On October 22, 1968, less than a month before a fateful presidential election and seven months after he declared himself one of the lamest lame ducks in American political history, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Gun Control Act of 1968, the first such measure to pass into law in a half century.

Being President doesn’t stop just because you decided not to Run Again. The office, and the power that resides therein, can be held by only one person at a time. The Republicans know this. And that’s why their new line of attack is to argue that if President Biden can’t campaign, he shouldn’t try to govern, either. (Expect some agitation on this score from anonymous Democratic sources, too.) LBJ proved that to be wrong. That is why the current president should tell anyone dealing in this swill to f*ck right off into the sun.

Frankly, that the GOP is pushing this line at all smells to me of panic. Tim Alberta of The Atlantic, whose Republican sources are impeccable, reports that the president’s announcement that he’s withdrawing from the race has completely wrong-footed the former president*’s campaign. The spirit of overconfidence that hung over the Republican convention in Milwaukee, and that prompted the politically useless choice of Senator J.D. Vance as the vice-presidential candidate, appears to have dissipated like a light morning dew.

And El Caudillo Del Mar-a-Lago has already taken the news in the “serene” and “spiritual” manner we were assured had come over him after what happened in Pennsylvania:

“Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve—And never was!” Trump wrote on his social media platform, adding: “We will suffer greatly because of his presidency, but we will remedy the damage he has done very quickly. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”Trump told NBC News in a brief phone interview on Sunday that if he’s elected in November, he will “fix what [Biden] has done.”“Joe Biden is the worst president in the history,” the former president told NBC News.“He should never have been there in the first place,” Trump continued. “He should have stayed in his basement.”

Unity!!!

That certainly doesn’t sound like a candidate soaring toward an electoral triumph. It sounds like a petulant old man clinging to neighborhood grudges nobody else is alive to remember.

There will be time enough later to assess the significance of President Biden’s act of patriotism, and to assess why the only coherent plan forward involves Vice President Harris at the top of the ticket. For now, though, the president has strengthened his friends and sown confusion among his enemies. That’s not bad for a Sunday in July.

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Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. 

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