The Democratic Party’s convention in Chicago, which is scheduled to run from August 19-22 should be among the most fascinating four days in American political history. 

Although there has been no official move as yet to shove Joe Biden away from his party’s nomination for the Presidency, there have been loads of rumblings among the power brokers, delegates, donors, and officials who will gather to decide whether they can get away with nominating a man who is both deeply unpopular and clearly in the grips of early (or perhaps no-so-early) stage dementia. Hiding him from the public during the Presidential campaign worked in 2020 because our nation was also in hiding due to the carefully manufactured Covid-19 craziness, but no such saving grace will be available to Democrats this time around—unless the mild Bird Flu can be rebranded and marketed as the next convenient Great Plague.

Although mainstream media manipulators have done everything possible to present our desiccated President as a virile and brilliant cross between James Bond and Albert Einstein, the reality is that we are watching a sundowning slide into senescence in The White House that has placed the actual stewardship of our nation into the hands of those who were not elected—and are neither accountable nor even known to us.

The result has been frighteningly extreme policies on law enforcement, border security, foreign policy, government spending, and political stewardship that have increased crime, filled our nation with illegal immigrants, brought us perilously close to the brink of war, dangled our country over the abyss of fiscal insolvency due to insane deficit spending, and shredded our cohesion as a nation by spreading fear and suspicion whenever possible. We are today truly a house divided, and there is a real question whether we can continue to stand if we stay on our present self-destructive path.

Unfortunately for Democrats, Joe Biden’s political instincts, whether they are truly his or someone else’s acting in his name, have demonstrated a unique ability to anger voters right across the entire political spectrum. His see-sawing blunders on border security have, for example, almost perfectly mirrored the disaster that has been his presidency. After spending years infuriated one side of the issue by rolling out the welcome map for what was, for intents and purposes, a government-sanctioned invasion of America, he has recently issued a contradictory executive order in an attempt to lock the door he left wide open for so long, which has now enraged those on the other side of the immigration debate and ensured everyone—Democrats, Independents, and Republicans—thinks him a blithering idiot. It would all be laughable were it not so pitiable, and the dance of indecision and double talk has been a dire feature of his disastrous administration.

So how do you solve a problem like Joe Biden with the Convention and nomination only two short months away? Americans have noticed his obvious decline, and clear majorities dislike the policies associated with his presidency. Polls show that a staggering majority of Americans now believe him mentally and physically unfit for another term in office, and his unprecedented erosion of support among traditional Democratic constituencies is pointing to an electoral catastrophe that could very well drag down his Party’s candidates further down the ballot.

The problem is that a great many replacement candidates look no better, so Biden’s renomination might be buoyed by a weak bench—but leave his Party in a pickle. Governor Gavin Newsom is a political orchid that thrives in the ultra-liberal hothouse atmosphere of California, but he has limited appeal elsewhere. Vice-President Kamala Harris is a political punchline who has somehow managed to be even more unpopular than her boss, and any attempt to ease her aside in favor of another candidate is sure to enflame the identity politics warriors among Democrats who are obsessed with checking diversity boxes instead of winning election. 

Would Democrats try, in desperation, to roll out Hillary Clinton and all her baggage for a rematch with Donald Trump? Is there a regional flavor such as Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker who can be pushed into a national campaign and survive the scrutiny and doubts of voters across 50 states? Democratic Party poobahs might find that a Joe Biden nomination will turn “doddering” into the political participle of choice heading toward November, but the alternatives available would be little better and bring their own baggage to the contest.

Presuming Joe Biden doesn’t slip in the shower between now and the Convention or election and end their hopes for squeaking out a victory, it seems Democrats will be stuck with both Biden and rolling the dice on continuing their “lawfare” against Donald Trump, which already has every appearance of backfiring spectacularly. 

Given that Trump’s poll numbers have only increased since they began their courthouse insurrection—and the Jack Smith and Fani Willis legs of Democrats’ legal triad seem to going nowhere fast—one has to wonder if their only hope now is that the judge in the much-derided hush money trial in New York City will jail Donald Trump or put him under house arrest in an attempt to stop him from campaigning, a desperate stunt that would obliterate any remaining political norms or good will, destroy the perceived legitimacy of the 2024 Presidential election, and tear our nation asunder in a manner that we can neither predict nor control. 

Unfortunately, there are enough desperate and duplicitous Democrats out there who will believe this kind of political atomic bomb, one that would thrill the Trump haters but horrify most Americans, would be a good idea, so we can only hope that sanity will somehow prevail among the insane—a shaky bet at best. Right now we at a point in our nation’s history that presents challenges and dangers that are unique to our age of 24/7 propaganda and official lies from our government. We will, hopefully, muddle through, but we truly need cooler heads and sensible minds to prevail in these perilous times.