The shadow president is now running the country
/A friend of Glenn Reynolds predicted this yesterday:
Earlier today, Trump called for RFK to get Secret Service protection, and a friend messaged me: “Haha, when they do that, our crazy orange former president official becomes shadow chief executive. Making the common sense calls the Biden admin can’t quite manage.”
And later today, they did that, with Sec. Mayorkas announcing that RFK will get Secret Service protection. To which my friend comments: “Prediction: Here through Jan 20 will be the first six months of the second Trump admin.”
What makes Biden look so weak in this situation (as in all other matters) is that he has previously denied six different requests for such protection for his own political purposes. Certainly, the assassination attempt forced his hand, but his handlers must have known as the shots still echoed that, politically they had to give Kennedy protection immediately, and had they acted swiftly, they’d have come through unscathed. Instead, they hemmed and hawed until Trump demanded that they act, and then their reversal made it appear that they were bowing to Trump’s will; bad optics.
John Fund, National Review:
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A Kennedy aide told me that the campaign has already spent $3 million on private security that accompanies Kennedy everywhere he goes. I asked why RFK didn’t have Secret Service protection despite his family history (his uncle, John F. Kennedy, and his father, Robert F. Kennedy, were assassinated).
I got a stunning answer. The Biden Department of Homeland Security has six times rejected requests from the Kennedy campaign to provide such protection. Ironically, it was RFK’s death in 1968 that led the Secret Service to expand its protective coverage to leading presidential candidates. Some Kennedy advisers believe that Biden is worried enough about Kennedy’s support in key swing states as to be satisfied that Kennedy has to allocate millions in scarce campaign dollars to security.
But as the shooting at former president Trump’s latest rally in Pennsylvania has just proven, American politics can be suddenly volatile. Newsweek reports that 775 pages of documents obtained by the Freedom of Information Act detail 34 instances of direct threats and bizarre rants directed at RFK Jr. by various entities and individuals. One promised, on social media, to “kill rfk jr lawfully on USA soil. Bullets right into the head,” while another wrote, “RFK is not immune from a 7.62 caliber bullet.”
Kennedy’s lawyers have sent six letters to U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas formally requesting protection, to no avail. Last month, cousin of RFK Jr. and former House member Patrick Kennedy weighed in with his own request: “I struggle to understand the administration’s persistent refusal to grant Secret Service protection to a presidential candidate deemed by the Secret Service itself to be at elevated risk.”
Even Democrats are starting to question the Biden administration’s preposterous refusal. Colorado governor Jared Polis and Arizona representative Ruben Gallego have demanded protection for Kennedy.
So too have some Republicans. Ari Fleischer, a former White House spokesman for President George W. Bush, says the Biden administration should have provided Secret Service protection to Kennedy “a long time ago.”
Thomas Balcerski, a presidential historian at Eastern Connecticut State University, says the Biden refusal looks both shortsighted and petty: “Giving Kennedy protection would give him political currency. The speculation is that Biden doesn’t want that.”
If that’s true, sadly, it wouldn’t be the first time that our cognitively failing, peevish, and narcissistic president has lashed out at his political adversaries. The attempted assassination of another presidential candidate, one expects, should be enough to alert the president to his folly.
