In the wake of President Biden’s disastrous and humiliating debate performance last night, the chatter was all about whether Democrats will replace Biden on the ticket, how the mechanics of that might work, and what the Biden campaign’s strategy is going to be now that the president has shown himself to be unfit for office.
But amid the Democrats’ rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, an important point has gone largely unnoticed: America essentially has no president right now. Whomever is calling the shots in the White House, especially on foreign affairs, it isn’t Biden. While it’s true that much of American governance has devolved into the hands of an unelected (and unaccountable) administrative bureaucracy, when it comes to foreign policy and decisions about how to respond to crises overseas, the president still plays an important and arguably indispensable role.
But our current president, as the entire world now knows, cannot follow the train of his own thoughts. He seems to have only a tenuous grasp on reality. He can barely walk down a few steps. Clearly, he’s not the one in charge of the White House, which means the presidency itself is remarkably weak right now. That in turn means the world is a much more dangerous place after last night, because America’s adversaries know they have a narrow window to exploit the obvious weakness of our Executive Branch while Biden is still in office.
In other words, the most serious consequence of the debate isn’t what the
