Jamal Simmons, Vice President Kamala Harris‘s former communications director, suggested over the weekend that Biden might be able to make for past mistakes and salvage his legacy to some degree by actually resigning and allowing the vice president to step into a new role as the nation’s first female president, at least for the next two months.

KEY DATES FOR THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION

“Joe Biden has been a phenomenal president. He’s lived up to so many of the promises that he’s made. There is one promise left that he can fulfill: being a transitional figure,” he stated. “He could resign the presidency in the next 30 days, make Kamala Harris the president of the United States. He could absolve her from having to oversee the Jan. 6 transition of her own defeat.”

The White House has yet to comment on Simmons’s proposal, but the idea of Biden stepping aside evoked mixed emotions among White House officials who spoke to the Washington Examiner on the subject.

Multiple senior White House officials said that they doubted Biden would consider leaving office early, with one senior official noting that the president wouldn’t go out of his way to “gift the vice president an honor she didn’t actually earn.”

Biden and Harris both took part in Veterans Day memorial services at Arlington National Cemetery, but, before Monday, the pair hadn’t appeared in public together since September, and reports of tension between the Biden and Harris teams permeated the final months of the campaign. The pair also lunched together on Tuesday.

However, while one former senior White House official doesn’t “see President Biden going for it,” a decision from Biden to elevate Harris in the final months of the administration might help unify the Democratic Party ahead of four years of Trump governance.

“I think we’re all still reeling right now. There’s a lot of finger-pointing, and this might serve to help cool heads and regroup,” that official stated. “We’ve clearly got some changes to make if we want to reach voters during the midterms and the 2028 election.”

Another current senior White House official, though, blatantly disputed the healing factor a two-month Harris presidency might have on the party.

“There’s a sense that we tried to jam Vice President Harris down voters’ throats instead of hold an open primary,” that person assessed. “This certainly wouldn’t make that feeling go away.”

Biden spent the weekend following President-elect Donald Trump‘s 2024 triumph over Harris vacationing at his beach home in Delaware, where video captured by C-SPAN reignited the debate surrounding the president’s health and general fitness for office.

In the video, Biden is seen stumbling across the sands in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and, at one point, first lady Jill Biden grabs his arm to prevent him from taking a tumble. The onlooking press can be heard catching their breath ahead of a potential fall.

At 81 years old, Biden will be the oldest-ever U.S. president when he leaves office in January, and his defining faculties, at first denied by the White House and his 2024 campaign, were the impetus behind his exit from the race.

Nevertheless, many Democrats argue that Biden’s choice to only withdraw his bid following his dreadful debate performance against Trump over the summer, or even his decision to seek a second term in the first place, severely hamstrung Harris’s chances of winning the presidency.

Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who ran against both Biden and Harris during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, made that exact point in a post-election op-ed authored last week.

“It probably wasn’t great to cover up President Joe Biden’s infirmities until they became undeniable on live TV,” Bloomberg, who coughed up $50 million to support Harris’s campaign this cycle, wrote. “It wasn’t ideal that party elders replaced him with Harris, a nominee who had received no electoral votes and had failed decisively in a previous presidential run.”

“The biggest onus of this loss is on President Biden,” Andrew Yang, another 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, told the Associated Press. “If he had stepped down in January instead of July, we may be in a very different place.”

Biden’s final weeks in office won’t exactly be a cakewalk. 

He’s slated to depart Washington, D.C., on Thursday for a weeklong foreign trip that will see him attend both the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and G20 summits. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed Tuesday that Biden is also planning to travel to Africa in early December.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

The final trips are risky as Biden has had plenty of gaffes on the world stage.

In Poland in 2022, Biden called for Russian regime change, which the White House quickly had to walk back. In Japan in 2023, Biden insisted the U.S. would intervene militarily if China attempted to take Taiwan by force, which deviated from prior White House statements regarding the “One China” policy. In July 2022, Biden fist-bumped Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the leader accused of having Saudi-American blood on his hands, in Saudi Arabia.

This summer, at a NATO summit in Washington, the president misidentified Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky as his arch-nemesis, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Biden said. “President Putin!”

The White House said Tuesday that Biden intends to head to Africa in December to make up for a canceled trip to Angola in October due to Hurricane Milton.

Meanwhile, the Biden White House is looking to advance government funding packages, the National Defense Authorization Act, and confirm as many as 40 federal judges during the final days of the congressional session.