Marshall here, welcome back to the realignment. I just got back from Saga's wedding, which was

conveniently or unconvingly from a content perspective, scheduled right between two of the wildest political events in living memory.

The attempted assassination of former President Trump right before the Republican National Convention

and President Biden's decision not to run for re-election and throw his weight

behind Vice President Kamala Harris instead.

So rather than throw together a last-minute interview, I thought I'd share my thoughts in no

particular order on the last month's events. The realignment will be back with

its usual schedule on Thursday. Hopefully I'll bring Sagar back on to discuss

discuss everything after his honeymoon the first part of this week.

So what went wrong for President Biden?

The biggest pushback on my earlier episode Jonathan Darmon was the fact that we were so shocked

and how poorly President Biden performed at the June debate with Trump. The polling was always clear that voters were far more concerned about

Biden's health and abilities than the vast majority of people in the media and high-level

Democratic politics. What happened was everyone clearly saw that Biden had physically slowed and clearly aged

beyond expectations over the past four years.

That said, the assumption was that while Biden couldn't win a foot race, his more than decent performance

at the State of the Union last January showed he was verbally up to the task.

That rationalization collapsed at the debate, and when combined with his disastrous handling of the aftermath, doomed his campaign.

A few teleprompter public events in a series of mediocre at best interviews weren't enough to recover.

Biden's NATO press conference went well other than the verbal slip-up where he accidentally

called Ukrainian President Vodimizelinski, President Putin, but it was too little, too late.

I was always struck by Biden's misplaced focus on trying to convince everyone the debate was just an aberration rather than instead convincing

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