(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)
What NBC News called a “conspiracy theory” less than a year ago has come to pass: President Joe Biden is being replaced at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Last October, under the headline “Republicans float a quiet conspiracy theory that Biden won’t be on the ballot,” Matt Dixon, Dasha Burns, and Alex Tabet lamented the “unfounded conversation among a faction on the political right that goes something like this: Democratic power brokers will intervene at the last minute to replace a weakened 80-year-old Biden with someone else as the party’s nominee.”
They continued:
The idea, centered largely on the thought that Biden is too old and not sharp enough mentally, is that there’s a secret plan to replace Biden due to his health or other reasons by amorphous illuminati-type forces within the Democratic Party. It is not a mainstream thought within the Republican Party, but it has maintained a persistent foothold among a relevant chunk of the GOP base taking their cues from some
party officials who continue to toy with the idea.
It’s unclear what compelled the trio to submit that Democratic power brokers were equivalent to “amorphous illuminati-type forces,” but as it turns out, the forces responsible for pushing Biden out of the presidential race were far from amorphous.
According to NBC News’ own reporting, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), and especially former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) all applied pressure on Biden to step aside.
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, meanwhile, also intimated that former President Barack Obama was overseeing a quiet effort to get Biden to drop out, specifically blaming him for an op-ed published by actor George Clooney in The New York Times.
“I think that Barack Obama has a lot of influence, and I think that there’s, there’s a lot there,” she mused.