The Vanishing Biden

The cultural president versus the actual president

Who is the president of the United States? On a technicality, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. Who is the cultural president of the United States, the ruler of the American psyche? As of August, Kamala Devi Harris. Donald Trump might be the cultural veep. That’s rough terrain for him.

The media is enthralled. It’s left to a few stray progressives and anti-monopolists to point out that Silicon Valley and Wall Street are euphoric, convinced they’ll have a normal corporatist in the White House—Trump, so devoid of an attention span and intrinsic beliefs, could only be reliable for so long—who will do most of what they want. What a blank canvass to paint upon! Barry Diller hopes and prays that Harris cans Lina Khan, the anti-trust maven who chairs the Federal Trade Commission. Reid Hoffman is right there with him. Venture capitalists had their own joyous fundraising Zoom for Kamala. Billionaires, it seems, are back in business. They can be Brat, too. Or hope that, if Harris wins, she’ll tell Jonathan Kanter to shove off and get that pesky anti-trust lawsuit against Google settled quietly and painlessly. David Plouffe, veteran of Uber and Facebook and those Obama campaigns, never got to helm the Biden effort. He’s happily signed up as a senior advisor.

What does Harris have to say about this? We don’t know because she doesn’t give interviews. She’s surging in the polls, Trump is reeling, J.D. Vance is whining on the tarmac (or couch): what a summer—for Kamalot—it’s been.

What a summer for Biden, who shocked the nation by announcing on July 21st he wasn’t running again, to vanish into thin air. His vapor is in the White House, somewhere.