I called this long ago

The end of the "president", the growth of the "presidency"

A tweet from May of 2023:

And from April of 2022:

Now everyone knows it. From Walter Kirn, a few days ago:

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It is nice (???) for everyone to come around to what you’ve been thinking this whole time.

To be fair, although this mismatch is exceptional in Biden’s case since he seems to be suffering serious age-related cognitive decline now, the gradual death of the “president”, and the growth of the “presidency” has been happening since… FDR, at least, maybe?

I was telling someone yesterday that one reason we have a press secretary is because the press can ask her questions, and she can have no idea what the answer is, and that’s kind of OK, because she’s just the press secretary. How can she keep track of everything happening in the office of the president? But the truth is, the president himself (and especially Biden) would be just as clueless about a whole lot of the stuff happening in his office, and that revelation would bother the public a good deal more.

So that’s where we are now in our nominally constitutional republic. (Perhaps better days ahead, can’t leave you on a negative note. We shall see.)