Convicted felon former President Trump personally thinks he can handle Vice President Kamala Harris were she to take over as the Dem presidential nominee as he believes she’s “too liberal, too hostile to business and secure borders, and too inexperienced, weak and phony to be president. But some of his advisers are quite concerned that a fresh, youthful, non-Biden ticket presents a bigger threat than Trump assumes,” Axios reports, adding that they’d be even more worried that Harris would pick a “moderate Midwestern male” as her running mate for November.

Who knows what Axios’s agenda is here, if there is one. It’s obvious enough that having Harris take over would remove the age liability and even put it back on Trump. But this whole situation fucking sucks and as much as we hate to admit it, this is on Joe Biden for not showing up to the debate the way he did for the State of the Union. All this douchey pile-on “insider” reporting – case in point from Axios themselves with “Biden staff ‘miserable,’ alarmed as pressure builds” – is accelerating this spiral into what Talking Points Memo editor and fellow Axios-skeptic Josh Marshall writes is “very likely when, not if” Harris takes over as the 2024 Dem nominee or maybe even as president sooner.

This is not where we or any other anti-MAGA voters wanted to be right now. You can see how we’ve been trying to skirt around it in our coverage while every other site is going balls-to-the-wall with Biden-is-Old-a-Mania for the past week. The Narrative™ is starting to coalesce around Harris and the hard truth is that The Narrative™ all too often gets what it wants. The good news at least is that’s not what the MAGA Reich wants, if we’re to take Axios’s “scooping” at face value.