With Biden out of the 2024 race, what’s the Deep State’s next move?

The deeply unlikeable Kamala Harris has been tapped to get the Democratic nomination. Can her victory be ensured behind the scenes?

The 81-year-old US head of state has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be picked as the Democratic Party nominee for the upcoming elections. Will this controversial shift drive a wedge between liberals long into the future?

Joe Biden’s eleventh-hour decision not to run marks a history-making change in the 2024 presidential race less than a month before the Democratic National Convention, which will kick off on August 19. Just after announcing that he would not be seeking the party’s nomination, Biden, who has said he would remain in the Oval Office until after a new leader is sworn in, announced in a tweet that Harris, 59, has his “full support and endorsement” to be the Democratic presidential nominee. This is where things promise to get ugly.

While Biden finally displayed the necessary amount of self-awareness to understand he is not physically and mentally fit to remain in office for another four years, Harris continues to delude herself that she is presidential material. The past four years have clearly and painfully proven that she is not. Not only did the vice president demonstrate her inability to perform simple functions, like effectually addressing a group of schoolchildren in what just might be the most cringe-worthy moment of her career, her own staff has raised serious questions about her office management skills. Meanwhile, Harris’s political instincts continually come up short at the most critical moments.

For example, one of her first major jobs as vice president was to oversee the crisis at the southern border, where millions of illegal immigrants are flooding into the US every year. Yet Harris waited over 100 days before paying a visit to the US-Mexico frontier. When pressed on the matter in an interview, she brushed off the oversight when she said, bafflingly, “And I haven’t been to Europe. And I mean, I don’t understand the point that you’re making. I’m not discounting the importance of the border.” It’s those sorts of uncomfortable exchanges that have kept the vice president’s likability and trustworthiness in the basement among voters.

A YouGov poll of 1,582 American adults conducted between July 13 and 16 revealed that 39 percent of respondents would vote for Harris if she was the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate, against 44 percent for Trump. This places Harris behind bumbling Biden, who the survey found would lose to Trump by 41 percent of the vote against 43 percent.

This is where the question about the future trajectory of the Democratic Party comes down to who is really in charge in Washington, DC at the moment. For those who believe that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been calling the shots for the past several years, I’ve got some hot property in Virginia Beach to sell you. The real powerbrokers behind the throne – the Deep State, if you will – who give Biden and Harris their marching orders, are comprised of the likes of the Clintons, Obamas, Pelosis, Schumers, and many others. While this may sound like a grand conspiracy theory, it’s not difficult to imagine that some of the most powerful and influential Democratic dynasties of the last century have serious sway over policy in Washington. Donald Trump, who knows a thing or two about how things work in DC, has suggested as much.

“You’ve been ripped off by everybody and betrayed by the globalists, Washington, Wall Street people, those combinations of Washington, Wall Street, they’re the worst of all,” Trump said last year at a New Hampshire event. “And it’s never been worse than it is now under crooked Joe Biden, and frankly, his boss, Barack Hussein Obama. I think it’s his boss.”

For the disbelievers, Obama fueled the speculation himself in 2020 when he told the late-night comedian Stephen Colbert, just before Biden was sworn in as president, that people would often ask him, “knowing what you know now, do you wish you had a third term?”

To which two-term Obama famously said, “If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front-man or front-woman and they had an earpiece in and I was in my basement or sweats looking through the stuff and I could deliver the lines but somebody else was doing all the talking and ceremony, I would be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.”

Some might call that a quaint description of how the ‘Deep State’ actually works behind the scenes, pulling the strings on puppet politicians they firmly control.

“The Deep State is real,” wrote Jason Chaffetz, the former chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “They don’t like exposure, accountability, or responsibility. They fight back, outlast, and work the system to their advantage.”

Whether or not the American political system has been victimized by such an operation is of the utmost importance for all Americans. But whether or not a person believes it to be true, they cannot deny that the most powerful names in Washington have one goal, and that is to prevent The Orange Man from getting anywhere near the Oval Office again. The question they are certainly asking themselves today is: can the first female, black and South Asian vice-president in US history pull off the task? My personal hunch is that they do not have much faith in Kamala winning a fair (and fair is the crucial word) no-holds-barred slugfest against the indefatigable Donald. Kamala simply lacks the composure and charm necessary for survival in the political jungle, as was clearly demonstrated in her 2000 run for the presidency when her polling numbers never escaped the basement, forcing her to leave the field before the primaries even began.

Unless. Yes, there is an unless. Unless the wily Democrats have ascertained beforehand that mail-in ballots, together with the millions of migrant voters anxious to support their benefactors, could guarantee victory to even the likes of Kamala Harris in a showdown against Trump. In that case, we could be looking at the first female US president (together with the possibility of a female VP, for example, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or maybe a male in the form of California Governor Gavin Newsom, whose super ego would probably preclude him taking the inferior role). Such a combination of factors could guarantee the Obama-run (?) Deep State at least another four years of calling the shots in Washington, DC from the shadows, with a weak and submissive leader formally in power. Stranger things have happened.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of DTNZ.