Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week it finally happened: David Ignatius gave Washington elites permission to talk about moving on from Joe Biden. Few columnists represent the voice of the DC establishment more than Ignatius, who was counted among the favorite writers of the president, at least until publishing this piece, titled “President Biden should not run in 2024.” We’ll see if he’s going to get invited back for the next cranky conversation in the Oval, where Joe will show him he’s still pretty spry — no joke!

While outlining his obvious defects as a candidate, Ignatius also tries to build a golden bridge out of office, praising Biden and his administration as meaningful, important and accomplished, as if trying to reassure his reader that bowing out is not giving up. As Mediaite writer Colby Hall put it: “Perhaps most damning is the nuanced and nearly loving tone Ignatius takes, almost as if he’s a loving son giving tough news to a cherished parent that they are no longer able to drive a car.”

All this means that Biden’s liabilities are impossible to deny any more, particularly on the world stage. Coming in the wake of the president’s “I’m going to go to bed” remarks at the G20, it sure looks like the overlapping Venn diagram of the Washington foreign policy blob, the deep state insiders and the exasperated MSNBC hosts are trying to push their private feelings out into the open prior to the eleventh hour. And to be clear: none of them actually want Biden out for the good of the country, they’re just increasingly worried he’ll lose.

This certainly feels like a vibe shift! But given how long Biden fought to get here, will he really let the brass ring slip so easily from his grasp? Or perhaps, given the weight of a campaign and the low likelihood he’ll finish out a second term, he might choose to step aside next year to make way for the first woman president… a legacy unto itself with the progressive left. But then how will they feel if she loses next November?

For this week’s podcast, we go into these questions and more — and talk about the risks and potential rewards of Republicans’ impeachment inquiry. Listen and subscribe today!

Even Mitt Romney ages

The Ignatius column arrives as more and more people seem open to engaging in The Age Question, motivated somewhat by Biden’s evident decline, but also by the wavering senile moments of Dianne Feinstein, Mitch McConnell’s freezes and the continued presence of Nancy Pelosi (who just announced at age eighty-three that she’ll be running for re-election).

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney isn’t going along with this. He announced that he won’t be running for re-election to the Utah Senate seat he’s held since 2018, in part because of his age. “I spent my last twenty-five years in public service of one kind or another. At the end of another term, I’d be in my mid-eighties. Frankly, it’s time for a new generation of leaders,” Romney announced in a video released by his office.

That supposedly “ageist” message, it turns out according to a Quinnipiac University poll, is increasingly on the minds of voters: 61 percent of Americans now support an age cap for presidential candidates, including roughly equivalent portions of Democrats, Republicans and Independents. A higher number support similar limits on Senate and House members, including 66 percent of Democrats, 64 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Independents. Most of those polled want the limits set at age seventy-five or less — which would obviously outlaw any of the above mentioned politicians from holding office.

Joe Scarborough admitted this week that privately, Democrats all feel that Joe Biden is too old to run:

“Mika and I, everybody, we talk to, every political discussion, it talks a lot about Trump, but when it comes to Joe Biden, people say, ‘Man, he’s too old to run.’ He’s, and I mean, he’s not going to, he’s not really going to run.

“So, you know, we often will complain about Republicans who will say one thing about Donald Trump off the air and another on air,” he added. “Well, let me just say, Democrats, off the air, will say ‘Joe Biden’s too old. Why is he running.’ On the air? They won’t say that.”

And it’s not just on the left. Ron DeSantis echoed this message in his interview this week with CBS’s Norah O’Donnell:

“The presidency is not a job for someone that’s 80 years old. And there’s nothing, you know, wrong with being eighty. Obviously I’m the governor of Florida. I know a lot of people who are elderly. They’re great people. But you’re talking about a job where you need to give it 100 percent. We need an energetic president.”

The problem for everyone who wants to move on from this aged, increasingly decrepit leadership is that it will take a long time to work through a generational shift. The Senate’s median age is older than sixty-five, and many of its oldest incumbents are once again running for re-election… which means that a lot more of the Ignatius-style “dad can’t drive the car anymore” conversations will need to happen to deliver on the appetite for generational change.

The case for impeaching Joe Biden

Thoughts from Bill McGurn in the WSJ:

[T]he ultimate question surrounding Hunter’s overseas millions from places such as China and Ukraine — and whether his father was the quo for the quid his son received—is political. More important than seeing anyone packed off to prison is learning whether Joe Biden, as vice president, willfully enabled his son’s schemes and twisted US policy in the process.

It may turn out that Joe Biden committed no crime. But even if he never received a nickel from his son’s businesses, his cooperation in Hunter’s selling of the Biden brand was corrupt. Ditto for President Biden’s Justice Department, which repeatedly sabotaged the federal investigation into Hunter.

The party line is that there’s no evidence that Joe Biden profited from his son’s dealings. But the administration has stonewalled any effort to get at the truth, and the White House is now building a war room of lawyers and communications staffers to fight the investigations. It’s disingenuous to argue there’s no evidence while you are working overtime to thwart any attempt to find evidence.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says impeachments should be rare, because normalizing impeachment isn’t good for the country. He’s right. But House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is calling for an impeachment inquiry, which he says is a “natural step forward” based on evidence that has been uncovered by the House committees investigating — Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means.

This includes learning that Joe Biden lied during the 2020 debates when he categorically denied Hunter was paid millions from China and said the laptop was Russian disinformation. And that the then-vice president had dinners with his son’s business partners, and spoke to them on speakerphone when Hunter called. And that, as two Internal Revenue Service agents have testified, the Justice Department sandbagged an IRS investigation. And that a Biden staffer emailed Hunter business associate Eric Schwerin confirming that the vice president had signed off on talking points Mr. Schwerin had supplied about Burisma.

All this from a man who claims he knew nothing about his son’s business?

But what about the risks? The Spectator UK editorializes:

Impeachment has become, then, a purely symbolic act. Moreover, the US public has already shown itself to be unimpressed by the employment of “lawfare” in political matters. Trump was never widely popular, yet every move by his Democratic opponents to try to get him in the dock — something they have now achieved — has only served to galvanize support among his base and draw sympathy from independents who abhor the misuse of the justice system. An obsessive campaign to impeach Biden over his son’s business dealings will doubtless do the same for the president.

Quick links

In interview with Megyn Kelly, Trump defends himself over Fauci.

Tim Scott is pushing the RNC to reconsider debate rules in fight for position on stage.

Latest South Carolina Monmouth poll has Trump ahead but now sub-50 percent.

In New Hampshire, Nikki Haley talked up as a potential veep.

Nancy Pelosi repeatedly refuses to say if Kamala Harris should be vice president.

One more thing

Vivek Ramaswamy has been catching flak for going back on his prior critiques of TikTok after a meeting with Jake Paul: “Had dinner with @JakePaul on Sunday. He changed my mind and convinced me to join TikTok. Yes, kids under age 16 shouldn’t be using it, but the fact is that many young voters are & we’re not going to change this country without winning. We can’t just talk about the importance of the GOP ‘reaching young voters’ while hiding in our own echo chambers. It’s bad when the CCP collects data from US users via TikTok, but the truth is it’s no better when ‘American’ companies like Airbnb do the same thing by handing over US user data to China, and we’re not going to get China to play by the same set of rules until we win this thing. I’ll be on there starting later today.”

One of the things that was a hallmark of the Trump presidency was that whoever spoke to him before he walked out of the room, getting in the last point, would be what Trump ran with once he got on stage. Apparently the Trumpian similarities on issue sets isn’t the only thing Vivek shares with Trump. If he’s just one Jake Paul conversation away from going back on everything he’s said about China and TikTok, imagine what would happen if President Vivek sat down with someone really good at convincing people of things, not just a Disney Channel actor turned boxer?