The Outsider Perspective Issue 399 | The Beltway Outsiders

If you’d like to read this issue on my website, click here! If you’d like to sign-up, and receive this in your inbox each week, click here! Read past issues here.

Good Friday Morning! I hope you and your family had a great Independence Day. We joke about thawing out Mariah Carey for the Christmas season. We should do the same for Lee Greenwood and the Fourth of July. Greenwood is celebrating the 40th anniversary of his song “God Bless The USA” this year and describes this time as his busiest.

He told the New York Post, “We always joked, if I’m not singing somewhere on the Fourth of July, you might as well take the flag down.” And with Donald Trump playing the song at all his rallies, and bringing Greenwood along at times, it makes it even busier for Greenwood.

Thanks to everyone for continuing to subscribe, like, and share the new YouTube channel, The Horse Race. Because it’s a new channel, it’s not showing up in people’s feeds just yet. You’ll have to turn on notifications for new videos at the moment. As the audience and viewership increase, that should become less of an issue.

This week, I’m sticking with Biden and the soft-pressure campaign from Democrats and the press to get him to step aside—links to follow.

Quick Hits:

Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory wrote a great piece titled “Joe Biden and the Common Knowledge Game.” His overarching point is that the common knowledge around Joe Biden has changed, and everyone knows it. Give the entire piece a read. He makes an undeniable point that many are missing. Hunt writes, “Everything Joe Biden does for the rest of his life will be seen through the lens of last Thursday night. Every step in public, every word spoken in public, every facial expression in public … everything he does in public for the rest of his life will be watched and examined and measured for signs of increasing decrepitude. Can you imagine? It’s already happening, like with the CNN cameras lingering after the debate concluded to look for a frail moment as he left the stage. Do you think that was an accident, that the cameras stayed on? And of course Biden delivered the frail moment. Of course he did. Because that’s who he is now. There will be another disaster moment. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows that everyone knows it. This isn’t a John Fetterman thing where you can imagine a future where his health improves. This only gets worse from here.”
Politics has been so insane I haven’t been able to write about the Supreme Court’s decisions as the term wrapped up, and there’s been a lot. The big one is the immunity case. Most of the commentary (including Sotomayor’s dissent) is trash. And it’s trash because few of them understand the case and the objectives involved. Jack Goldsmith at Lawfare did the best writeup I’ve seen for a center-left perspective (and he dismisses Sotomayor’s hyperbole, too). Josh Blackman at Volokh is doing great work writing up thoughts on the case (I’ll link to several of his pieces below). I don’t consider it a good or bad case; it’s one of those things that will have to develop and evolve over time. The Democratic Party’s newfound love of prosecuting political opponents impacts constitutional law – something Roberts notes in his majority opinion. Where the exact line drawn on this is impossible to tell for now because the court didn’t rule on what acts of Trump were official acts versus something less. The main reason Democrats are mad is that it’s increasingly clear they won’t get a trial before Election Day, which tells you a lot about their belief in the “rule of law.” Here’s the question I’ve posed to my liberal friends: in 2013, the Obama administration admitted that it had killed four Americans via drone strikes with the military. Under Sotomayor’s dissent, Barack Obama could be prosecuted for murder. Under Roberts’s view, there’s immunity to that decision. Which one is right? Let me put it this way: Sotomayor would only prosecute Trump, she’d offer immunity protections to Obama.

Where you can find me this week

Please subscribe, rate, and review my podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or Google Play — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you find me in the algorithms. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter.

Horse Race Ep. 004: Press Wants Biden OUT | Trump Wins New Hampshire? | Biden’s Pollster Talks

Congress Should Demand Joe Biden’s Medical Records – Conservative Institute

Democrats Launch Coup Against Joe Biden – Conservative Institute

Can Joe Biden Be Removed By The 25th Amendment? – Conservative Institute

What Happens When The Emperor Has No Clothes?

On the issue of removing Biden, I was right about one thing but very wrong on another. Where I was right was telling you to look to the editorial pages of the New York Times and Politico for clues on where the media would go after Biden’s disastrous debate performance.

After Robert Hur’s February report, I reported a movement to kick Biden off the ballot. One of the media forces who charged out to protect Biden was Politico journalist Jonathan Martin (formerly of the NYT), who penned this column:

Get Used to It: Biden Isn’t Going Anywhere: The GOP fantasy crowd is so accustomed to conspiracy theories that they’re betting the Democrats will switch candidates at the last minute. Have they actually paid attention to politics?

The Wall Street Journal dubbed Martin the “hall monitor” for Democratic conventional wisdom—a point Martin mocked on X/Twitter.

The DAY AFTER Biden’s disastrous debate, Martin published a column titled “The Movement To Convince Biden to Not Run Is Real.“

In retrospect, calling Martin a hall monitor was kind. The whiplash you get from all these 180-degree switches, and Martin is just one example, will send you to the emergency room.

There’s now a broad debate within the media about whether they somehow got the story wrong (I know, I know, stop laughing). They obviously did and helped the White House shape the “official narrative” of Biden’s decline. That has changed. The powers that be in the press are now executing a full-court press to push Biden out of the race. Some highlights:

The New York Times Editorial Board called on Biden to step aside the day after the debate. The Times has also published a barrage of op-eds calling for Biden to step aside or resign from:
- Michelle Cottle – who blasts Jill Biden
- Nate Silver – who is yelling at Dems to do something
- Kevin Boyle – who wants Biden to act like LBJ
- Michelle Goldberg
- Thomas L. Friedman – who wrote not one, but two columns begging Biden to step down. Including one where he admits he wept in a Spanish hotel room while watching Biden implode.
- Ezra Klein
- Maureen Dowd
- Lydia Polgreen – who is pumping up Kamala Harris
- Frank Bruni
- Nicholas Kristof
- The Times readers themselves, who beg, “Is This the Best We Have?”
The Washington Post Editorial Board wrote and published a possible farewell address for Biden, where he also has a “mini-primary” for Democrats to choose a new candidate.
The Economist published a cover story editorial calling for Biden to step aside. The cover featured a walker with a Presidential seal on it. The internet dubbed it “Walk-Force-One.”
Every major news organization has run a reported story that Biden was in mental and physical decline, with evidence building at the start of the year.

Watch the timing of their stories to get a sense of how hard the Times, in particular, is pushing Biden to get out. On Wednesday, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris held an all-hands call for their campaign staff. It was part of a full-day blitz to tamp down leaks and issues in the campaign, in Congress, with Governors, and with donors.

Rumors started swirling that morning that The New York Times was about to release their latest poll of the race post-debate. Those rumors were expected to be accurate because Biden’s campaign was already putting out talking points rebutting a poll that hadn’t even been released yet.

The moment Biden’s call started, and he was speaking with Kamala Harris and their campaign staff, the Times clicked the publish button on that poll. It was an identical move to when CNN brought on Carl Bernstein to nuke Biden after his statement on the Supreme Court immunity case. The press is not just opposing Biden; it is actively timing its hits to coincide with attempts by the Biden campaign to right the ship.

This brings me to the point where I was wrong. In writing and on YouTube, I’ve said multiple times that I thought Biden would get a brief reprieve because of the holiday. I thought that Independence Day might slow down polling. It hasn’t. The press has rushed out to get polls as quickly as possible, and those numbers are burying Biden.

In the RealClearPolitics average, Biden is now losing by nearly 3 points. The NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and CNN all have Biden losing by 6 points. This is Trump’s largest poll margin since January when the primaries were going on.

In betting markets, Trump is sitting at 55.5% odds to win. For the first time, Kamala Harris is in second place with 15.2% odds of winning. Biden is at 13.8% odds.

Biden was sinking hard going into the debate. Nate Cohn says that polls have shifted towards Trump by another 3 points from the pre-debate stage. Interestingly, this is a standard shift for most polls where there’s a clear winner in the debate.

In short, Biden is losing this race. It’s not a toss-up, and Donald Trump’s commanding lead puts him squarely in the lead. Could the race shift back towards Biden? Sure. I’ve written many times about how most races have ebbs and flows to them, but they tend to push back toward an equilibrium.

The question is this: What is this race’s equilibrium point? Biden was already sinking after getting a brief bump from the Trump conviction news cycle—that feels like 25 years ago now. Bloomberg reported that Democrats were weighting pushing up the convention nomination vote to mid-July instead of waiting until August.

The White House denied this reporting, but we need to understand this report for what it was: a trial balloon. The White House and Biden allies are testing whether they can head off a nomination fight by getting Biden across the hurdle before the convention. That trial balloon got nuked.

That leaves Biden with the July 5th sit-down interview with ABC News and George Stephanopoulos. Here’s the problem: The Daily Beast is reporting that this interview will last only 15 minutes. Everyone denies the reports, but the Daily Beast says, “ABC executives hope that Biden–long known for his loquaciousness–will simply give them more time once they are on the ground.”

Biden and the White House perceive ABC News and Stephanopoulos as a safe harbor. It’s worth asking: Are they? How does Stephanopoulos view his role here? His media colleagues, including many within the Democratic Party, are on a campaign to push Biden out of the race.

Will Stephanopoulos try to offer Biden a life preserver? Or is he going to bury the knife in Biden’s back?

We’ll have to wait and see. For now, the media is pushing a soft-pressure campaign to get Biden out. Biden is resisting. What will the press do in response? They will amp up the pressure campaign and make it a hard-pressure campaign.

For me, a hard-pressure campaign means the press pivots from “age-related issues” to an actual medical diagnosis of Biden. If Biden pushes back against the drive to get him out of the race, the next step is to make it hard for him to stay. That would involve doing one of two things: 1) Dropping a story that Biden has a confirmed case of some disease. Or 2) Running op-eds by “experts” claiming that Biden has a neurological disease.

I suspect there already is a diagnosis, and at least one of the news organizations, most likely The New York Times, is sitting on it.

Generally speaking, all the current health stories around Biden agree that he started going downhill in a serious manner around the start of the year. If you read these stories, there’s a common thread: Everyone is talking about the decline of Biden in Washington D.C.

It’s an open secret.

It is notable, then, that The New York Times ran a story on April 4, 2024, covering Biden’s health. The Times included Trump in this, too. But Trump isn’t the reason we’re asking health questions. If you cut out all the throat-clearing sections regarding “we’re asking the same about Trump as well, to be fair!” These stories start to look more focused on Biden.

One of the specific things the Times called out in their April piece was the “Neuropsychological Assessment Battery (NAB), which can detect dementia and other brain dysfunction.” They note everyone over a certain age should take it (Biden is well over that age). The Times wrote:

During Mr. Biden’s physical, his physician and a team of specialists chose not to conduct the Neuropsychological Assessment Battery, or a similar comprehensive assessment of his mental fitness.

The doctor decided there was no need for such a test because Mr. Biden regularly demonstrated what the medical team considered high-level executive functioning, according to people familiar with the decision.

One person on Mr. Biden’s team put it this way: After the president navigates hours of complicated foreign policy meetings during grueling trips overseas, it would be pointless to have him sit for a test asking which picture is a lion and which is a rhinoceros.

Dr. Sayed Azizi, the clinical chief of behavioral neurology and memory disorders at Yale University, said exams that go well beyond those kinds of simple questions are common in some fields after a certain age.

“Oftentimes, even in medicine, physicians who are over age 70 or so, they have to yearly go to the doctor and either take those tests or not, or somebody has to certify them that they’re OK to practice medicine,” he said. “Most hospitals have that.”

Instead of running NAB, Biden’s doctor, through the White House Press Secretary, said they cleared Biden of any “neurological disorders such as a stroke, multiple sclerosis, or Parkinson’s disease.”

In short, the White House answered questions no one was asking. The Times report also noted that the White House should subject Biden to an independent evaluation because the White House physician likely had a conflict of interests (the doctor is a Biden family friend and treated Beau Biden through his cancer and eventual death).

We’re getting close to the press releasing a medical diagnosis on Biden. They’re walking up to the line while sticking to the “age-related issues” line.

The language is shifting, though. Here’s a section from the left-leaning NYMagazine by Olivia Nuzzi:

Those who encountered the president in social settings sometimes left their interactions disturbed. Longtime friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names. At a White House event last year, a guest recalled, with horror, realizing that the president would not be able to stay for the reception because, it was clear, he would not be able to make it through the reception. The guest wasn’t sure they could vote for Biden, since the guest was now open to an idea that they had previously dismissed as right-wing propaganda: The president may not really be the acting president after all.

This is a liberal reporter talking to Democrats. These people don’t believe Biden is the acting President. She then relates a moment she met Biden in April, the same month as the NYT started sniffing around on Biden’s health:

My heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile. It made me sad in a way I can’t fully convey. I always thought — and I wrote — that he was a decent man. If ambition was his only sin, and it seemed to be, he had committed no sin at all by the standards of most politicians I had covered. He took my hand in his, and I was startled by how it felt. Not cold but cool. The basement was so warm that people were sweating and complaining that they were sweating. This was a silly black-tie affair. I said “hello.” His sweet smile stayed frozen. He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. “And what’s your name?” he asked.

Exiting the room after the photo, the group of reporters — not instigated by me, I should note — made guesses about how dead he appeared to be, percentage-wise. “Forty percent?” one of them asked.

“It was a bad night.” That’s the spin from the White House and its allies about Thursday’s debate. But when I watched the president amble stiffly across the stage, my first thought was: He doesn’t look so bad. For months, everything I had heard, plus some of what I had seen, led me to brace for something much more dire.

We haven’t hit the bottom on bad stories for Biden’s health. The press is signaling it can, and likely will, get much worse if Biden doesn’t drop out.

I’ve gone long this week because we’ve never seen anything like this in U.S. history. The news cycle is wild, especially for Republicans and conservatives watching the press go full attack dog on a Democratic President for the first time in decades. It’s an open question on how this shakes out.

Forty-six days to the Democratic Convention.

Links of the week

Broad Reflections on Trump v. United States: The wisdom of the decision depends on unknowable future events. – Jack Goldsmith, Lawfare

Presidential Immunity As a Question of Executive Power: There is no textual basis for “immunity” as such, but there are structural reasons why some degree of insulation is inevitable. – Jonathan Adler, Volokh Conspiracy

The President’s Three Bodies After Trump v. United States: Official, Individual, and Personal. – Josh Blackman, Volokh Conspiracy

The Presidential Immunity Trichotomy: Chief Justice Roberts sought to put an end to Lawfare against the presidency. – Josh Blackman, Volokh Conspiracy

Trump v. United States Recognizes That Prosecuting The President Poses More Risks Than Suing The President: Defenders of the Mueller investigation routinely argued that the threat of civil enforcement was worse than a federal prosecution. – Josh Blackman, Volokh Conspiracy

The Goal Of The “Architects of the Supreme Court” Was Always Overruling Chevron, and not Overruling Roe: McConnell: “Dismantling the administrative state and empowering people who are actually elected to make decisions has been the motivating force” for nearly every “Federalist Society-type lawyer.” – Josh Blackman, Volokh Conspiracy

How ‘Misinformation’ Becomes Common Knowledge: Fear of being punished by a crowd is not unique to Democrats, or liberals, or Americans. It is an innate human response to the dangers of being ostracized. – Timur Kuran, The Free Press

They Knew: Biden is no longer fit to be president. Last night’s debate exposed the lies we’ve been told. – Bari Weiss, The Free Press

The left-wing media has seen the decline of Joe Biden for years, and now it’s out in the open – Miranda Devine, NYPost

Disney heiress, wealthy Democratic donors say they won’t finance the party until Joe Biden drops out – CNBC