Glenn Greenwald and the Plot Against America

Part III: After ditching his 2020 screenplay about Democratic leaders protecting brain-scrambled Joe Biden when its political utility ended, Greenwald writes a new one with a perfect ending.

Image created by Washington Babylon readers Isak Sjursen and Zaches Zinnober.

Sorry for the long delay between installments, but “Glenn Greenwald and the Plot Against America” resumes today with with Part III. If you need to catch up, here’s a link to Part I and another to Part II.

A few minutes before dawn broke on July 21, 2024, Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi rousted President Joe Biden out of bed at his home in Wilmington, Delaware and put a burlap bag over his head. “Wake up, Scrappy Joe,” Obama hissed to the country’s startled chief executive. “It’s coup time.”

Obama and Pelosi roughly escorted Biden to the basement, where Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, and Hillary Clinton were waiting. “What do we have here, it looks like the one and only President of the United States of America,” Clinton said to Biden with a menacing grin on her face. “Well, you won’t be for much longer, motherfucker.” 

Clinton painfully wrenched Biden’s arm behind his back and along with her four companions led him to a room at the far end of the basement, where a harsh sound was emanating from behind the closed door. When it was thrown open, Biden’s eyes opened wide with horror: his beloved wife Jill and son Hunter were laying roped and tied at opposite ends of a ping pong table just a few feet away from a blaring wood chipper.

“We mean business,” Pelosi told Biden over the roar of the machine, and to emphasize the point she viciously kicked him in the groin until he fell to the ground in agony. “You either get your ass out of the presidential race and let Kamala take over from here or your beautiful First Lady and No. 1 son get ground into lawn fertilizer.” 

During the succeeding hours the nation’s elderly leader was subjected to a level of physical and psychological torture that broke the will of hardened Al Qaeda terrorists interrogated at CIA black sites, yet he endured the abuse with extraordinary stoicism. “Fellas,” he whispered through parched, bleeding lips, at one point, “this is a bunch of malarkey.” Finally, after Hillary Clinton became so twisted with rage by Biden’s continued resistance she viciously pistol whipped him until Schumer stepped in and pulled her away, he acceded to the cabal’s demands. 

“While it has been my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term,” said a statement posted from Biden’s Twitter account, but written by Bill Clinton, the last of the main conspirators, at 1:46 pm that afternoon. Days later, Harris was formally named to take his place at the head of this year’s Democratic ticket. 

The plot against the president had succeeded. For the first time in US history, the elite leadership of a major political party had implemented a coup that toppled the presidential nominee picked by voters in the primaries and installed their own hand picked replacement.

The events that transpired on July 21 – which I lightly embellished for dramatic purposes – only came to light thanks to the unbelievable reporting of Glenn Greenwald, who ferreted out the truth even before the plotters struck. 

Not many Republicans are Biden fans, needless to say, however top GOP officials, including Donald Trump, the party’s 2024 nominee, harshly denounced the scheme. Biden regretted the “historically tragic mistake” he made by “handing over the US Presidency [in] a COUP,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post last month. 

Yet, Biden has yet to utter a single word about the shocking conspiracy, which hasn’t been reported by the mainstream media. Hence, the official story remains that Biden reluctantly but voluntarily ended his re-election campaign because he was unable to alleviate concerns about his cognitive acuity that erupted following his catastrophic performance at the June 27 presidential debate.

Many Republicans believe mainstream reporters have buried the truth about the coup because it would help Trump and the media is overwhelmingly favorable to Democratic Party candidates and policies, which is one of Greenwald’s pet arguments. I generally tend to agree, but in this specific case, there’s probably a simpler explanation for the media’s radio silence. There was no coup. 

Greenwald fabricated the story from whole cloth as part of his unstinting efforts to support Trump’s presidential candidacy, as he did in 2020 and 2016 as well, by willfully and wantonly skewing his reporting, as he accuses his journalism enemies of doing. I’ll begin laying this out in today’s third installment of the series by using Greenwald’s own words and declarations from his oft-repeated, consistently narrated version of events in the years leading up to Biden’s downfall on July 21, and comparing that tomorrow in Part IV with the dramatically different, logically inconsistent account he’s been telling ever since in the coup fairytale he dreamed up.

It’s essential to begin by making the obvious point that Greenwald’s coup storyline never made sense from the outset. As defined by Merriam-Webster, a coup is “a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics, especially the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group,” which bears no resemblance to what happened in the case of the alleged plot against Biden.

His spot at the head of the Democratic ticket was taken by Harris, who Biden picked to be his running mate four years ago and endorsed as his replacement after the coup. Her political views are extremely similar to his and those of Obama, the Clintons, Pelosi, and the other establishment leaders of the Democratic Party’s dominant neoliberal wing, who up until they allegedly staged Biden’s overthrow had long been his closest political allies. 

The party elite rigged the Democratic presidential primaries in 2020 and 2024 to make sure Biden would win the nomination, and protected him throughout that entire period by doing their best to cover up his diminishing cerebral capabilities, until that became impossible to do any longer after the debate debacle. Even then, the establishment tried to keep Biden in place as the party’s nominee, against the wishes of the lion’s share of Democratic voters, until the push to force him out gained such strength that it was no longer an option. 

Furthermore, Biden wasn’t forced out for some hidden, sinister purpose that was masked by a staged, Gulf of Tonkin-style incident, but because he was suffering from severe cognitive decline – which was an extremely good, legitimate reason that an 81-year-old president should not seek another four-year term in office, whether he made the decision on his own or it was forced on him by his political allies and associates. “Stepping down because you’ve lost the support of your party and you’re getting older isn’t a coup,” Edward Luce of the Financial Times tweeted as Greenwald and other MAGA hacks rolled out the farcical account of Biden’s overthrow. “It’s called retirement.” 

Greenwald was fully aware of all the inconvenient facts that ran contrary to his coup theory, as they featured prominently in his journalism output between March 2020, when Biden was running against then-President Trump, and early July of 2024, when their challenger-incumbent roles were reversed and the plot he depicts began to unfold. He simply buried, obscured, or ignored the evidence because otherwise it would have demolished the foundation for Greenwald’s new, hastily concocted narrative. 

The changes between the accounts weren’t subtle. In the original, which was largely accurate, Greenwald portrayed Biden as a leading figure in the Democratic establishment, but devoid of genuine legitimacy as the party’s presidential nominee in 2020 or 2024 because his elite colleagues fixed the primary process both times so his triumph was preordained.

In the sequel, which is virtually all false, Biden was no longer a trusted member of the Democratic elite, but “Scrappy Joe,” an outsider who wasn’t truly close to the establishment coup plotters or their malleable like Harris, who Greenwald described as an “arm and tool of establishment interests” during a post-coup episode of “System Update,” his Rumble show. Furthermore, he now had the full stamp of democratic legitimacy after all because the primaries had been “flawed,” but faithfully reflected the will of voters. 

A third key change, and easily the most spectacular in terms of journalism fraud, is that when Greenwald debuted his original script eight months before the 2020 election, Biden was already so dangerously brain-addled the Democratic establishment desperately needed to convince or compel him to renounce his run against Trump, and that was same situation – but more urgent because his dementia was worse – when the show closed in 2024 about four months before this year’s balloting. Throughout the entire time, Greenwald often cited the Democratic elite’s refusal to force Biden into retirement as the reason for his latest attack on party leaders for their moral depravity and high crimes against humanity. 

However, in July of this year, it became clear party leaders were finally preparing to do exactly what Greenwald had long demanded but never actually favored or expected, forcing him to rapidly reverse course. So, when he rushed out the sequel in July very soon after the curtain came down the final time on the original, forcing Biden out of the race because he didn’t have the  necessary mental competence to faithfully perform his presidential duties was no longer the only conscionable step for Democratic leaders to take, but a direct assault on the country’s democratic institutions, which was far worse than what they’d been doing for the past four years. 

Voila, Greenwald had the script for his new and improved political parable about Biden being deposed in a coup theory, which he’s been performing ever since. Now let’s compare and contrast Greenwald’s two scripts, so we can watch in real time as he squeezes, twists, and beats the facts into submission until they say what he wants them to. 

In order to be fully transparent, I must make a brief but necessary disclosure at this point. In summarizing Biden’s Brain: Gone With the Wind, as I’ve dubbed Greenwald’s original screenplay, and My Struggle: Triumph of the Will, the name I came up with for the sequel, I occasionally modified and embellished the textual narrative, as I did above in chronicling the events of July 21 that collapsed Biden’s will to resist the coup.

I had no nefarious motive in doing so, but merely thought it would be best to reduce as much as possible the mind-numbing miasma of tedium that envelops readers subjected to any more than cursory exposure to Greenwald’s leaden, hackneyed prose, and rapidly has them snoring as soundly as Dorothy, Toto and their companions were five minutes after energetically skipping into the field of poppies the Wicked Witch of the West set as a trap for them when they were off to see “The Wizard of Oz.”

Only Good Witch Glinda’s intervention in creating a snow storm that woke Dorothy & Co. as they slept in a field of poppies prevented an unimaginable tragedy in “The Wizard of Oz.” Photo credit: Clip from “The Wizard of Oz” on YouTube.

For the same reason, I excised all but the most essential narcotically sleep-inducing intrusions that occur when Greenwald mounts the stage to deliver yet another Shakespearian-length interjection to make the same banal point he’s already made so many times before that the audience could repeat the lines verbatim along with him. Otherwise, my recounting is rigorously faithful to Greenwald’s original, dreary scripts.

Now, let’s take a stroll down memory lane and review the storyline of Biden’s Brain, whose star-studded cast of characters included the president’s friends and neoliberal fellow travelers in the Democratic elite and the party’s toadies in the mainstream media; their imperfect but eminently preferable Republican counterparts, such as Trump, his devoted wife and family, and legendary journalists like Tucker Carlson; and of course Greenwald, the story’s narrator and hero.

Biden’s Brain premiered in the pages of The Intercept on March 9, 2020. When the action opens, Biden is his party’s “consensus establishment choice” to challenge then-President Trump and had locked up the nomination despite worries about his electability. “One of the towering questions in that regard is his cognitive fitness,” Greenwald informs the audience, which is “a grave matter” because the Democratic elite “wants to put him in charge of the world’s most dangerous nuclear arsenal, a large chunk of the planet’s health, and the welfare of hundreds of millions of people.”

That Biden would pose an immediate, imminent threat to the country and universe is no concern to the sociopaths at the helm of the Democratic Party, who’d united behind him during the primaries “with creepy speed and obedience” to push him across the finish line and extinguish the hopes of left-leaning Bernie Sanders. Now, they’d imposed a nationwide blackout “on speaking ill” of Biden by discussing the crippling dementia that afflicted him, which Greenwald had easily diagnosed because it had advanced so far it was “visible to the naked eye.” 

To enforce the blackout, party operatives and reporters at Democratic “propaganda outlets such as MSNBC” were closely monitoring political commentary from coast to coast. If they uncovered breaches to the ban, the perpetrators would “instantly come under a withering assault of insults and attacks” to paint them as cogs in the right-wing media machine, which Greenwald – like all American dissidents who’d gone underground in hopes of avoiding arrest at the hands of the Deep State, even if he was the only one who sought refuge in Rio de Janeiro, where he hid out in an unoccupied wing of his servant-infested estate – had experienced firsthand many times.

Greenwald found it unfathomably hypocritical that “thinly disguised pro-Biden reporters...insist on wearing the unconvincing and fraudulent costume of neutrality” even while pretending the Democratic challenger was as mentally sharp as the average teenager. “They are invoking the classic Orwellian formulation from the novel 1984,” Greenwald put it chillingly, in the instantly recognizable tone of moral rectitude he invariably employs when launching into one of his particularly interminable, grating soliloquies. “‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command’.”

Meanwhile, Democratic stenographers continued to “casually arrogate unto themselves the right to disseminate the most unhinged conspiracies without the need for any evidence and without the slightest regard for whether they are true,” just as they’d done from the moment Trump was inaugurated in 2017 after defeating Hillary Clinton. If one were to believe their laughable reporting, President Trump was an authoritarian buffoon and unfit to be president because he was too lazy, incompetent, and corrupt, and his team of closest advisors and associates were collectively the most cretinous, unhinged assemblage of morons, grifters, and criminals to ever appear on the American political stage.

For his part, Greenwald strived to remain as honest and impartial as he’d been since the days when he was an idealistic young defense attorney crafting closing arguments at trial he hoped would persuade the jury to acquit his neo-Nazi client. Nevertheless, a barely perceptible pro-Trump tilt periodically seeped into Greenwald’s reporting, if only because of his earnest concern that if Biden defeated Trump it would only be a short matter of time before he blundered and bumbled the country into full economic collapse or accidentally launched a first strike on the West Coast that vaporized millions of Americans from San Diego to Seattle.

That probably accounted for Greenwald’s wildly overly negative diagnosis about the severity of Biden’s cognitive decline and his urgent appeal to The Intercept’s readers to “do everything possible to make sure” the electorate was aware Biden was a babbling idiot who was barely able to string together two consecutive lucid sentences, before the “point of no return” passed and he ended up in the White House. “Voting in democracy is valuable only when it is informed,” Greenwald explained in high dudgeon, and “not the by-product of elite deceit and propaganda,” 

Sadly, Greenwald could do little more than watch in despair as the clock wound down to the November election and the media blackout held firm. He never even knew if the stream of underground samizdats he managed to post on Twitter reached the public, as this was prior to the Golden Age of Free Speech ushered in by Elon Musk that finally lifted the wall of censorship on Greenwald, his close friend Matt Taibbi, and other formerly outlawed independent journalists.

Fearless independent reporters Greenwald and Taibbi at a 2022 event where they were feted by some of the country’s wealthiest venture capitalists who tremble before their harsh attacks on the business and political oligarchy. Credit: Image of the affair from YouTube.

Sure enough, when the votes were counted, the ignorant masses hadn’t seen or failed to heed his pleas to protect American democracy by re-electing Trump. Instead, they handed his “banal, empty septuagenarian” Democratic challenger a “very narrow win,” as Greenwald subsequently defined Biden’s margin of victory of seven million votes and edge of 306 to 232 in the Electoral College.

The Intercept story served as the basic blueprint for Biden’s Brain, which dragged on over the following years without much drama or much of anything happening at all beyond Greenwald becoming ever more hectoring in the SOSs he continued to regularly emit about the need to get Biden out of the White House. For example, in August of of last year, he said during one of his frequent appearances on “The Megyn Kelly Show” that Biden was much further off in la-la land than he’d been when he ran against Trump in 2020, but Democrats were going to continue to recklessly insist he stay in power anyway. “It’s just very disrespectful to Americans to tell them that this person is just somehow divinely entitled to remain in power even though everyone can see with their own eyes that he’s just not capable of doing the job,” Greenwald rued.

The pace of Biden’s Brain only began to speed up after the June 27 debate, when the president's mental frailty was painfully visible for all to see, and the solid wall of support he’d enjoyed from the Democratic establishment slowly began to crack. Initially, though, the party elite went into overtime to try to minimize the damage Biden suffered. “This election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself,” Obama posted on Twitter the following day. “Last night didn’t change that.”

David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist for both of his presidential campaigns, sprang to the president’s defense on Twitter as well. “Joe Biden is the nominee of the Democratic Party, nominated by voters in primaries across the country,” he wrote. “Unless he... decides to quit – which he won't – that issue is settled.”  

Greenwald returned fire in a flurry of tweets launched at enemy troops as they massed in front of the White House to reinforce Biden’s still seemingly invulnerable position. “What Alexrod says here -- Dems chose Biden -- is false,” he wrote in replying to Axelrod. “The GOP had many candidates running, held many debates, then held a fair vote. Dems announced in advance they would not allow a primary challenge, would ban all debates, and proclaimed Biden their nominee no matter what.” 

The night after the debate, Greenwald jubilantly took a victory lap on “System Update,” saying in claiming personal vindication that 

Democratic officials had been “lying for years...and the bill finally came due last night.” He also used his time to explain the immense significance of Obama’s tweet, which less sophisticated observers may have missed.

Mainstream reporters pilloried Biden during the debate and continued to the following morning, he expounded, but that was because they believed they “were speaking for insiders who texted them all night saying he’s got to get out.” Now, though, Obama’s post had informed Democratic-controlled media storm troopers that the party intended to stick with Biden, and simultaneously provided the craven hacks with direct marching orders in light of the aristocracy’s decision, including the script they were to follow moving forward: 

You’re going to get back to work for the Democratic Party and Joe Biden and say, ‘Yeah, he had a bad night,’ I promise you, I guarantee you, by Monday all of these media people are going to be back on message once they realize Joe Biden is not going anywhere…and do all they can to make sure that debate night doesn’t harm him and that he gets reelected and keeps Trump out of office.

Greenwald was quickly proven completely wrong, for a change, largely due to his bizarrely juvenile, imbecilic conceptions about the media, where smothering, establishment-friendly consensuses do indeed frequently form, but not as a result of political officials dictating to reporters what they should write or say. So, when the the dust cleared, the media didn’t follow Obama’s “script,” but ran numerous stories and op-eds – with the New York Times taking the lead – that raised further doubts about Biden’s cognitive capacity and fed the clamor to replace him as the Democratic nominee, which was most enthusiastically supported by party voters.

That forced Greenwald to bring the curtain down on Biden’s Brain about two weeks after the debate, and quickly wheel out the sequel, My Struggle: Triumph of the Will, which flipped his earlier screenplay directly on its head in postulating the harebrained theory about Biden being overthrown in an elite-sponsored coup. His new account also demonstrated of Greenwald what Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman: everything he says “is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” 

Coming next in Part IV: When the Democratic elite finally forced Biden into retirement two months ago, Greenwald excoriated party leaders for sinking to new levels of scumbaggery by doing precisely what he’d insisted was necessary for the previous four years but labeled a coup the moment they did it.