January 20, 2025 will be a very exciting day: For the first time in a few years, America will again have a president.

I wish this were one of those “it’s funny because it’s true” lines, but whether one finds it humorous is a question of taste; what matters is that it’s true.

The most common pop-culture comparison to which Joe Biden is subjected is the film Weekend at Bernie’s, where the protagonist is dead and his visiting employees pretend otherwise by treating him as a marionette. But these days I often think of an old New York Post headline, universally considered the best ever: “Headless Body In Topless Bar.” Because America is, at this dangerous moment, a headless body politic in an endless war.

There’s no sense in pretending Biden is in charge—or that anyone is in charge—for politeness’s sake. We can get back to politeness when the Iranian missiles we made so affordable to the mullahs in Tehran stop falling on Israel for good.

In the public imagination, Biden has officially moved from Goofy Uncle Joe to the cultural version of a nursing home. Dana Carvey’s magnificent Biden impression on this weekend’s Saturday Night Live was the first to get it right in years—the slurred speech, the confusion, the filler phrases one after the other, the vacant eyes. Last week, the HBO hit show Industry contained a scene in which the head of a major bank asks the U.S. treasury secretary for a bailout. When she says no, he asks her what the president will think. “The president still thinks we’re at war with Japan,” the treasury secretary responds. “Goodbye and good luck.”

So that’s where we are: headless, and having a good time of it.

Technically, we have a vice president. Only she’s running for president on the conceit that she doesn’t yet exist. Like Tinker Bell, we must clap and cheer her to life. “We can’t afford four more years of this,” declared her running mate Tim Walz, inadvertently but unavoidably turning the crowd’s attention to the manifold failures of Vice President Kamala Harris and the rest of the administration.

The only time we see Harris acknowledge her current status as the incumbent is when her debilitating fear of social interaction kicks in. This week she had to make a choice: preside over a photo-op FEMA meeting about the devastation Hurricane Helene is visiting upon the American Southeast, or actually visit North Carolina or Georgia. She chose the bloodless and rather weird FEMA option, which didn’t involve possibly unscripted interactions with the public.

The combination of Harris’s social anxiety and her self-seriousness has made her distant when she is reading from a teleprompter and unintelligible when she isn’t, so she relies on preloaded canned lines. The result is that the rest of the world is moving too fast for her to be anything but a spectator.

Which means national-security imperatives are being handled by Cabinet secretaries who will soon be out of a job, like Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The latter, you might remember, disappeared without explanation for a couple weeks at the beginning of the year to get treatment at Walter Reed without telling the president. The Pentagon appeared to be running on autopilot and yet Biden didn’t fire Austin, making them both look absurd.

Here’s what’s happening in the Middle East today: Iran fired 180 ballistic missiles at Israel while the IDF sent ground troops into South Lebanon to dismantle the terror infrastructure Hezbollah built to launch an attack similar to the one launched by Hamas on Oct. 7. Israel is being attacked by Iran or its proxies now from five separate countries.

Today alone, just before that missile barrage, a shooter killed six Israelis in Jaffa and injured about ten others. A couple rounds of rockets were fired from Lebanon at Israeli population centers. Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen attacked two ships in the Red Sea, one with missiles and the other with drone boats.

It has been quite the afternoon in the Middle East so far. Yet it wasn’t unusual. Every day seems to bring this amount of news from the conflict in one form or another. And that’s without zooming out to the ongoing land war in Europe thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or China’s militaristic stunts in which Beijing’s coast guard ships have been swarming and ramming Philippine boats and most recently a Vietnamese fishing craft.

It’s not a good time for the American superpower to be rudderless, but here we undeniably are. Let’s hope the damage can at least be contained until we have a president.