On Monday, former Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah wrote an Op-Ed for Fox News, detailing why he believes President Joe Biden is planning to withdraw from the 2024 presidential election.
Chaffetz says that the five greatest factors leading him to come to this conclusion are as follows:
- The lack of campaign staff.
- The limited travel to campaign stops.
- The Kamala Harris factor.
- His response to the Hawaii disaster.
- Hunter Biden and the president’s culpability in the scandals surrounding him.
Chaffetz, who retired from the House in 2017, begins by laying out the fact that Biden’s campaign team is a “tiny skeleton crew of staffers working exclusively out of his home state of Delaware.”
He continued: “As of last quarter, he had just four people on the payroll, all working out of the party offices,” adding that “there seems to be little urgency to mount a full-scale campaign and the first primary votes are five months away.”
Chaffetz then points to Biden’s tendency to travel to a few specific places, none of them particularly competitive.
“After spending some of the summer overseas, Biden is in vacation mode for the month of August,” he said. “Not only did Biden skip the traditionally all-important Iowa State Fair, he traveled to Utah. My home state always welcomes the president of the United States, but we’re hardly a battleground state. A serious candidate would have campaigned in Nevada, Colorado and Montana.”
Chaffetz acknowledged that Biden visited Arizona, which is typically somewhat competitive, but pointed out that “he proclaimed the Grand Canyon to be one of the ‘nine wonders’ of the world and full of ‘ironic’ species. He has always been a gaffe machine, but with the election ramping up, his new wilderness grab does nothing to expand his base in critical Arizona. In fact, it polarizes voters.”
He then turns his attention to one of the little-used aspects of Biden’s Administration: Kamala Harris, who, other than “[picking] fights with GOP presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis … has been largely invisible through the first three years of the Biden presidency. Unless she makes a gaffe, she seldom makes news.”
“Her portfolio is minimal. She is nowhere for solving the immigration and human trafficking crisis. She is also supposedly tackling AI. We are not yet sure she can spell “AI” or lead the critical thinking to put necessary guard rails on this emerging technology,” Chaffetz wrote.
Chaffetz also says that Biden’s response to the Maui fires is “inextricable,” after he gave a “no comment” response to reporters. He asks, “Did he really not have anything to say to those desperate people fighting for their lives as he sunned himself on the beach? This was an opportunity for a president to flex his political muscle. Though the administration insists he has taken action, reports on the ground in Maui describe aid being blocked, properties being looted and FEMA being AWOL.”
On the topic of the Hunter Biden scandals, Chaffetz wrote, “With real, substantive evidence surfacing that the president’s son took payments from foreign entities in exchange for access to his father, the campaign seems to be locking down.”
“Though this could be a basement-to-beach campaign strategy, it’s more likely that Biden will not run,” Chaffetz says, in reference to Biden’s infamous tendency in 2020 to campaign from his basement. “With few exceptions, we don’t see him on the campaign trail defending his presidency or touting his accomplishments in key battleground states. We don’t see his vice president making the case for him. He isn’t sharing his vision for the future. He is hiding – hiding from the press, hiding from the scandals and hiding from his own incompetence as a commander in chief.”
“By the end of this calendar year, I, for one, anticipate he won’t be a candidate in 2024,” he concludes.
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