House of Mouse wants Biden out

Sleepy Joe: ‘I’m tired’

Joe Biden has come out swinging against the “Sleepy Joe” allegations… by telling Democratic governors that he is not getting enough sleep.

According to the New York Times, Biden said he “needs to get more sleep and work fewer hours, including curtailing events after 8 p.m.” The CNN debate on June 27, in which Biden performed disastrously, began at 9 p.m. ET. The State of the Union address in March also began at 9 p.m. ET.

Many of the governors present, in person and virtually, have been mentioned as alternatives to Biden or possible VP picks for a President Kamala Harris, including Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Wes Moore of Maryland Gavin Newsom of California, Jared Polis of Colorado, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. Cockburn wonders how many of them work nights.

He followed up his meeting with the governors Wednesday with a July 4 interview on a black Philadelphia radio station, in which he inadvertently described himself as “the first black woman to serve with a black president.” Reminder: this is part of the clean-up from last week…

As for the vibes inside his White House right now? “Everyone is miserable, and senior advisors are a total black hole,” one official told Axios’s Alex Thompson. Biden is giving Emmanuel Macron and Rishi Sunak a run for their money in the “world leader having the worst week” stakes…

House of Mouse wants Biden out

The latest news out of Disney is bad for President Joe Biden — and for down-ballot Democrats.

Abigail Disney, the nepo-grandbaby heiress of the legendary company’s fortune, announced that she’s cutting off the entire Democratic Party that she’s helped bankroll unless Biden calls it quits.

“If Biden does not step down the Democrats will lose,” Disney told CNBC News. “Of that I am absolutely certain. The consequences for the loss will be genuinely dire.” As such, she announced, “I intend to stop any contributions to the party unless and until they replace Biden at the top of the ticket. This is realism, not disrespect. Biden is a good man and has served his country admirably, but the stakes are far too high.”

Disney’s pressure tactics come as Democratic megadonors are trying to gently put the president out to pasture. This week, another effort launched that would see up to $100 million donated to the Democrats’ presidential nominee — so long as that person is anyone but Biden, who has insisted that he isn’t going anywhere.

Biden’s decline has seen rival streaming gurus set aside their business differences to unite on the importance of making him last season’s news. Netflix co-founder Reid Hastings similarly is trying to cancel the Democratic Party’s subscription to Biden and return him like a mail-order DVD from last decade…

Now watch this drive…

While Biden is adamant that he’s not leaving the presidential race, his predecessor isn’t so sure.  “I got him out,” former president Donald Trump told golfers in a video covertly filmed at a golf course. Biden, Trump believes, is “quitting the race.” In the days since the debate between the two, Trump has been surprisingly content to sit back and let Democrats publicly squabble over the future of their party.

But, he couldn’t quite resist spiking the football while sitting in a golf cart. While he called Biden an “old broken-down pile of crap,” he didn’t exactly sound intimidated by his likeliest potential replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris.

She, he said,” is “so fucking bad.”

Rather than be humiliated by the video — which was leaked to the Daily Beast — Trump reposted it on his site Truth Social.

For his part, Trump will be back on the trail next week, potentially announcing his own number two in the days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Power play

A number of British top brass at American publications have managed to head off recent attempts to force them out — yet the ax has fallen over at the post-liberal site Compact — which “accepted the resignation of senior editor Nina Power” on Thursday. Power, a Brit who is still listed as the site’s managing editor on its masthead, lost a libel suit against the artist Luke Turner in November 2023, who is most famous for his “HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US” flag. Evidence from that trial was made public this week, revealing that Power had a fairly edgy burner account and joked with a colleague in texts that she’s “definitely a Nazi now lol,” among other things.

Compact claims to draw “on the social-democratic tradition to argue for an order marked by authentic freedom, social stability and shared prosperity” and the Compact editors fancy themselves thick-shelled warriors and strongmen, immune to the pressures of histrionic oversensitive online moral panics. So Cockburn can’t help but wonder this weak-kneed posture comes from and what may have led to them throwing their friend and coworker under the bus?