In the immediate wake of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race and his endorsement of Vice-President Kamala Harris as his successor, Republicans have mostly focused on attacking the changed Democratic ticket as an end in itself. They are weeping crocodile tears for the president and primary voters who are allegedly the victims of a “coup” (a coup inconveniently brought to fruition by Biden himself). And they are pretending not to understand that there’s a difference between Biden’s fitness as a candidate and his fitness to complete his term. They will spend plenty of time in court trying to complicate the handoff and will treat it as a scandal somehow as terrible as those Donald Trump has abetted so regularly.

Sooner rather than later, though, the GOP, the Trump-Vance campaign, and conservative media will focus all of their attention on the new Democratic ticket, and especially Harris. From past experience and current intimations, we have a pretty good idea of some of the attack lines they will launch and relaunch. Here are the arguments they’re likely to make.

A subset of the conservative claim that Biden has been senile for years is that his vice-president lied to us all in concealing his condition. This is a particularly active line of attack on Fox News, as the Washington Post reported:

Several Fox hosts accused Harris of being part of “a coverup,” as [Jesse] Watters put it, complicit in hiding the extent of Biden’s decline. “Right up until the last minute, she’s been lying to the American people,” [Laura] Ingraham said. On [Sean] Hannity’s show, former Trump White House official Kellyanne Conway said Harris “led the chorus of liars.” Fox host Mark Levin took an even grander and more conspiratorial tone, saying Harris “violated the Constitution every day since she’s been vice president of the United States” by not invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the president, and therefore “should never be anywhere near the Oval Office.”

These are some of the same........

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