Even the Bright Side for Biden Isn’t Very Good News

Slate’s guide to the most important figures in politics this week.

Welcome back to the Surge, Slate’s guide to the most notable figures of the week in politics. I’m Ben Mathis-Lilley, filling in for Jim Newell, who tried to propel himself onto the White House lawn to report on Joe Biden’s mental state by strapping his body to a load of fireworks being launched from the National Mall the night of July 4. His explosion a thousand feet above the Washington Monument was described by observers as “surprisingly patriotic,” and he is expected to make a full recovery at a local hospital that specializes in Wile E. Coyote injuries. (Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern also lent his expertise and insight to the item about John Roberts, i.e., he wrote it and we copied and pasted it and added a joke.)

This week, obviously, we’ve got a lot about a Democrat to be named later possibly succeeding Biden on the presidential ticket, as well as news about who’s been dropping in on White House meetings. (Hint: It’s a convicted felon with a self-admitted history of smoking crack.) Additionally, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denies eating a dog, and the Supreme Court says being president means you get to follow Purge rules. (It really was a very busy week.) But first, the man who wasn’t there.

1. Joe Biden

Still running (depending on when you open this newsletter).

In some ways, it was a very eventful few days for the president, who probably has not been the focal point of the American news environment to this extent since he was first elected in 2020. There were articles about how he had to interrupt his debate preparation for regular naps, and reports about how he has started to forget the names of longtime allies. There was a story about how he told the country’s Democratic governors that he has trouble working after 8 p.m. What Biden did not do a lot of this week was talking in public; he spoke from a script for five minutes about a major Supreme Court ruling (see below) on Monday, delivered prepared remarks at a Wednesday Medal of Honor ceremony and a Thursday Fourth of July event, and did two short radio interviews—including one in which he garbled his words and described himself as “the first Black woman to serve with a Black president.” Biden, nonetheless, has reportedly been telling people that he’s going to make a blitz of more high-profile appearances to prove that he can still handle the demands of running for reelection; Step 1 in that effort was to be an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that, inconveniently, was scheduled to air Friday night, after this newsletter was completed but before it was sent out. So, if you could, please grab a Sharpie and write your own take on Biden’s ABC interview on your phone or computer screen before moving on to the next item.

2. Kamala Harris

Would they be coco-nuts to just hand her this thing?

Democrats everywhere—elected officials, rank-and-file party organizers, frequent social media posters, and even normal people—are reeling from Biden’s debate. It’s not quite a seven-stages-of-grief situation, given that it might still have a somewhat satisfactory ending, but it has similarities as far as the wild swings between despair and optimism and uncontrollable laughter/screaming. Playing a key role in this hysteria is Vice President Kamala Harris. On the one hand, she’d be the obvious choice to take over Biden’s spot, but then again, she did a lousy job campaigning for the presidency in the 2020 primary. And, sure, a hastily contrived pseudo-primary to select someone besides her might degenerate into a nasty mess. But it might be a good idea to test the eventual nominee in a weird, high-pressure media environment culminating at the convention. And if that nominee did end up being Harris, well, maybe it could be fun, like the “falling out of a coconut tree” thing. The consensus on the VP at any given point is like what they probably said about the weather where you grew up: If you don’t like it, just wait five minutes.

3. John Roberts

Briefly interrupting Biden Time to declare that laws are over.

The Roberts-led Supreme Court powered through a series of victories for the GOP this term, culminating in a sweeping decision in Trump v. United States written by the chief himself and issued Monday. Legally, the decision grants Trump, and all future presidents, near-absolute immunity for “official acts” committed in office. Practically, it means that Trump is unlikely to face further prosecution before the election because lower courts will have to figure out what an official act is. Going forward, it’s a sign that Roberts has forced his way back into the SCOTUS driver’s seat after it had begun to look as if the court’s priorities were going to be set by the three Trump appointees and the MAGA-pilled duo of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. All it took Roberts was, let’s say, adjusting his principles and temperament to better fit the Trump era, and now pretty much all of the ideas he likes can become the law again. Must be nice!

4. Nate Cohn

Dropping bombs on the discourse from the maternity ward.

The “eyeball test” for Biden isn’t good at the moment: When he doesn’t have a teleprompter in front of him, he does something like freeze up for 20 seconds on national television or claim to have been the first Black vice president. Big-shot decisionmakers everywhere, though—like the kinds of people who lead the Democratic Party or have enough money to influence their opinions—like having data they can point to in order to justify a risky move, even if that data is kind of speculative and made-up. (It’s our understanding that this is the entire purpose of the consulting industry.) Stepping up to fill that need, as always, this week—with legitimate, good data, to be clear—was New York Times poll maestro Nate Cohn, who helped get a much-anticipated edition of the widely respected Times/Siena College poll out the door just days after the birth of his child. What the poll found was that there has been a 3-point postdebate swing toward Trump; Biden currently trails by 6 points nationally among likely voters, and a (1-point) majority of Democrats think he should be replaced on the ballot. The intra-Dem grumbling about getting rid of him has continued to intensify to the point that it’s probably now better described as planning.

5. Hunter Biden

Haha, wow, yeah, that’s a really bad idea.

In the wake of Biden’s debate performance, the people who reportedly advised him against immediately bowing out of the race were his wife Jill and his son Hunter. Leaving aside whether family members should be making this decision at all vis-à-vis the actual Democratic Party, Hunter Biden is a particularly conflicted person from whom to seek counsel, given that he was recently convicted of a federal crime and famously trades on his father’s name to generate his own income. This is a guy with a pretty strong interest in his family’s remaining atop the gears of power, in other words. NBC further reports that this week-ish, Hunter “popped into” several meetings and phone calls at the White House. Just helping out, we guess, and possibly monitoring his father’s advisers to see who needs to be fired for disloyalty. If Joe Biden really wants to show people that he should still be president, letting it leak out that his famously reckless and unemployed son who was just convicted of illegal gun possession is now helping run the country is probably not the best way to do it.

6. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Where to start?

Staying on the subject of political sons with interesting lives, it has also been a heck of a few days for RFK Jr. On Tuesday, Vanity Fair published a long story about him that alleged, among other things, that he’d groped a family babysitter and—we are not making this up—sent someone a picture of himself pretending to eat a barbecued dog. (The article includes the photo, which Kennedy now claims is a picture of a barbecued goat. He pointedly failed to deny groping the woman, who says she found his advances inappropriate and off-putting.) Then, on Friday, he tweeted that he promises “not to take sides on 9/11” as president. This was nominally a reference to a recent 60 Minutes report that the U.S. government might be hiding evidence that the Saudi Arabian government helped plan the attacks, but for one, Kennedy’s promise was also obviously a dog whistle to his “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” supporters in the conspiracy community, and for two, it involved using a “gotta hear both sides” construction in reference to the worst terrorist attack in human history. The good news? Edward Snowden, the exiled National Security Agency whistleblower—whom RFK Jr. has said he’d pardon—tweeted that the Democrats would be doing fine right now if they’d just nominated Kennedy instead of Biden. You know, Ed, I’m not so sure that’s true.

7. Keir Starmer

Her Majesty’s Surge congratulates the new king of Greater London (?).

What ho? Why, it’s an election in the United Kingdom, coincidentally held on July 4 so that we could gloat and accept their thanks for inventing democracy. The basic dynamic in every wealthy country right now is that voters want to throw out whoever’s in charge, and since the conservative Tory party was in power across the pond previously, that made the Thursday vote a big win for liberals, which means that the new prime minister will be a Labour “geezer” named Keir Starmer. Other outlets might tell you that Starmer has guided Labour back toward the center of British politics or that his “dull competence” appealed to voters after years of Brexit-related chaos; the Surge’s take is that Keir Starmer sounds like an Irish name and that the British might want to keep an extra close eye on him in case he’s a sleeper agent for the Roman Catholic agenda. (In point of fact, Starmer is an atheist, and his wife is Jewish. Open-minded, those Brits!)