Who is in charge of America? Biden has destabilised the nation's psyche

Has America just experienced its own version of the 1991 coup in the Soviet Union, where Mikhail Gorbachev was confined to his dacha, with all lines of communication cut, and pressured to sign a letter declaring a state of emergency? Did the staffer who published the news of Biden’s resignation act on orders from Biden himself? Or did someone else make that call? Every hour that Biden doesn’t publicly dispel these rumours adds to the feeling of unreality. Needless to say, this is not exactly a healthy state for the “world’s greatest democracy”.

But whatever the details, one conclusion has been reached: Joe Biden is out and Kamala Harris is in. This is currently being met with a fair degree of celebration among many on the American Right: Harris is a notoriously weak candidate, one who is prone to gaffes and was completely unable to make headway in the 2020 Democratic primary. But counting your electoral chickens before they hatch is never wise, and certainly not in these extraordinary times. Biden himself was also a notoriously weak candidate (having tried to run for president several times and failed spectacularly every time), even more gaffe-prone than Harris, and only became the 2020 Democratic nominee as part of a concerted insider plot to stop Bernie Sanders. Neither Harris nor Biden could ever hope to win even a remotely competitive Democratic primary if their lives depended on it. But as we learned in 2020, a basic inability to win a primary race does not mean a candidate can’t then go on to win the presidential race.

And yet, 2024 is not a year that lends itself to easy predictions. In the space of just over a week, the US has seen one presidential candidate shot, and the other step down under murky circumstances. The idea that Trump now has an automatic path to victory reeks of the same complacency that saw him lose in 2020, and that spurred so many hopes for a massive “red wave” in the 2022 midterms.

But while it might be impossible to confidently call the outcome of the election in November, the very near future is quite easy to predict: more political chaos, paranoia and uncertainty. Biden’s decision to remain as president even as he now concedes he is unfit for the job of campaigning for re-election is not at all tenable. Already, more and more Republicans are stating the obvious: if you aren’t healthy enough to run for president, you clearly aren’t healthy enough to be president. Chances are that a real battle to remove Biden from his perch inside the Oval Office is about to commence — either through convincing or coercing him to “voluntarily” step down, or by invoking the 25th Amendment. The latter would be an entirely unprecedented watershed moment, but unprecedented watershed moments seem to have become a dime a dozen in America of late.

There exists an old African proverb: when the elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled. It is tempting to analyse these large, chaotic movements inside the American political system simply in terms of the political rat race: what, one might ask, would it mean for large donors if Biden had continued to run? But while that might still be interesting, the wider context to all this chaos is more important. Who is even in charge at this point? Is it Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi? Is it Joe Biden himself, despite all the signs to the contrary? Or is nobody in charge?

Few seem to be able to answer these questions in an authoritative manner, and it seems increasingly unlikely that the election will solve this fundamental brokenness. A Trump win is unlikely to calm the paranoia that has seeped into the walls of the American political consciousness; a Harris win, especially at this point, might not be accepted as legitimate by a very large number of Republicans.

So, while America isn’t quite yet at the same level of crisis as the Soviet Union in 1991, even acknowledging that is to damn the US with some very faint praise indeed. It’s true that renditions of Swan Lake aren’t yet playing on an endless loop on CNN and MSNBC, urging the Soviet citizens of America to remain calm as the tanks roll up Pennsylvania Avenue. But faith is surely starting to wane. Some may say that Biden’s departure is proof that America’s political system is working. But just as the past few months have proved the opposite, don’t be surprised if the next few do the same.

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Malcom Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, Sweden

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