Opinion: Three Presidents. One Country. What Could Go Wrong?

How can one country have three presidents and be leaderless?

Perhaps I have answered my own question. Three presidents is too many for any one country—especially in the configuration we’re currently experiencing in the United States. Before disappearing in a puff of smoke on election night, our actual president was slowly fading away for a year. He is currently MIA. Our president-elect has been acting since the first week of November like he has already taken office, meanwhile, but has also effectively appointed a shadow president in Elon Musk, who appears to be the one of the three with the most clout right now.

As for our two political parties, that of the incoming president and his unelected co-consul are spineless and that of the incredible vanishing incumbent is totally adrift.

What could go wrong?

Let’s start with the peculiar and somewhat pathetic case of the former president in-waiting Joe Biden, and his party, the Democrats. Biden is a decent man who achieved a great deal in office—the nation owes him a debt of gratitude. But he should not have run for a second term, and should have made that clear well over a year ago. He should have been the transitional figure he promised to be. By not doing so, when he faltered as a candidate he put the party and his designated successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, in a difficult position. To her credit, running the shortest campaign in US political history, she very nearly won the election.

Since that day in July when Biden stepped aside, he has more or less faded from public view. No doubt some of that was to give Harris the oxygen she needed to run in his place, although even the specter of his presence in the wings made it hard for her to distance herself from many of his policies. Clearly, that was a burden for her in a year when the American public clearly had an appetite for change.

But Biden has also seemed to continue to fade in his resolve and his public role. (He on Thursday announced worthy climate goals, for example, although he and everyone in the world knows they are meaningless since Donald Trump will revoke them in a few weeks.) The problem for the Democratic Party, then, is that with the current president entering a well-deserved retirement, with his vice president having been defeated in November and with potential 2028 candidates already building teams behind the scenes but not wanting to appear to jump the gun, there is a leadership void atop the party.

While respected and competent, no member of the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill currently stands out as a potential “leader of the opposition” in the face of Republican control of both houses of Congress. The move by the party’s gerontocracy to block the effort of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the Democrats’ most important emerging voices, to lead the party on the House Oversight Committee is indicative of their lack of foresight. Now is precisely the time the Democrats should be embracing generational change. The old guard, for the most part, are having none of it.

Meanwhile, Republicans are once again in disarray. About six weeks after they won a slim but solid victory in November, we are faced with a new twist on an old familiar story: a government shutdown because a fractious GOP-controlled House can’t get its act together on anything associated with the budget. A continuing resolution to avoid furloughing millions of government employees and shutting down crucial government services during Christmas week was just about to pass when Musk, DOGE lord and the world’s richest man, decided to take issue with its apparent fiscal irresponsibility.

Merry f-cking Christmas, Mr. Scrooge.

Of course, Scrooge was a fictional character. Musk is all too real. He has decided that he is going to rule America by tweet. And as far as the squeaking minions in the GOP Congress are concerned, his word packs a punch—especially now that there’s no character limit. Granted, that’s because he has already indicated that he is willing to fund challenges to Republicans who don’t follow his dictates.

Trump does not currently appear to be concerned with the havoc Musk is causing. In fact, he seems to like it; he has certainly spent more time during the transition period with Musk than he has with almost anyone else, Melania included. In all this, Vice president-elect J.D. Vance has very nearly been as invisible as Biden, leading to the inevitable theories that he’s not real after all, rather an inflatable HOV-lane dummy or some new breakthrough in Musk’s robotics labs. (Given Vance’s performance on the stump, one would have to guess that if he is a Musk invention, he is a product of the Boring Company’s workshops.)

Interestingly, neither Trump nor Musk is actually in the White House yet. Musk has never gotten a single vote from a single American voter. He isn’t even eligible to be president. But in today’s Washington, they are the ones driving the question of whether the government will keep operating.

So, not so surprisingly, having too many presidents is not an improvement on the old-fashioned idea of having just one at a time. Frankly, even when we go back to having just two in late January, the prospects are not great. With Trump preening like an aging peacock and Musk acting like the GOP’s checkbook-in-chief, tensions between the two are certain to rise. Whether that’s because of Trump’s notoriously tender ego, because Musk paid for this country and thus wants to run it his way or because some among the fractious GOP caucus will increasingly bridle at their heavy-handed tactics, it’s all but certain the current chaos will continue for a long time to come.