I will leave to others the dissection of the freshly reported Wall Street Journal story on the extent of the coverup of Joe Biden’s decline. I’ll just add one point that is obvious by its omission. Amidst all the discussion of cabinet officials and members of Congress failing to get Biden’s ear, and of senior staffers stepping up to take over the implementation of policy, notice what nobody ever says: that the vice president stepped up to fill the vacuum, or that anybody ever asked or expected that Kamala Harris would do so. That’s a striking omission, eloquent in what it says by not saying it. If George W. Bush had drifted mentally during his term, of course, Dick Cheney would have accrued a lot more power. If Donald Trump begins fading two years from now, we would expect that JD Vance would step up. But apparently, nobody looked at the situation of a president unable to communicate regularly with key allies and subordinates, and unable to follow through on the implementation of policy, and said, “Don’t worry! Kamala Harris can handle this!”