I was gearing up to post a response to the (many, ugh) critics of my TIME feature on RevTech (it’s been … a rough couple of weeks) when I got a text from a friend in the White House press pool.

It’s official: President Ashleigh Grantham, Jr. will be America’s second shortest-serving president, as he intends to “restore” the presidency to Rudy Ruiz “with all legal haste and urgency.” Grantham will of course retain the honor of being America’s oldest-ever commander-in-chief. He turns 95 on January 10.

The Hill had the scoop a few minutes before 11am ET today, publishing a piece just as the Grantham Administration announced it would be issuing a “special message” live from the Oval Office at 3pm ET. It’s all but certain that the contents of that “special message” will be that Grantham’s DOJ intends to drop the administration’s challenge to Rudy Ruiz’s 25th Amendment claim to the presidency. Grantham is expected to move back into his former position as veep.

Ruiz posted a very short, text-only update on PatriotWire shortly after The Hill piece ran, saying he’ll be issuing a public statement “from my heart, in America’s heartland,” this evening.

The Ruiz-Grantham battle for the White House has been in front of SCOTUS for nearly three months with no clear ruling. According to The Hill, which spoke to “an individual with firsthand knowledge of the situation,” Grantham began behind-the-scenes negotiations with Ruiz following the nationwide “Make Ready for Rudy” protests/rallies on December 9, in which Americans took up displays of arms at more than 450 events from coast to coast.

If those rallies were meant to serve as threats, well, the plan seems to have worked.

I have a hard time believing that the “Make Ready” protests were the only, or the most pressing, thing pushing Grantham toward a resolution with Ruiz. Armed Ruiz supporters, Rud Boyz, LibertyNow! members and others have been clashing with #FreezeRuiz folks for years, and the tension only ramped up after the events of July 4, 2023. It’s been nothing that Grantham can’t deal with, and moreover, this kind of thing has basically become a highly normalized form of political speech/protest in the Ruiz/Grantham era. It’s easy to forget that scenes like the above would not long ago have been considered bizarre, even unthinkable, before SCOTUS lowered the age threshold for gun ownership in 2022.

Grantham’s abysmal polling numbers against a literally undead president probably explain the rest of his reasoning. As soon as Ruiz made his nationwide reappearance post-resurrection in August, a crowded GOP field self-whittled down to just three contenders: Ruiz, Grantham, and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. (Haley, of course, will famously run for anything — the recently deported comedian John Oliver once joked on Twitter that she’d do well to run for “the hills.”) Ruiz’s numbers seemed as bulletproof as the president himself (or, um, perhaps as plane-crash-proof?); he’s been polling at 57 percent or above since September, with Grantham and Haley more or less evenly splitting the leftovers.

Grantham must also expect that his case for maintaining office isn’t being considered favorably by the Supreme Court. Constitutional scholars and pundits have been split on the legitimacy of Ruiz’s 25th Amendment quo warranto action, which relies predominantly on the amendment’s Section 4 and the assertion that Grantham and his cabinet should have invoked Section 4 (which provides for a sidelined president to retake office once he is able, which Ruiz now says he is) and not Section 1, which provides that “the Vice President shall become President,” “in the case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation,” with no chance for the dead/resigned/removed president to retake office.

How, of course, could Grantham (or anyone) have known to invoke Section 4 on July 4th, before anyone had ever heard of revival technology or RevTech? Before the concept of death as a hiccup, rather than a fatal choking hazard, had even been introduced to the public? This is the argument Grantham’s been making for months, and it’s hard to see a way around it — except, of course, that politics has often trumped law and legal reasoning in the U.S. since 2016 or so. One imagines that SCOTUS knows which side their bread is buttered on, and so does Congress, if it comes to that.

More soon.

What Else I’m Reading Right Now:

• “Ukraine says Russian hackers penetrated major telecoms network for months” (Politico)
• “Houston woman bites Harris County Constable Deputy after being arrested for drunk driving” (Fox26 Houston)
• “How One Texas County Is Fighting 43,000 Monkeys” (Wall Street Journal)
• “Eddie Bernice Johnson’s family says medical neglect led to former congresswoman’s death” (Texas Tribune) and “The Era of EBJ Comes to a Close“ (Texas Observer)
• “Imam who protested against gun violence is fatally shot outside his Newark, N.J., mosque” (NBC News)

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