What if …
With all the talk swirling around that Trump may resign, which is the only way JD Vance ever becomes president, it got me thinking what if Biden had resigned in July, 2024, and Kamala Harris had become president. As Trump was quick to say, if he can’t run for a second term then why should he continue as president?
At the very least, we would have had our first woman president. Given a chance to lead the country, President Harris also might have quieted her many doubters and won the election in November. Instead, mainstream critics continued to question her ability to lead and so we never got the chance to find out.
Biden really disappointed me in the second half of his term. It wasn’t just that his mental acumen appeared to be dropping off, he lost his will to lead. He literally gave up Ukraine, making little effort to get an appropriations bill through Congress that would have granted it much more in the way of munitions and economic aid. It took a bipartisan Senate effort to finally get that bill passed in April, 2024. Even still, Old Joe was reluctant to give the military aid to Ukraine all at once. The process dragged for more months until Harris lost the election, at which point Biden was forced to speed things up.
The guy was done, as Trump is now. Yet, we allow these octogenarians to drag the country down rather than face facts. There’s a reason why there is a retirement age, it should apply for elected officials as it does for everyone else in the country.
Biden had a great first half of his tenure, defying his age. He seemed energetic, pushing both domestic legislation and foreign policy with steadfast resolve. He handled COVID very well. However, he broke down when Putin first threatened nukes.
Ukraine had Russia on the ropes, pushing them out of Kharkiv and across the Dnipro River at Zaporizhzhia. Ukrainian armed forces very well could have pushed the vaunted “Z Army” all the way into the Azov Sea had not Biden lost his nerve and held up badly needed munitions until after winter. This allowed Russia to heavily mine the strip of land they held onto, making it virtually impossible for Ukraine to reclaim it by conventional means. The Halo Trust estimates there are over 2 million landmines spread along the east side of the Dnipro. Thanks, Joe.
He seemed to go through some kind of existential crisis that the world could blow up on his watch. He had already dragged the US out of its worst health crisis in a century and now this! Biden had correctly predicted Russia would invade Ukraine when most felt Putin was just flexing. Here was the Russian autocrat now threatening Armageddon.
Biden had started to backslide when the Democrats lost control of the House in November, 2022, and was never the same again. There was still much he could do by executive order but was exceedingly slow to do so. He didn’t want to give F-16s to Ukraine. It took months of haggling in 2023 to finally get him to relent, and even then it was just approval of the fighter jets that Denmark and the Netherlands had pledged. The US did not directly give any F-16s to Ukraine and it was Biden who insisted on a 6-month training program, further slowing down efforts. Ukraine didn’t receive those jets until a full year later in August, 2024.
Here in Europe, we couldn’t figure out what was going on. The man had single-handedly pulled NATO together against Russia at the start of the war and now here he was afraid Putin might take the war to the next level. We also had those concerns but Ukraine desperately needed defense missiles if nothing else, and even here Biden was slow to act. This while Ukrainian cities were constantly under fire throughout the war. The OHCHR has officially confirmed that more than 16,000 Ukrainian civilians have died as a direct result of these bombings. Another 46,000 injured. Hundreds of thousands uprooted.
Granted, Western European countries were slow to act in 2022. Macron, Scholz and Rutte were particularly slow, seeming to prefer Russian appeasement to action, but with constant pressing from the US and Britain, they finally came on board. By 2024, European countries were donating far more economic aid to Ukraine than the US and making up for the shortfall in munitions by providing badly needed jet fighters, tanks and missile defense systems. Today, most of the outside military hardware comes from European countries, not the US, as Trump has made no real effort to give additional military support since assuming office in January, 2025.
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No major legislation has been passed since 2024 to further supply Ukraine with American munitions or economic aid. Instead, the Trump administration tried to force a minerals deal down Ukraine’s throat as a means to cover what the US had already given Ukraine. No security pledge, no further aid. This was seen as payback.
Adding insult to injury, Pete Hegseth actually rerouted defense systems earmarked for Ukraine under the 2024 appropriations bill to Israel allegedly for “protection” of American citizens. This was apparently done behind Dotardly Don’s back while he was hosting a military parade on his birthday last June.
We can only wonder what Kamala Harris would have done if she had ascended to the presidency in July, 2024. While her focus no doubt would have been on domestic issues that had been plaguing the Biden administration for two years, I don’t think she would have been as reluctant as Old Joe to supply Ukraine. She knew the stakes and had no intention of appeasing Russia.
There was a lot of talk that Biden was already pressing Zelenskyy to give up part of Ukraine for the greater peace of the region. At this point, the Ukrainian president began to appeal more to members of both parties in Congress than to the Biden himself, especially with the Ukraine Security Assistance and Oversight Supplemental Appropriations Act stalled in the House. The feeling was that Biden had either given up or wanted some sort of compromise to end the war.
It’s tough, as former Pres. Obama recently said in an interview. “Everyday you have five, ten things that are really hard”. You have to stay focused, and it was clear that Biden was no longer focused on the war. He increasingly saw it as a distraction that threatened his legacy. He was still gloating over the infrastructure bill he signed and the crisis he pulled the United States out of during COVID. He seemed to be genuinely taken aback that he received no appreciation for these great efforts on his part and certainly couldn’t understand why he was continually slipping in the polls, especially to a man who was in court constantly, with tax fraud, sexual abuse and treason charges floating over his head, lest we forget January 6, 2021.
That was largely because Biden no longer looked very fit. He had developed a shuffle step like one gets after suffering mini-strokes, he had a hard time holding his train of thought, he grew increasingly irritable when questioned. You wanted to give Joe the benefit of the doubt as those close to him continued to insist he was fully aware what was going on, but you just didn’t get the sense he was.
All this came to a head in June, 2024, when he agreed to an unprecedented summer debate with Donald Trump. He didn’t need to do this but somehow his inner circle convinced him he had to assuage all doubts and put Trump in his place. Everyone expected Trump to self-destruct in this setting but it was Joe who seemed unable to handle the challenge, giving Trump the upper hand at the worst possible moment. Joe didn’t fair any better a few days later in an interview with George Stephanopoulos.
Biden insisted he was still able to lead but deferred to the growing pressure to drop out of the race for president. In retrospect, I have to agree that you can’t have it both ways, yet this seemed to be the only way to get Biden to defer the Democratic nomination to Vice-President Harris.
It wasn’t like he was doing much at this point anyway, at least as far as anyone on the outside could see. His inner circle continued to state firmly that the President was in full control of his mental facilities. He didn’t need a cognitive test, which Trump and political pundits demanded. It was just jet lag from his trip to Normandy earlier in June. Others said he was battling a nasty cold and the antibiotics had knocked him out.
We will never know what could have been because in Biden’s moment of truth he refused to man up. He refused to admit he was no longer fit for the job, which is taxing on anyone and most especially on an 81-year old man. Had he stepped down, had he allowed Kamala Harris to become the first Woman President of the United States, I think we would have had a very different outcome in November. She would have been fully able to use the power of her presidency to diminish Donald Trump to nothing more than a carping old man, no more fit to be president than was Joe Biden at that point.
Now we face the very real possibility that Donald Trump will step down after the midterms and we will be made to endure JD Vance as President. This is the only way Trump can get a full pardon like Nixon, which Vance talks so much about these days, leaving us with the Eyeliner-in-Chief.
So it goes.
