dropped out. Many of Harris’ would-be challengers for the nomination, such as Govs. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), and Josh Shapiro (D-PA), are among the Democrats to endorse her. If and how they angle for Harris’ running mate remains to be seen.

Republicans are left wondering: If Biden is currently incapable of running for president, how can Biden perform his duties for the rest of his term?

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) has been repeatedly called for invoking the 25th Amendment against Biden for some time. Now, with Democrats apparently admitting that Biden cannot carry out his responsibilities as president, Republicans are looking into an effort to prematurely remove Biden from office. 

“Democrats have been struggling with the box that they created for themselves by frankly keeping up the false pretense that the President of the United States was mentally cognizant enough to carry out the powers and duties of the office,” Roy said in a recent interview, which the Texas Congressman posted to X with the hashtag “25thAmendmentNow.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has also believed for some time that Biden should resign the presidency. Biden’s decision to drop out has only hardened the Speaker’s resolve. “If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President. He must resign the office immediately. November 5 cannot arrive soon enough,” Johnson said in a statement.

Roy and Johnson’s sentiments were echoed in the Senate. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) told The American Conservative that “If Joe Biden can’t run for re-election, he is not capable of serving as president for the next six months and needs to resign today.”

Removing Biden from office could be electorally risky, however, because it may give Harris some of the advantages of incumbency come November.

Nevertheless, the questions that carry more profound electoral implications in whatever fact-finding effort into Biden’s decline that may follow is what did Harris, Biden staffers, and other powerful Democrats know about Biden’s declining faculties, when did they know it, and why did they not say anything before the first debate.

“We know someone who can’t run for office is too diminished to serve in office. We need to know if Kamala Harris has been lying to the American people about Biden’s condition,” Riley Moore, the Republican Candidate for West Virginia’s Second Congressional district, told TAC. “What did she know and when did she know it? How long have she and her donor friends been planning to subvert the will of more than 14 million Americans?”

“For four years, those closest to Joe Biden, including Kamala Harris, knew he was not fit to be president and lied to the American people in an effort to hold onto their power. It was painfully clear that Biden wasn’t competent for office going way back to 2021,” Scott told TAC. “Democrats laughed when I said Biden should be removed from office after his deadly Afghanistan withdrawal disaster. They’re not laughing now. Over those four years, we have seen immense damage done to our country. Our border is wide-open, inflation is crushing American families, and countless Americans have lost their lives at home and abroad due to the policy decisions of Joe Biden and his ‘border czar’ Kamala Harris.”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) sent a statement to TAC marshaling the same fact pattern. “For three and a half years, the corrupt media and the deep state bureaucracy have lied to the American people. Today, President Biden finally admitted that President Trump was right all along: Joe Biden was never mentally fit to be President,” Tuberville wrote. “Democrats and the media knew Joe Biden had serious cognitive issues and they used him as their puppet for as long as they could. Now, they’re trying to gaslight Democrat voters into thinking they have a say when clearly the Democrat elites are running the show.”

Until November, one of the GOP’s top priorities is to hold Biden, Harris, and Democrat power brokers to account: “Democrats and the complicit media must be held accountable for this massive cover-up. If Joe Biden is unfit to run again, he is unfit to hold the nuclear codes. I join my colleagues in demanding that President Biden resign immediately.”

Despite upcoming GOP efforts to expose Biden’s decline, and who tried to cover it up, continued chaos in the Democratic Party reaffirms that a Republican victory in 2024 will take laying out a compelling vision of what four more years of a Trump presidency can accomplish. As Vivek Ramaswamy told TAC previously when Biden replacement theory was gaining steam: “We have to focus on what we stand for, and without that, I think we’re at risk of disappointment yet again.”

And Republicans are already trying to turn Democratic messaging on Trump and the GOP being dangerous for democracy on its head. 

“At this unprecedented juncture in American history, we must be clear about what just happened. The Democrat Party forced the Democrat nominee off the ballot, just over 100 days before the election,” Johnson’s abovementioned statement read. “Having invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden to be the Democrat nominee for president, the self-proclaimed ‘party of democracy’ has proven exactly the opposite.”

“Elite Democrats knew Joe Biden wasn’t fit for office. Now that the whole country knows, those same wealthy and well-connected Democrats have successfully overturned the results of primary elections in all fifty states,” Moore told TAC. “In America, your vote is supposed to matter.”

“The Democrats’ hypocrisy knows no bounds. The same people who spent years saying President Trump and Republicans are a threat to democracy, just pushed out the sitting president from running for re-election because they don’t think he can win,” Scott claimed. “Let’s be clear—Washington’s Democrat elite went around the will of Democrat voters who picked Biden to be their nominee. They think they know better than the American people and will stop at nothing to hold on to power.”

Even still, for Scott, this election will come down to the bread and butter issues. “While we welcome the news that one of America’s most destructive presidents will be denied a second term, it changes very little as to the stakes of this election. We cannot allow the American dream to be destroyed and replaced with California socialism. Come November, we will defeat the Democrats, elect Donald J. Trump, take back the Senate and the House, and save our country.”

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