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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Can a president resign via letter on Twitter? Sure, they can announce their intention to resign, but there are formal constitutional requirements to actually resign that a dead Biden would be unable to fulfill.

And would the optics be as believable as a gradual acclimation to Harris and a later handoff? Biden being presented as succumbing to external pressure to withdraw, then dying days or weeks later with his life's work completed (or of anguish at Washington's betrayal) is much more palatable than "I resign and withdraw immediately" via Twitter without a public appearance or recorded statement with a public death announcement a few days or weeks later. The latter is just a transparently papered-over coup whereas the former at least provides plausible deniability and media massaging.

Can a president resign via letter on Twitter? Sure, they can announce their intention to resign, but there are formal constitutional requirements to actually resign that a dead Biden would be unable to fulfill.

Per the Nixon precedent, it requires a letter to the Secretary of State, on which someone willing to run this conspiracy would happily forge Biden's signature. (It isn't deliberate, but it is useful the SoS has probably seen more wet-ink Presidential signatures than anyone else except the National Archivist because they countersign documents that require sealing). You can publish the letter on Twitter, but it isn't effective until someone couriers the wet-ink original to Blinken's office. If Blinken isn't on board with the conspiracy and refuses the letter until Biden authenticates it in person, then you probably didn't have enough support to pull it off to begin with.