MILWAUKEE—President Joe Biden unexpectedly announced on Wednesday that he had contracted COVID-19. On Thursday, Axios published a report citing staff predicting that Biden would drop out of the 2024 presidential race in the coming days.
Bestselling author and radio host Seb Gorka highlighted some rather curious remarks Biden made about what he would do if he disagreed with then-President Barack Obama.
“This is fascinating,” Gorka told The Daily Signal at the Republican National Convention Wednesday. “Moments ago, allegedly Joe Biden has caught COVID.”
“You guys have to dig this up from the archives, before he became vice president, somebody asked him on camera, ‘What happens if you and Barack disagree?’” Gorka recalled. “Biden actually stumbles and says, ‘I don’t think we’d ever disagree, but if we did’—he said the following—‘I’d come up with an ailment and retire.’”
Biden didn’t only say this once.
“We are simpatico on our philosophy of government and simpatico on how we want to approach these issues that we are facing,” Biden said of then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in December 2020 after his election victory, the Washington Examiner reported. “When we disagree, it’ll be just like—so far, it’s been just like when Barack and I did. It’s in private. She’ll say, ‘I think we should do A, B, C, or D,’ and I’ll say, ‘I like A, don’t like B and C. And let’s go, OK.’”
“And like I told Barack, if I reached something where there’s a fundamental disagreement we have based on a moral principle, I’ll develop some disease and say I have to resign,” Biden continued. “We don’t have that I’m—we haven’t—and we’ve discussed at length our views on foreign policy, on domestic policy, on intelligence.”
The fact that Biden not only said this about Obama but repeated it about Harris suggests it may be less of a joke and more of an unintentional slip-up.
After the White House announced Biden had contracted COVID-19, the president released a cryptic message on X that read simply, “I’m sick.”
Obama and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi privately warned Biden that Democrats could lose the House of Representatives if he doesn’t drop out of the race, Time reported Thursday.
“So we elect you with the top of the ticket, and then you just manufacture ‘an ailment’?” Gorka asked rhetorically in his interview with The Daily Signal. “I guess he’s nine years late, but that’s what he said.”
Gorka, who served as deputy assistant to President Donald Trump in 2017, had predicted that the Democratic National Committee would delay the virtual vote to officially nominate Biden, and both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., pressured the DNC to delay the vote.
“You just sit back and buy shares of popcorn, because they are in a mantrap, a bear trap of their own making,” the radio host said. He noted that “it is nigh on impossible to get rid of an incumbent president. You can do the 25th Amendment, but you need two thirds of the Cabinet, with the concurrence of the vice president, and you need a majority—a supermajority—of Congress, and that would be such a self-burn for the Democrats.”
(The 25th Amendment does require a two-thirds vote of Congress to determine that the president is unable to fulfill his duties, if the president refuses to step aside.)
“So what do you do?” Gorka asked. “Well, the only thing you can do is have him resign, and the only way that’s going to happen is if Jill … Jill is like clawing to the Resolute Desk for dear life.” (The Resolute Desk is the president’s desk in the Oval Office.)
“So if they can get through to her, give them pallets of cash, immunity for Hunter, Frank, and Joe, and everybody else, then maybe he’ll leave,” the radio host noted. “But then, how do you do an end-run? How do you jump over the female black diversity hire?”
Referring to Harris, he said, “Can we just remind ourselves, she couldn’t even scrape 3% of the primary vote of the Democrats? Less than 3% of the Democrats like her, and this is the person you want to try and win an election against my former boss who was nearly just assassinated?”
While Gorka expressed optimism that Trump would win in November, he insisted that “three-and-a-half months in politics is an eternity,” and he urged conservatives to register to vote. Warning that Democrats are likely to use various levers to swing the election in their favor, he quoted Trump in calling for voter turnout that is “too big to rig.”
