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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices.

This year, 2024, is an election year in America, a presidential election year.

And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one, because we want to

and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

I am delighted to be joined today by Damon Linker, who is senior lecturer in political

science at the University of Pennsylvania, and who writes a substack, damonlinker.substack.com

for anybody who's interested.

And I'm also joined by Americano's podcast most regular guest,

Jacob Harbrun, who is currently in a car somewhere, who knows where. We are going to talk

about Joe Biden because in the last 24 hours, we had the news that Adam Schiff has come out and said that he thinks

Joe Biden should stand down. This would seem to be significant because Schiff is seen as a kind

of protégity of Nancy Pelosi. There are growing rumors that all of the most senior people in the

Democratic Party are now pushing on Joe Biden to withdraw from

the 2024 election. And then he announced that he had COVID in almost sort of spectacularly

bad timing. And Damon, I'll start with you. It feels a bit like at the moment, and it's often

easy to get carried away in these moments, but it feels a bit like at the moment, and it's often easy to get carried away in

these moments, but it feels a bit like the sort of dam of Biden resistance is breaking. Is that

your impression? Oh, absolutely. Yesterday, Wednesday was an extraordinary day of news in the

United States. I mean, yes, it's true. Biden announced, or it was announced that

Biden has COVID, but that came only about, I think, an hour or so after the story broke that

in addition to Adam Schiff saying what he did, that Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader,

...