Welcome to Thunderdome. The dynamics of the current moment for the presidency, the Democratic Party and the country as a whole are absolutely insane and are gaining speed towards a conclusion that is still unknown. Let’s break down the factors as they stand today, understanding that the current direction could alter dramatically based on what happens next — with President Biden’s press conference tonight and Monday interview, the RNC gathering in Milwaukee and former president Donald Trump’s choice for vice president all scheduled in the coming days. So here’s a snapshot of the moment right now, even as the ground shifts under our feet.

Almost everything going on right now is about granting permission

When you read George Clooney’s piece in the New York Times, understand that you aren’t just hearing the musings of a Hollywood actor weighing in on Joe Biden’s standing. According to Politico, Clooney — one of the biggest celebrity fundraisers for Democrats for years — reached out to former president Barack Obama, who obviously didn’t dissuade him from writing it. Perhaps that’s because — despite Nicole Wallace’s “cheap fakes” claim — Obama saw the reality of Joe onstage with Jimmy Kimmel at the $30 million California fundraiser Clooney hosted. The WSJ reports today:

It was a night that combined Democratic politics with Hollywood star power. Clooney’s co-host was his frequent co-star, Julia Roberts. Barbra Streisand jeered Donald Trump, and Jack Black took to the stage in a pair of overalls adorned with the stars and stripes.

To some in the audience, Biden appeared at times to struggle through answers or keep up with the conversationalists, a harbinger of what millions of Americans would see in a debate with former President Trump weeks later…

When Kimmel joked at the Los Angeles’s Peacock Theater that he had given his son, Billy, a stuffed animal of the president’s dog, “and it bit Billy’s toe off,” the president didn’t register an immediate response — but Obama chimed in with a reference to his Affordable Care Act, quipping, “Fortunately he’s covered!”

If Clooney’s op-ed, echoed by Obama bro Jon Favreau and clearly taken personally by the Biden campaign, can be seen as granting permission for Team Obama critics to do their worst to Joe, Nancy Pelosi’s comments on MSNBC’s Morning Joe about awaiting Biden’s “decide if he’s going to run” (last we checked, he’s definitely running) were intended to accomplish the same thing for Democrats on Capitol Hill:

Those comments were meant to serve as a subtle green light, one person close with Pelosi said, meant to encourage members to speak up about their desire to see change atop the ticket — and to warn Biden to reconsider staying in the race. They had their intended effect: they reignited the debate over Biden’s viability on the Hill after a day where he appeared to have temporarily quelled the mutiny.

Furthermore, in private conversations with lawmakers, the former speaker has been forthright about the dire situation the party now finds itself in. She’s suggested to people that Biden won’t win this November and should step aside, according to a half-dozen lawmakers and others who have either spoken with her or are familiar with conversations she has had.

The public permission slip had its intended effect, with more members adding their names to the growing list by the end of the day. And we have heard many more are waiting to come forward after the NATO summit concludes. As one Democrat House member was quoted, anonymously of course, “I told my comms team, have our statement ready to go next time he has a big fuck-up, because you know there’s going to be another one.”

Last night, Axios reported that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is essentially in the same place as Pelosi. Schumer added a statement about still supporting Joe Biden, but he notably didn’t deny the report. Within the same hour, Peter Welch of Vermont became the first Democratic senator to openly call for Biden to withdraw in a Washington Post op-ed.

And what of those outside of leadership? For the progressives, AOC and others have supported Biden publicly for a variety of reasons, as has Jim Clyburn and the Congressional Black Caucus — at least for now. But some members are saying the quiet part out loud. See Representative Jayapal on Tuesday: “I’m fully behind him as our nominee, until he’s not our nominee.” Alrighty then.

It’s clear by now that the insular Team Biden does not have any idea how to stop the bleeding. The best tactic to assuage concerns or at least stop the slow roll of opposition would be to get the president out there more, unscripted and at all hours of the day, which is exactly the thing the White House seems terrified of doing. Their fear is palpable — even Monday’s interview with Lester Holt will, like the George Stephanopoulos conversation, be pre-taped. Any confident press team would have known they should do it live. 

Time is running out

The fantasy that Obama, Pelosi, Schumer and others would visit the White House and tell Joe it’s time to go is not how this will play out. If the Democratic Party is going to speak with one voice — a combination of voters, donors, media, activists, elected leaders in Washington and across the country will have to advance their demand of a change, to the point that the Chicago convention will look like a post-apocalyptic dead zone with an endorsing speaker’s list of Hunter, Ashley and Dr. Jill.

We’re almost to that point. Whether it gets here in time is an open question. But the question of if Joe Biden will care? That’s already answered: no, he won’t. He spent half a century getting to the Oval Office, and Democrats will have to carry him out on a stretcher. Feel sorry for them if you want, but they’re in a tight spot of their own making. And unless and until they make a change, it’s worth asking one last question: incidentally, who’s leading the country?

What happens if the money just stops?

We’ve all seen the poll numbers rolling in from swing states showing Biden’s struggles post-debate. What people seem to be ignoring is that after the coming week, those numbers are likely to get much worse with even a modest post-convention bump for Trump. These polls matter most to donors — and signs are they’re already abandoning the Biden campaign. NBC reports:

President Joe Biden’s campaign has already suffered a major slowdown in donations and officials are bracing for a seismic fundraising hit, with the fallout from a debate nearly two weeks ago taking a sizable toll on operations, according to four sources close to the re-election effort. 

“It’s already disastrous,” one of the sources close to Biden’s re-election said of fundraising.  

“The money has absolutely shut off,” another source close to the re-election said.

Two of the sources said this month is on a path to be down by possibly half — “or much more,” one of them said — from large donors alone. Sources emphasized that the donations were down across the board.

“Donors are negative. They had a call with the president. The call seemed so contrived to people; I don’t think they buy it,” one of the people close to the campaign said, referring to a recent national fundraising call between Biden and donors. “They called on people who were the most loyal, die-hard… There were no tough questions for the president.”

And Politico reports this is not just confined to large-dollar donors:

The problem isn’t limited to the party’s big-donor class. Small-dollar fundraising has also dipped in recent days, according to one person with direct knowledge of the internal campaign data. The campaign is now projecting that grassroots fundraising will drop at least 20 to 25 percent over the rest of the month, according to this person.

“This is a massive, massive problem,” the person said. “Right now, we should be scaling up, doubling and tripling our goals as we head into the fall. But we’re cratering.”

If the RNC’s post-convention bounce makes swing states appear out of reach, donors will likely take the lesson that 2024 is now an election about providing a check against an inevitable Trump victory, shifting their money to key Senate and House races.

What if delegates decide to exercise power?

Much as the media assumes that the delegates headed to Chicago will be Biden loyalists, his campaign certainly seems concerned that they might be willing to invoke the “conscience clause” of the DNC’s bylaws if things get worse. Jonathan Martin reports:

Fearing a floor revolt against his nomination, President Biden’s aides are telephoning individual delegates to next month’s Democratic convention to gauge their loyalty to the president, according to three delegates who received a call this week.

After a round of introductory questions confirming each delegate was still planning on going to Chicago and asking if they had served as delegate before, the Biden aide making the calls got to the point, the Democratic activists recalled to me in separate interviews.

One of the delegates said the line of questioning turned with an inquiry along the lines of, “Do you understand what being a pledged delegate means?” before the aide asked: “Do you have any potential disagreements with the president?”

Another delegate said the bottom-line question was even more direct. “‘Is there any reason you couldn’t or wouldn’t support the president at the convention?’” the delegate recalled the aide asking.

The third delegate said the version he received was more open-ended: “’Do you have any concerns?’”

The delegates were thunderstruck at the calls. One of them initially wondered if it was some sort of prank until double-checking the caller ID and seeing Delaware’s area code, 302. After hanging up, each of them reached out to other convention delegates they knew and found these individuals also received the calls.

The three delegates I spoke to, all long-standing veterans of Democratic campaigns, said they had the same initial reaction after hanging up with the Biden aide: was this an attempt by the president’s campaign to potentially block or replace disloyal pledged delegates?

One factor here could be the overall morale of the Biden campaign, which is reportedly in the absolute dumps. Forget the leaders and donors and media — if the campaign staffers who signed up for this effort have no confidence, how can delegates ignore the tools at their disposal to make a change?

There is only one alternative

Her name is Kamala Harris, and she may be the only option. Antonia Hitchens reports:

“We’re in a terrible situation and no option is without risk,” a group of self-described Democratic operatives wrote in an unsigned memo last week. “Donors, pundits and Democratic elites are freely slinging around wild ideas about dream tickets.” The document, titled “Unburdened by What Has Been: The Case for Kamala,” posited that it was time to get real — “like it or not, there’s one realistic path out of this mess: Kamala.”

The memo, which is said to have circulated among Democratic donors and coalition groups, made a case for Harris as the least chaotic replacement for President Joe Biden. (The title of the document is a reference to a phrase that Harris has used repeatedly throughout the years.) Bullet-pointed action items included “push the administration to stop sidelining Kamala” and “promote Kamala as a leader of the party and the country.” The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial boards had called for Biden to resign the nomination, recently published articles teasing whether this might finally be Harris’s “moment.”

It was against this backdrop that Harris traveled to Las Vegas on Tuesday for what some hoped, or at least speculated, was part of an audition tape for a candidacy of her own…

I walked into the event with a man named Kenneth, a Biden supporter who was skeptical of a Harris candidacy. “I know there’s a lot of issues with Biden’s age,” he said, “but I don’t think the electorate is ready for a female president. Right now, it’s old man versus old man, ideals versus ideals. If it comes down to a gender question, we’re fucked.” When I told him that some people were talking about the event as a launching pad for Harris, he gestured around the room, baffled. “This is her coming-out party, this little ballroom? Please. Rent out a theater. It’s Vegas.” Anyway, he said, Biden would never step aside: “Who gives up power?” When I told Kenneth that I usually cover Trump, he said, “So you see the difference between fanatics and realists.”

One more thing

If this was a normal election, this whole edition would have been about handicapping the potential Trump veep picks — but it’s 2024, so it’s not normal. Neither is the Republican platform, which for the first time in forty years doesn’t contain a commitment to the protection of unborn life. For pragmatic Republican voters, this may not be a big deal. But for the pro-life movement, it’s disappointing in the wake of Dobbs — made all the moreso by the sight of Senators Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, both strong abortion critics, going along with the Trumpian effort. Andrew Walker shares his critique here. Of course, platforms don’t typically matter much — and in the Trump era probably not at all. What matters is what comes after — and for that we’ll have to wait and see. Much as Republicans would like to avoid this issue on a national level, there will be a host of federal issues related to abortion they’ll have to handle if they retake the White House. And pro-lifers will be watching them closely.