Republican Gov. Mike DeWine extended Ohio’s first-in-the-nation ballot deadline to allow Democrats until September to nominate their presidential candidate this year, solving a filing date technicality that had seemed to threaten President Joe Biden’s Buckeye State ballot status. Still, Democratic power brokers have proceeded as though the Democratic National Committee has only until Aug. 7 to formalize their general election ticket.

So even though Biden is polling worse than any Democratic presidential candidate — much less, an incumbent — against a Republican challenger in 20 years, the Democratic Party seems slated to ignore the majority of its voters who wish to replace the president in a fall fight against former President Donald Trump, the 2024 Republican nominee.

In part, this may be a product of the party elders accepting the inevitable. With the worst inflationary crisis since that which made Jimmy Carter a one-term president, as well as Trump’s cinematic survival of a heart-stopping assassination attempt, the DNC may simply be resigning itself to the reality that effectively disenfranchising its voters by replacing the candidate they (nominally) selected only to lose to Trump anyway may not be worth it. More realistically, the Democratic defeatism is a product of the potential peril of a presidential candidacy by Vice President Kamala Harris.

The only person who could practically replace the sitting president on the ticket is his vice president, as even if convention delegates allowed the party to leapfrog the first female, first black, and first Asian vice president with a different Democrat, only Harris would be legally allowed to inherit the Biden campaign’s quarter-trillion-dollar war chest. And the choice of Harris would cement the explosive exodus of the Silicon Valley and high-dollar donor class to the GOP under Trump.

President Biden has governed dramatically to the left of the already liberal Vice President Biden when he was in President Barack Obama’s administration from 2009-17. And a President Harris would likely push her economic agenda even further leftward than Vice President Harris. Biden, in his desperation to shore up the youth vote, is now pushing a radical national rent control cap that would cap annual rent increases at just 5%. Jason Furman, one of Obama’s top economists, rightly blasted such rent control as “disgraced as any economic policy in the toolkit,” and judged that the Biden proposal in particular would “make our housing supply problems worse, not better.”

But whereas Biden’s bluster is likely a mere extinction burst evident of a dying campaign, Harris has historically been a true believer in such macro malarkey going back to the beginning of her career in Congress. As a California senator, Harris endorsed an Oregon rent control law that mimicked the same San Francisco statute that wound up increasing rental prices after housing supply plummeted. And Harris’s proposed Rent Relief Act would issue a tax credit to the tens of millions of renters who spend more than 30% of their incomes on rent, an unfunded liability that would work as well as Obama’s federalization of the student loan system.

And while Harris would likely favor the same sort of green central planning executed by her boss, she also pledged her support socializing one-fifth of the nation’s economy with “Medicare for All” during her failed 2020 bid for the presidency. Although Harris would later pretend otherwise, she fully favored criminalizing private health insurance to achieve a government takeover of the healthcare system.

Most egregiously, Harris was one of the original co-sponsors of the 2019 Green New Deal, which calls for nationalizing not just the healthcare industry but also the entire energy industry, or nearly 30% of the U.S. economy. The plan would also cost between $52 billion and $93 trillion in 2019 dollars, according to various estimates at the time.

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In the history of her various flip-flops throughout her career, Harris has supported a federal $15 per hour minimum wage even when the median wage in certain states was lower than that, the elimination of right-to-work laws, and opposed both the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Harris voted against confirming Jerome Powell’s chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, instead introducing a law to require that a racially, ethnically, or gender diverse candidate is interviewed for all central bank vacancies.

Harris does not poll much better than Biden in head-to-head matchups against Trump, and historically, she has polled worse than her fellow California Democrats in statewide races and abysmally enough in the 2020 primary to force her withdrawal before Iowa. But her actual legislative wish list is worse than merely incompetent. It is truly radical, and if implemented, would risk accelerating Biden’s stagflationary policies into something more Soviet.

MILWAUKEE — The morning after his monthslong crusade to champion Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) to become Donald Trump’s running mate proved triumphant, Donald Trump Jr. appeared with Axios’s Mike Allen to take a victory lap, but even the former first son admitted his father kept him in the dark until the end.

“I felt it for a while,” Donald Trump Jr. said of his sense that the former president would choose the Ohio senator as his running mate. “I knew for sure when I saw the ‘Truth’ go out. I found out with the rest of the world on social media.”

The younger Trump lobbied the Republican presidential nominee up through the beginning of the Republican National Convention, arguing that Vance’s populist bent and more isolationist leanings demarcate “where our Republican Party is” even if “the Republican Party in D.C.” does not agree. He was clear that his victory in Vance’s promotion over other veepstakes contenders, widely regarded as more “traditional conservatives,” means the party can put “a lot of that nonsense behind us.”

“He lived and epitomizes the American dream,” Donald Trump Jr. said of Vance, who earned his favor for the vice presidential bid because of “his youth, his vigor, [and] his ability to prosecute the case.”

“I think he does better than, frankly, a lot of our stars on friendly television,” Donald Trump Jr. said.

Donald Trump Jr. confirmed the campaign plans to park Vance in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where the former president narrowly survived an assassination attempt on Saturday. The site of the shooting, Donald Trump Jr. noted, was right next to a factory where the “blue-collar” Vance’s grandfather once worked.

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Donald Trump Jr. maintained the campaign doesn’t fear the notion of the Democratic Party trying to replace the 81-year-old Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris, admitting that “there’s a component in me that would rather run against” the vice president who “makes Hillary Clinton seem likable.”

“The No. 1 thing I’m tuning in for the rest of the year is J.D. versus Kamala,” he said.

MILWAUKEE — Although Donald Trump Jr. boasted of his “badass” father‘s resilience after narrowly surviving an assassination attempt during a rally on Saturday evening, the former first son remains indignant over how the since-slain shooter was able to come so close to murdering the former president in the first place.

“I don’t want to be the guy to be conspiratorial,” Trump Jr. said on the second morning of the Republican National Convention during a conversation with Axios’s Mike Allen. “A guy does not get on a rooftop with a rifle — that doesn’t happen without a serious breach of something.”

The Secret Service, which is overseen by the Department of Homeland Security, has come under fire for the evident security breach on Saturday. The elder Trump’s would-be assassin managed to bear-crawl up a rooftop fewer than 500 feet from the president’s podium, and despite various eyewitnesses spotting the shooter and attempting to alert authorities before the shooter blew off a portion of former President Donald Trump’s ear, the shooter was not stopped until he shot at multiple victims, killing one.

“How did someone get that close for that long?” Trump Jr, who confirmed the Trumps have previously requested further security from the Secret Service, asked. “It’s a little different than a Biden rally — [Trump] attracts a lot of people there.”

The agency’s latest excuse came during a Tuesday interview with ABC News.

“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point,” Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle said in defense of the decision not to secure the site of the shooting. “And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof.”

Trump Jr. praised his father for fighting rather than fleeing after the shooter was subdued.

“My family, we’re built a little differently, as you probably noticed: [Trump] stood up with defiance,” the proud son said. “Everyone is a badass on the internet, but when you’re actually tested.”

The Republican presidential nominee was notably emotional as he joined the RNC on Monday, with Trump uncharacteristically somber and grateful and the party, polling ahead of the Democratic nominee in the general election for the first time in two decades, unusually gleeful. Trump confirmed to the Washington Examiner that he scrapped his original convention speech after his brush with death, reflecting his desire to focus not just on uniting the party but also the country at large. His son confirmed that the “new Trump” is here to stay — with some caveats.

“There are events that change you for a couple minutes, and there are events that change you permanently,” Trump Jr. said but confirmed that he will still prove pugnacious when necessary. “My father will always be a fighter. That will never change. But he’s going to do his best to moderate that when he needs to be.”

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In the meantime, Trump Jr. signaled that his father can rely on his new running mate as his attack dog, lauding Sen. J.D. Vance’s (R-OH) “ability to prosecute the case” for Trump on hostile media. Trump Jr. heavily lobbied for his father to choose the Ohio senator as his vice presidential nominee specifically because of his ability to go on the offense. Even the “new Trump,” however, can still be relied upon to push back on defense.

“He’s never going to stop being Trump when attacked,” Trump Jr. said. “That’s what makes him an effective leader. He doesn’t cower when under fire, literally.”

Just two days before the Republican National Convention commences to formally nominate Donald Trump for a third presidential bid, a gunman attempted to assassinate the former president during a Pennsylvania rally.

After a stunning round of audible gun shots, Trump was evidently a single inch from death, with a bullet appearing to graze his ear and bloody his face. But Trump, who briefly hid for safety beneath the podium, emerged defiant with a fist pumped as his Secret Service detail huddled around him to corral him off to safety.

According to a senior government official, Trump is safe. But democracy is not. In fact, more than Russian trolls or 2020 election truthers could ever dream of achieving, the attempt to assassinate the Republican presidential nominee is actually the single greatest threat to our democratic experiment.

The Republican Party establishment, which pissed away more than $200 million on primary challengers other than Trump, did not want the former president to win the nomination for a third time in a row. But the voters unequivocally did. More than three-quarters of Republican primary voters, or 17 million Americans, voted for Trump. That’s 3 million more than the Democrats who voted for the incumbent president.

Joe Biden, of course, was safely cocooned by the Democratic Party, which cancelled presidential primaries outright in two states and blocked his challengers from appearing in other states, while the media pretended he did not succumb to the senility exposed at his disaster of a debate performance against Trump late last month.

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Criminal law correctly maintains a very narrow definition for the incitement of violence. And even in common parlance, we don’t hold political agitators directly or personally responsible for raising the temperature of a discourse. But two troubling truths cannot be denied.

First, assassinating the democratically elected candidate for either party is tantamount to disenfranchising an entire half of the American electorate. That is what was one inch away from reality on a sweltering Saturday in Pennsylvania.

Second, this attempted murder of Trump cannot be considered in a vacuum. Those who have deemed Trump the pre-eminent danger to democracy and demonized him beyond the norms of opposition to policy or character may not be responsible for the actual attempt on his life, but reckless demagoguery is responsible for normalizing neutralizing Trump by any means necessary.

Impeachment failed twice, and four separate criminal cases against Trump seem unlikely to fulfill their intended purpose of locking the former president up before Election Day. When one man has been cast as the Big Bad, the existential threat to humanity’s first and last enforcer of the consent of the governed, someone will take such rhetoric both literally and seriously, and the promise of violently ending Trump’s candidacy to its logical conclusion.

In the last four years, Democrats have escalated from echoing President Joe Biden‘s assertion that decency is on the ballot to now threatening that democracy itself is at stake, but neither the party in panic nor the president imploding in public seem to really believe this.

Despite accusing Trump of posing a greater risk to democracy itself than “his old pal Putin” and claiming the contemporary Republican Party under the former president’s purview is “worse” than literal Jim Crow segregationists such as Strom Thurmond, Biden seems positively sanguine at the prospect of losing his reelection bid to a man he’s accused of treason.

“I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” said a satisfied Biden when pressed on the possibility of losing to Trump by George Stephanopoulos during last week’s ABC interview.

While a handful of more centrist Democrats have overtly called upon Biden to withdraw from the race, the party’s leadership has more or less resigned itself to the reality that Biden has secured 99% of the nominating delegates and that he will relinquish neither his nomination nor his quarter-trillion-dollar war chest that could legally only go to Kamala Harris if he were to withdraw and endorse his vice president. Elected kingmakers such as Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Jim Clyburn (D-SC) have publicly dithered in expressing concern, and past presidents such as Barack Obama have not refuted leaks that they’re quietly questioning Biden’s longevity despite their public endorsements.

But when Dr. McB, first lady Jill Biden, declares her husband is the only one for the job, no household name from the party has called her out for bringing their crackhead son into White House conversations. When Biden himself smears those challenging his rule as “elites” wishing to disenfranchise voters in general and his team telegraphs Biden haters are racist and classist as well, not one mainstream maverick has called out such malarkey. Ironically enough, the likes of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), the far-left socialists who would likely earn the greatest share of plaudits from their bases for radical truth-telling if they called out Biden for the egotistical tyrant that he is becoming, actually seem downright pleased with his persisting bid.

Across the ideological spectrum and demographic tiers of the party, the various elected Democrats all have their own self-interested reasons not to admit the emperor is actually butt naked — better 2028 odds to challenge a weakened Harris should Biden lose to Trump, etc. — but they all reveal the truth behind their ugly lies: Democrats don’t actually believe Trump poses an existential threat to democracy as we know it.

If Democrats really cared about democracy as an abstract concept, they probably wouldn’t have spent years trying to disenfranchise one side of the aisle by prosecuting its preferred presidential nominee and trying to overtly remove him from the ballot, and they definitely wouldn’t have successfully disenfranchised their own voters by outright canceling state presidential primaries and blocking any challengers to Biden from even appearing on the ballot. Furthermore, we wouldn’t have seen the torrent of tirades that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, or literally any other Republican was Actually Worse Than Trump.

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If, according to Democratic logic, Trump is worse than Putin and every single other generic GOP primary challenger was actually more dangerous than Trump, then either the person making such a series of statements doesn’t believe Putin is that dangerous or, more realistically, everything they’re saying is a lie.

As has been true for the past half-century of Biden’s career of failing upward, the man who has, at last, achieved his white whale will not let go because Pelosi hemmed and hawed over his age. Biden, who is polling worse against Trump than any general election Democrat against a Republican presidential challenger in at least the last 20 years, is happy to suicide-bomb his way to Election Day, dragging his party down with him. And if the rest of the party really cared, it’d stop treating him less like a frail old man trying to pass with dignity and more like a threat to democracy as we know it.

While her husband was holed up in Camp David as Democratic Party kingmakers worked overtime to resuscitate his imploding reelection bid, first lady Jill Biden reminded the world that she is indeed the power behind the throne and, more importantly, why she will push the president, come hell or high water, to Election Day.

In her third Vogue magazine cover since Joe Biden‘s inauguration, beating the First Lady record previously set by Michelle Obama, a monochromatic Dr. McB stares off contentedly into the distance, like an airbrushed Lenin or designer-dud-clad Mao. Days after former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton made clear that Democrats are stuck with the incumbent even after a debate performance that can be mostly kindly described as a borderline medical emergency, the first lady in white is embossed with her own sordid reminder: “WE WILL DECIDE OUR FUTURE.”

Petrified by the presumption that a real journalist would uncover the actual story of the consummate socialite pulling off a real-life Weekend at Bernie’s but with the presidency, the hagiographers at Vogue stick to the shallow depths of hackneyed sartorial studies — “She looks like she’s ready to party, and in a way, she is—these are her people” — and peddling the party line that “democracy is on the line.”

The problem for the Bidens is that voters agree, and increasingly and for good reason, voters across the aisle view the party in power as the greater threat to our democratic process. In a national CBS News poll after the debate, voters agreed that both Biden and former President Donald Trump were equally dangerous to democracy, despite Biden’s previous lead on the issue. Even before the debate, swing state voters gave Trump an 11-point advantage on the question of protecting democracy.

Alas, that is a consequence of the Democratic Party quite literally canceling state primaries until Biden, with 99% of delegates secured, revealed he could not spar against Trump without falling on his face, let alone against Russian President Vladimir Putin or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

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Jane O’Meara Sanders, the wife of the socialist senator-turned-Biden loyalist Bernie Sanders (I-VT), likened Dr. Jill to former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In reality, Biden is likely more of an Edith Wilson type. Careful not to let facts get in the way of the narrative, Vogue omits the first lady’s reported full-time job of cordoning off the president from staff before sunrise and after sundown. (Medical professionals have a word for octogenarians incapable of retaining their faculties after the sun is down.)

Instead, the plain old professor Jill of Vogue is a mere mannequin, a still rather pretty older lady who excels at the abstract — “advocating” and campaigning, holding the hands of strangers, telling them “please” and “thank you.” But a picture is worth 1,000 words, and the magazine’s cover star, complete in a $2,820 Ralph Lauren dress, can’t lie: Joe Biden will remain president because that is what Jill Biden has decided.

Had the Democratic Party actually allowed the public to witness President Joe Biden in the wild after 4 p.m. prior to the formal start to its presidential primary, and had the media any interest in exposing his now-undeniable senility, the best course forward for liberals would be obvious.

If the electorate knows that an 81-year-old candidate cannot speak for longer than four minutes, even with a teleprompter, after sunset without mumbling and stumbling slack-jawed and staring into space, and if that same candidate is now trailing a convicted felon by some six points nationally and even more in battleground states, the pragmatic decision for the Democratic Party would be to pressure the president into forgoing reelection and encouraging an open primary in the hopes of democratically superseding the vice president who is nearly as unpopular as he is.

It’s not hard to imagine a democratically nominated Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) or Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) running at least neck-and-neck with former President Donald Trump, even if he has a quantifiable record to compare against the incumbent party.

But the Democratic Party made the decision to go all in on cordoning Biden off from the public to prop him up for a second general election, and the media went along with it gleefully, chiding not just candid observations from conservatives about Biden’s condition but also special counsel Robert Hur and the rare dissenters in the press for reporting that Biden was cognitively deteriorating in real time. The party itself didn’t just cancel two state primaries and bar other candidates from the ballot in another four states to secure a seamless renomination for the incumbent ticket. The media engaged in a full-scale blackout of Biden’s long-shot challengers and, much more importantly, the reality that Biden was being escorted early out of international summits and incapable of unscripted remarks to the public.

So when Biden imploded Thursday night, he didn’t just blow up his own reelection odds. He suicide-bombed the credibility of much of the ostensible press and all of the liberal intelligentsia in the process. Publicly, the entire left-of-center Democratic media complex has broken its knives out and declared war on Biden, with the politicians and aides who haven’t yet called out for Biden’s withdrawal in their own voice, leaking their opposition to his continued candidacy to a press salivating for scoops to cover their own derrieres.

Privately, the promise of a multimillion-dollar severance may prove a better tact because the legal and practical reality is that the party has exactly 35 days to beg Biden to resign, and even if he cowers to their demand, Democrats are stuck with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Biden became the party’s presumptive nominee four months ago and has since accrued a full 99% of the delegates to secure his bid. While Biden could theoretically release his delegates from their pledge, Ohio state law required presidential nominees to be added to the ballot no later than Aug. 7, until Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) agreed to a last-minute extension until the beginning of September.

But the Democratic National Convention is reportedly proceeding as though the original Ohio deadline were binding, planning a “virtual roll call” weeks before the DNC at the end of August. Even if Biden, who has spent half a century chasing after the presidency, agreed to step down before Aug. 7, Biden’s delegates have promised to wage war on the party if it tried to leapfrog over the nation’s first black, Asian, and female vice president with a less intersectional candidate. A brokered convention or brokered virtual vote that blew past the ballot deadlines now much earlier than in the past thanks to rampant absentee and early general election voting could wind up disenfranchising individual voters across the country.

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Harris is also the only alternative legally entitled to the Biden campaign’s quarter-billion-dollar war chest if he chose to give it to her. Otherwise, the PAC would be required to refund donors or siphon off the money in $3,300 increments to other Democratic campaigns.

In post-debate polling, Biden trails Trump by six points and Harris by two, and the Republican’s lead is only growing. But the time to find an alternative to the Biden-Harris ticket has passed because Democrats decided its voters were not entitled to an informed and democratic primary process. It’s Biden-Harris, or Harris, or bust.

Despite the overwhelming outrage from voters across the political spectrum at President Joe Biden’s public implosion during his first 2024 presidential debate against former President Donald Trump, Democrats are legally and practically stuck with their incumbent, which is likely by design. The president, who would require only a simple majority of the party delegates to secure the nomination, has already earned 99% of those delegates thanks to a primary season that involves canceled state elections and a top-down media blackout of possible primary challengers.

Even if the party secretly planned to oust Biden after he received the nomination, when the Democratic National Committee has more legal sway over delegates, the $180 million war chest raised by Biden could only go to one other person in the country: Vice President Kamala Harris who polls as poorly as he does.

Even so, the Biden family syndicate is understandably in crisis mode. Thanks to its powerful and connected patriarch, the Biden family name has been the meal ticket for most of Biden’s siblings, all his surviving children, and six of his seven grandchildren.

“One of the strongest voices imploring Mr. Biden to resist pressure to drop out was his son Hunter Biden, whom the president has long leaned on for advice, said one of the people informed about the discussions, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations,” the New York Times reported. “Hunter Biden wants Americans to see the version of his father that he knows — scrappy and in command of the facts — rather than the stumbling, aging president Americans saw on Thursday night.”

More than any other family member, Hunter Biden has the most perverse incentives to push his octogenarian patron into a second term in the presidency. Hunter Biden has already been convicted on three counts of federal gun crimes, and he heads to a second trial over criminal charges related to his tax evasion. Hunter Biden is banking on a pardon and the persisting power of the Biden moniker to keep any further investigation into whether he violated sex trafficking or foreign agent registration crimes during his overseas influence peddling and solicitation of prostitution.

But perverse incentives aside, the real revelation in the outlet’s report is that the leader of the free world is relying on the advice, not of the Obamas, faith leaders, or medical professionals, but rather a literal crack addict who:

• Is a convicted felon because his sister-in-law, with whom he cheated on his wife, threw out the firearm he illegally purchased in a public dumpster
• Owes millions in alimony and child support to the various mothers of his children
• Has never met one of his five children

The first point more or less speaks for itself. The indigo-blue jury pool of likely lifelong Joe Biden voters unanimously convicted Hunter Biden of three gun felonies after his various mistresses confirmed he was actively using crack at the time he illegally purchased the gun in question.

While Hunter Biden’s lawyer and sugar daddy, Kevin Morris, has paid back millions Hunter Biden owed to the IRS. The first son’s financial obligations to the women he used and discarded are still outstanding. Hunter Biden was famously taken to court by ex-paramour Lunden Roberts to prove his paternity of daughter Navy Joan, after which he retaliated by blocking the little girl from using the Biden moniker and reducing his child support payments to an undisclosed amount. To this day, Hunter Biden still reportedly owes Kathleen Buhle, his first wife of a quarter-century and mother to his three eldest children, nearly $3 million in court-ordered alimony.

Roberts, whose tell-all about her relationship with Hunter Biden hits bookshelves the week of the Democratic National Convention, has revealed that Navy Joan has never met her father in person, let alone the paternal grandparents who pride themselves as patriarch and matriarch of a devoutly Catholic dynasty.

Joe Biden can and should shoot a text to former President Barack Obama or someone who has actually won an election before, but his crack addict, deadbeat father, criminal of a son is probably better off seen rather than heard.