Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race eight weeks ago, and he has basically been on vacation ever since. There was the trip to California after his bumped-out-of-primetime address at the Democratic National Convention, followed immediately by a trip to his Delaware Beach house.
He continues to spend most weekends in The First State, and – with little on his public schedule – the questions about who is actually running the country have only gotten louder. The events of the last three days, meanwhile, certainly haven’t helped matters.
On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by Vivek Ramaswamy, author of Truths, to discuss Biden’s behavior and what is really going on at the highest levels of government.
Weekend Worries
The president convened his first cabinet meeting in nearly a year on Friday and delivered very brief opening remarks before turning the floor over to his wife, First Lady Jill Biden, who was seated prominently at the head of the table.
The first lady proceeded to read from a binder about a White House initiative on women’s health research as her husband looked on blankly. “Joe Biden being a cog in the wheel appears to be evident every day because it does not appear he is actively the president,” Megyn noted. “The rare occasions you get to see him now, like at a cabinet meeting for the first time in a couple of years, he let his wife run it – not the vice president, his wife.”
That turned out to be just the beginning of an awkward weekend for Biden, who departed the White House – as he often does on Fridays – for his Wilmington, DE, home. Only this time, he was headed there to meet with world leaders.
Biden hosted the so-called Quad Summit with the leaders of Australia, Japan, and India in Wilmington rather than Washington, D.C. The locale allowed the meetings to be unusually private with the press largely left out. But what the media did manage to see, however, did not reflect well on the president.
During a press conference alongside India’s prime minister on Saturday, Biden was supposed to introduce Prime Minister Narendra Modi but instead appeared to become confused. “I want to thank you all for being here,” Biden said to the small crowd gathered. “Now, who am I introducing next?”
“Who’s next?” he shouted again. That was followed by an uncomfortably long silence before the public address announcer introduced Modi who then approached the podium to shake hands with the president.
The ‘Managerial Machine’
Megyn, who “charitably” called the “cringy” incident “a senior moment,” said it only opened the floodgates for more questions about the president’s well being. “You can see all the heads looking around… The people in the audience are uncomfortable. I’m sure the prime minister is uncomfortable,” she said. “I mean, who is the sitting president? Do we know?”
In Ramaswamy’s view, that has been the million-dollar question for a while. “I think the idea that Joe Biden is the functioning U.S. president has been a joke for a long time,” he said. “It’s just that it became socially acceptable to say so in public once that first debate happened and the media decided this was now inside the Overton Window to talk about.”
Whether it is the first lady or Vice President Kamala Harris stepping up in place of Biden, Ramaswamy said the through line is the same. “One thing I will say in Jill Biden’s defense is that… she has gotten exactly as many votes for U.S. president as Kamala Harris has, which is to say zero,” he noted. “The reality is the Democratic Party of the present really doesn’t care about the democratic will of voters.”
Instead, he believes Democrats see voters as a “risk” to democracy. “You can go straight down the list of policies or the way they’ve even conducted their own primary process, the way in which they are making sure the U.S. president who ultimately is elected is constrained enough to make sure that he doesn’t actually do something that might represent the democratic will of the voters,” Ramaswamy concluded. “It’s this managerial machine that is actually running the show, and that is what I think is going on in the country.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Ramaswamy by tuning in to episode 896 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.