On the menu today: Shortly after 8 a.m., President Trump appeared on the couch of Fox & Friends and said of the national manhunt for the assassin of Charlie Kirk, “I think, with a high degree of certainty, we have him, in custody. In custody, everyone did a great job. We worked with the local police, the governor, everybody did a great job.” Hopefully by the time you read this, that declaration will prove true and we will have more details about the long arm of the law reaching out and successfully capturing the perpetrator.
It’s been a dark week, so let’s turn our attention to the kind of political news that can make us laugh: former vice president Kamala Harris attempting to explain that her defeat in the 2024 presidential election was everyone’s fault but hers.
Excuses, Excuses
Former Vice President Kamala Harris probably has no idea how many Democrats can’t stand her right now, and how spectacularly unwelcome her forthcoming memoir is. 107 Days will be published September 23, and the first excerpt ran in The Atlantic Wednesday morning.
In a way, she and the rest of the Democratic Party are lucky that since Wednesday afternoon, the news cycle is justifiably almost entirely focused on the Kirk assassination. Few Democrats have much appetite for another high-profile round of recriminations and finger-pointing, and every new now-it-can-be-told account makes everyone involved in the party’s efforts in 2024 look even worse, and no one has clean hands. And considering the consequences of the party’s failure, no one at the top of the party last year has earned another shot at major responsibilities in the future. Not the Bidens, not the Biden inner circle, not Harris, not Tim Walz, not DNC chairman Jaime Harrison — and the party’s current congressional leaders didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory, either.
I gave my initial thoughts on the released excerpt over in that other Washington publication, but there’s still meat on the bone.
One of the few questions about Harris that still generates public curiosity is whether she ever saw anything from Biden that made her worry about the president’s ability to serve another four years in the White House. (Or, for that matter, another four minutes.) In the released except, Harris indicates no, conceding “his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles” but denying that Biden was incapable of serving another four years as president. She begins:
Many people want to spin up a narrative of some big conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity. Here is the truth as I lived it.
Boy, that phrase just made you raise an eyebrow, doesn’t it? We’re really looking for “the truth as it was,” not anyone’s personal version of the truth. She continues:
Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles. I don’t think it’s any surprise that the debate debacle happened right after two back-to-back trips to Europe and a flight to the West Coast for a Hollywood fundraiser.
The jet lag excuse was always nonsense. As I wrote in my Post column, “Biden returned from his overseas trip on June 15 and later that day attended the Hollywood fundraiser — where he reportedly didn’t recognize George Clooney, who, in addition to being one of Hollywood’s most recognizable faces, had met Biden many times before. The debate was on June 27. If you’re still jet-lagged 12 days after an overseas trip, you’re in no condition to be president.”
Harris continues:
I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.
Uh huh, sure.
Hey, let’s count how many times Biden has made remarks in public or done interviews since leaving office 236 days ago.
In March, Biden spoke at the Model United Nations conference in New York City, an event that had zero press invited.
In April, he spoke at a conference hosted by the Advocates, Counselors, and Representatives for the Disabled in Chicago, where he rambled about “colored kids.” (A correspondent for Time magazine put it gently, “The 27-minute speech Tuesday gave no one nostalgia for Biden.”) Also in April, Biden spoke when he received a lifetime achievement award from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers at the union’s convention in Washington.
In May, he did one interview with Jill alongside him on The View — tough questioning there! — and one alone with the BBC.
In July, Biden appeared at the annual conference of the Society for Human Resource Management, lamenting that so much of his record in office was begin reversed by President Trump so quickly.
A bit later in July, Biden did one phone interview with the New York Times, where he insisted that the autopen was used on those infamous pardons and commutations because there were a lot of documents, when in fact only a handful of documents required the presidential signature. (Biden seemed to think that the commutation he granted to 2,490 individuals required each commutation to be signed on a separate document.)
When Biden’s staff learned the former president had a brief conversation with the New York Times White House correspondent without checking with them, they screamed at the reporter and then disconnected the phone line.
By my count, that’s seven public remarks or interviews in almost eight months. Maybe I’ve missed one or two that got exceptionally little attention for a speech by a man who was president when the year began. But either way, Joe Biden is rarely appearing in public and rarely taking questions. You know, the sort of thing that a president is supposed to do, multiple times a week, if not more than once a day sometimes.
We’re not stupid. Joe Biden is older than the fall of Nazi Germany, color television, duct tape, the flu vaccine, the atomic bomb, and the Slinky. This guy’s in rough shape. If he could do speeches and interviews and sound coherent and sharp, he’d be doing them.
You can chalk up Biden’s infrequent public appearances to his diagnosis of prostate cancer — you know, the one that his doctors missed throughout his presidency because they never ran a standard PSA test on his blood samples — but it’s not like Biden’s prostate cancer wouldn’t have been a problem if he had been reelected. Had Biden been reelected to another term, there’s a decent chance that Harris would be acting president for periods, depending on what treatment options Biden chose.
Much of the excerpt in The Atlantic is Harris laying out all the different ways that the Biden inner circle resented her and undermined her at every turn. There is almost certainly some truth to these claims; contemporaneous reporting indicated there were higher tensions than usual between the vice president and the president’s staff, as well as First Lady Jill Biden. But it’s strange to see Harris painting a picture of herself as so helpless and so defenseless in the face of the Biden inner circle’s irrational, self-destructive hostility to her.
Ms. Harris, weren’t you the vice president of the United States? Didn’t you have some weight to throw around? Didn’t anybody fear the consequences of messing with you? Do you think Dick Cheney ever had these problems?
(And if Harris felt like she was constantly being undermined and thwarted by the president’s top staff . . . where the heck was the president in all this? Despite her earlier defense of Biden, Harris is affirming the portrait of an out-of-it president oblivious to what’s going on inside his own administration.)
Now, the Biden inner circle is reportedly livid about Harris’s accusations, and is striking back the only way they know how, with anonymous quotes to publications like Axios:
Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job,” said one former Biden White House official. “She had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration’s key work streams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was.”
Biden is “not the reason she struggled in office or tanked her 2019 [presidential] campaign,” the ex-official said. “Or lost the 2024 campaign, for that matter. The independent variable there is the vice president, not Biden or his aides.” . . .
The same aide, referring to Harris’ duties in trying to reduce unauthorized migration, argued: “On the border stuff in particular I’d also say, if she had spent a fraction of the time and energy doing the work that she did on complaining, about how she was perceived, she would have been perceived a whole lot better.” . . .
Other former Biden aides said he made a mistake picking Harris as vice president in the first place and fumed that Harris was now using Democratic Party resources to sell a book that could divide the party.
I know. It’s early in the day, and already you want some popcorn.
Let’s point out that if you’re a senior White House official, and after years of working alongside the vice president, your conclusion is that she is “simply not good at the job” and that she’s out of her depth in just about every issue . . . this is not the sort of information you should tell the American public in September 2025, nearly a year after she lost her presidential bid. You should tell the public this before she’s the Democratic nominee and before she comes within about 115,000 additional votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin of becoming president.
By the way, you probably noticed that this belated brutally honest assessment of Harris’s competence aligns with what a whole bunch of right-of-center voices were saying the whole time. Now it can be told!
Secondly, if Biden aides believe Biden “made a mistake picking Harris as vice president in the first place”. . . what does that say about him? This was one of the biggest and most consequential decisions of his life! He’s picking somebody to be a then-78-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency!
In a way, this sort of information affirms what those on the right have long suspected: Democrats don’t really care if their nominees are good at the job.
ADDENDUM: Some folks objected to yesterday’s newsletter characterizing the assassination of Charlie Kirk as “left-wing violence.” They insisted that because the perpetrator had not yet been caught, it was impossible to discern the motive.
Horsepucky. We know this wasn’t road rage. This wasn’t an attempted robbery. This wasn’t a lover’s quarrel, or a life insurance scam, or mistaken identity, or eliminating a witness to a crime so he couldn’t testify.
The perpetrator, with considerable malice aforethought and likely a considerable amount of planning, shot Kirk as he was speaking to a large crowd on a college campus, spreading his beliefs.
No, we don’t know all the details of how this shooter saw the world, but as I posted on X yesterday, “I feel pretty darn confident saying that the assassin’s political worldview included a desire to see Charlie Kirk no longer able to continue speaking about what he believes on college campuses.”