Vivek Ramaswamy heads up the Biden replacement theory victory lap

The News

The idea has hovered around the fringes of American politics for months: Joe Biden, 81, won’t be his party’s nominee.

It’s the sort of thing Republican candidates tossed out at rallies and on podcasts, at first as a warning to their own party not to renominate an aging former president, and then as part of the broad implication the Democratic Party is a kind of rigged system of its own.

And now that the idea appears, suddenly, plausible, its promoters would like you to remember they were there first.

“All people remember later is you said something crazy — without remembering what it was, when in fact the crazy thing that you said turned out to be true,” Vivek Ramaswamy, who repeatedly said on the campaign trail that he’d be running against a Democrat other than Biden in November, told Semafor in a phone interview. “Many Republicans rejected this possibility last year when I spoke about it, let alone the Democrats in relegating this to fringe conspiracy talk.”

Ramaswamy wasn’t the only one on that particular fringe.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was quick to suggest the Democrats “may sub him out for someone else,” and in part participated in a debate with California Gov. Gavin Newsom on that premise.

“Now you have some of these media people saying that he should not run, and all this other stuff, when they knew this was how he was,” DeSantis told reporters at a press conference on Monday. “They decided to paper that over, to try to get him across the finish line. Well, what happened on Thursday was that people saw with their own eyes, and so they’re not going to be able to gaslight that.”

Nikki Haley, the only Trump challenger to carry a state in the primary, frequently said Biden would be unable to finish his term, and that the next president would be female – either her, or Vice President Kamala Harris.

“They are going to be smart about it,” Haley told the Wall Street Journal on Saturday. “They’re going to bring somebody younger. They’re going to bring somebody vibrant. They’re going to bring somebody tested.”

Shelby and David's view

Biden may well stay in the race: His closest confidants have urged him to do so, and him stepping down would open an entirely new can of worms for the party.

But Thursday’s 90-minute debate turned an outlandish Republican theory into a mainstream Democratic opinion. It’s not that the questions around whether Biden should run again, or if he’d be replaced, weren’t happening — it’s simply that they were dismissed by such a wide portion of the elites. And perhaps that quick dismissiveness compounded the very problem that many are now discussing.

Republican voters were always skeptical about Biden’s nomination, a factor Democrats attributed to their media diet of talk radio and YouTube chatter. A year ago, when we asked Iowa caucus-goers if Biden would be the Democratic nominee, it was striking how often they said he wouldn’t be. Republicans said for months that the president couldn’t make it through another election.

“They’re gonna have to have a candidate that has mental toughness, physically tough, that can actually go up against a Republican candidate in a debate and win,” Sen. Joni Ernst told us. “And I don’t think Democrats have that right now.”

Now more than ever, conservatives believe they cannot trust a media-political elite that protects its own. They accuse the press of indulging a “Russiagate hoax” against Donald Trump; the CDC of lying about the origins COVID-19 and the danger of vaccines; the legal system of waging bogus “lawfare” to nail Trump on crimes that no one else would be prosecuted for.

Since Thursday, Biden’s shambling debate performance has become the strongest possible evidence that something isn’t right. If the elites only now admit the president has declined too much to serve again, what else were they lying about?

Room for Disagreement

Stopped clocks can be right sometimes – twice a day, specifically. Not every theory of Biden or media perfidy became true on Thursday. The accurate panic about Biden’s age superseded a baseless panic about the president taking performance-enhancing drugs at key moments (though, strangely, not all of them). On Fox News, the debate disaster was a hook for repeating the theory that Valerie Jarrett is secretly running the country. And for months, the theory that Biden wouldn’t be the nominee assumed that Michelle Obama would, a baseless, time-filling obsession that is no closer to being true.

Notable

• While “the White House press corps can’t be totally blamed for its struggle to cover questions about Biden’s age,” the story nonetheless was missed by many, our own Max Tani recently wrote.

• Donald Trump’s campaign isn’t taking this theory too seriously, although they are happy to let the drama play out: After Thursday’s debate, Trump aides reminded top surrogates that Joe Biden was the nominee, and that Democrats had made that decision, Semafor reported on Monday.