[Order a copy of Robert Spencer’s forthcoming book, Muhammad: A Critical Biography, by clicking here.]

It is easy to forget the fact, but the president of the United States is an old fellow named Joe Biden, a relic of the late 1980s political scene, a sinister corruptocrat who affects a genial, folksy mien. He’s an octogenarian so deep in the grip of dementia that his frequent mental lapses led him to end his campaign for reelection after a disastrous debate with the man he had tried to destroy in numerous ways before a debate became unavoidable, Donald Trump. Yet, although the whole world knows, or thinks it knows, that Biden abandoned his reelection bid because of his cognitive decline, he continues to pretend to be president. Now, even the New York Times is calling for a halt to the charade.

To be sure, the author of the Times column calling for Biden’s resignation was the Paper of Record’s resident conservative, Ross Douthat, so it cannot be taken as an indication that the Democrat Party leadership, which generally uses the Times as its press release service, is on the verge of administering the final coup de grace to the Biden “presidency.” Still, this is the Times, and so it’s an unmistakable indication that there are currents within the Democrat Party that want to jettison Old Joe now.

Douthat points out that the destruction of Biden’s reelection campaign headed off a scandal: “for a few weeks the media coverage of the Biden White House built up the idea that there was a major scandal here, implicating the inner circle that encouraged the president to run for re-election and practiced deception amid his obvious decline. The potential scale of that scandal has diminished now that the country is no longer being asked to entrust the Oval Office to Biden for another four years.”

Nonetheless, if Old Joe would just get out of the way, says Douthat, Kamala Harris’ chances of being elected president would increase. “It’s possible,” he writes, “depending on Biden’s true capacities, that by rights he should have resigned and Harris should be president already — which probably would have put her in a better position to win the election even than her current honeymoon does.”

Instead, Old Joe is still in the White House, and the Democrat top dogs who have allowed him to stay on as their Oval Office figurehead may come to regret it before Jan. 20, 2025 comes around: “It’s also possible that there will come a crisis in the next few months that will make the Democrats wish that he’d resigned, rather than staying and then seeming overmatched.” Seeming? Biden won’t just seemovermatched in a crisis. He will beovermatched in a crisis. He is overmatched trying to climb the stairs of Air Force One. He is overmatched reading off a teleprompter. He is overmatched trying to tell Vladimir Putin apart from Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Yet he stays on as president because, as much of the world knows at this point, he was never really president in the first place. He was a mouthpiece for a shadowy individual or group that was making decisions for him, as Biden himself inadvertently revealed when he remarked on several occasions that he was going to “get in trouble” if he departed from the script that had been prepared for him.

The most likely candidate for who has been running things has been Barack Obama, who provided a ready foundation for such rumors when he famously said in Nov. 2020: “If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a frontman or frontwoman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats, looking through the stuff, then deliver the lines, but somebody else was doing all the talking — I’d be fine with that.” No one, however, really knows for sure except those who are running things and the people around them.

Whoever is in charge is still in charge, as Douthat acknowledges: “The people who readily signed up for another four years of a 10-to-4 presidency are still running the government around him.” The risks involved in this, however, are immense: “Since things keep happening in the world — for instance, this week, the nation that we’ve been arming for a defensive war decided to invade Russia — it seems like America could stand to learn a bit more about how the White House has been working recently, and what a perceptive observer (say, someone like George Clooney) might notice if he were to observe Biden consistently over a few days or just a full 24 hours.”

The bit about George Clooney being a perceptive observer aside, the point is well taken: America is in deep crisis, and no one is really sure who is in charge. If those in charge really cared about the American people instead of just about their own power, they would all resign along with Biden. And Kamala Harris. And the entire leftist power establishment. Instead, of course, they’ll continue to do everything they can to stay in power and keep on feeding at the public trough. If that includes a devil’s bargain to keep their empty shell in the Oval Office, whether as a concession to Biden for dropping out or because of lingering opposition to Harris, the American people will just have to take what comes.