Portraits of Kamala Harris

Who’s in charge of the executive branch? That question has been on many lips throughout the duration of President Joe Biden’s term, and has been asked even more often since his decision to stand aside as Democratic nominee in July. Perhaps the White House itself offers some visual clues to the answer: a source who has been heading in for transition meetings with the outgoing administration notes that virtually all of the jumbo portraits inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue feature Vice President Kamala Harris — visiting foreign countries, making speeches and the like. Biden, meanwhile, is barely featured. Perhaps all of his impressive pictures are displayed in the basement at Rehoboth Beach…

POTUZzzzzzz

While many are eager to blame President-elect Donald Trump or Elon Musk for any looming government shutdown, sitting President Biden is somehow avoiding much of the blame — because, as it turns out, he remains as missing in action as he’s been for much of his presidency.

Following the great switcheroo of 2024, where Democrats ousted Biden in favor of VP Kamala Harris, and her subsequent defeat by Trump, all can apparently now be revealed. The Wall Street Journal published a banner piece this week documenting how Biden’s decline was evident from almost the moment he took office.

“The president’s slide has been hard to overlook,” the Journal noted — despite the eagerness with which many did in fact overlook it. Canned CNN commentator Chris Cillizza recently issued “an apology: as a journalist, I should have pushed harder on the very real questions about Joe Biden’s physical and mental health as president.”

Of course, the Biden team insisted that everything was fine and that he would be the Democrats’ nominee in 2024, and that he would even defeat Trump again. All the meanwhile, “Biden’s team tapped campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, a Hollywood mogul, to find a voice coach to improve the president’s fading warble,” per the Journal story.

“If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether,” the exposé continued. “On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. ‘He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,’ the former aide recalled the official saying.”

This diminished capacity had real world effects, including how the administration presided over the failed withdrawal from Afghanistan. Congressman Adam Smith, a Democrat who was chairing the Armed Services Committee, told the Journal that the only time Biden ever called him was after he fiercely criticized the administration’s communications about Afghanistan. “The Biden White House was more insulated than most,” he said. “I spoke with Barack Obama on a number of occasions when he was president and I wasn’t even chairman of the committee.”

These problems impacted Biden on the campaign trail in addition to his time in the White House. Donors (and allegedly journalists) were instructed to pre-submit questions for him to answer ahead of fundraising stops. And yet, “even with all these steps, Biden made flubs, which confounded the donors who knew that Biden had the questions ahead of time,” the story claimed.

Biden’s loyal servant, rapid response director Andrew Bates, remained defiant in the face of the reporting, like the last Japanese soldier to surrender in World War Two. Biden “earned the most accomplished record of any modern commander-in-chief and rebuilt the middle class because of his attention to policy details that impact millions of lives,” he insisted. At ease, Private…

‘minisoldr’ logs back on

Mark Robinson, the scandal-plagued self-proclaimed “black NAZI” lieutenant governor of North Carolina, drew scrutiny for his unusual online handle, “minisoldr,” during his failed campaign for governor this year. 

As Robinson attempted to push back on negative stories, including lodging a lawsuit against CNN, he claimed that he was not the user in question. However, an account with the username “Minisoldr” popped up again this week — this time on a Google Meet call for North Carolina’s Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, with local publication the Assembly reporting that Robinson spoke from that account on the call. 

Despite Robinson’s landslide defeat, he continues posting on his social media accounts with his actual name about his problems with Senator Thom Tillis, seeming to imply that a comeback may happen in 2026, when Tillis is up for reelection.

Tillis, for his part, is used to running against politicians with sex scandals. During his 2020 campaign, he beat his Democratic opponent, Cal Cunningham, who cheated on his wife with a woman he infamously dubbed “historically sexy” in leaked text messages.

Were Robinson/Minisoldr to run against Tillis, Cockburn eagerly awaits a far less PG-rated campaign than the one Tillis ran against Cunningham. He wishes all those involved a happy family Christmas.

Fox Booze

Cockburn dipped into the Dubliner on Wednesday for a festive bash hosted by Fox News’s Bret Baier, where the whiskey and tequila flowed freely. Guests included Trump NSA pick Mike Waltz, Arizona senator Mark Kelly and numerous Fox contributors in what was Baier’s first Christmas do since Covid. At the event, Baier, who is set to sell his DC manse to treasury secretary designate Howard Lutnick, cited stats showing that his tête-à-tête with Kamala Harris was the most watched one-on-one cable news interview since Larry King interviewed O.J. Simpson in 1995. Baier’s past bashes were notorious for their host’s festive garb — this year he wore a red jacket with a white fringe — and him taking to the stage’s bar to duet with acts such as the Sugarhill Gang.

Cockburn wishes all his readers, in DC and beyond, the happiest of holidays. He will return on January 3.