Vice President Kamala Harris was scheduled to travel to her home state of California on Thursday, perhaps until after the Christmas holiday, while President Joe Biden was scheduled to spend Christmas at his home in Delaware.

Yet, those plans abruptly changed and reports indicated that both Harris and Biden were rushing back to Washington D.C. Thursday evening, according to Newsweek.

The lack of any definitive explanation from the White House for the altered plans predictably started the rumor mill spinning with a variety of possible reasons that ranged from the mundane to the conspiratorial.

Harris and Biden cancel holiday vacations

Per Newsweek, VP Harris was scheduled to catch a flight from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles, California on Thursday, where it was thought that she would spend the holidays at her home in Brentwood.

However, without any additional explanation, the VP's office revealed in the afternoon that Harris would "not travel to Los Angeles, CA, and will remain in Washington, D.C."

At the same time, other reports revealed that President Biden, who was at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, where he was expected to remain through the holidays, also canceled his vacation and headed back to the White House on Thursday, though he had no public events on his schedule.

Video catches Harris motorcade rushing to White House

The speculation that something significant might be going on was spurred later Thursday evening when freelance D.C. reporter Andrew Leyden posted a video on X of VP Harris' motorcade rushing past him and wrote, "After cancelling her trip to California earlier today, the @VP has just motorcaded to the White House at 6:30PM."

After cancelling her trip to California earlier today, the @VP has just motorcaded to the White House at 6:30PM pic.twitter.com/mCgBQy2bkA

— Andrew Leyden (@PenguinSix) December 19, 2024

In a follow-up post, the independent journalist added, "Biden just returned from Delaware. He looked fine. Was walking with the first lady and his grandson Beau."

Harris replacing Biden, or just prepared to break a tie vote in the Senate?

That was enough to get the conspiracy theories flowing in the absence of any official explanation, and one conservative commenter posted, "Rumors are circulating that Kamala Harris is about to take over as President after she was caught on camera rushing back to the White House."

Those rumors were likely based, at least in part, on a damning report from the Wall Street Journal that exposed in detail how the White House has worked diligently over the past four years to disguise or hide from the public just how "diminished" President Biden has become since the 2020 election.

Indeed, there was ample speculation in response to that post as well as Leyden's about how, now that the secret was out, Biden was set to be removed from office under the 25th Amendment and replaced, albeit for just one month, by VP Harris, who in that unconventional way would achieve the historic moment of becoming the nation's first female president.

That said, many commenters also offered up a much more likely, if far less exciting, possibility for the canceled getaways from Washington D.C. -- the vice president's tie-breaking responsibility in the Senate.

Bear in mind that the canceled trip to California for Harris came while the House was still fighting over a last-minute spending bill to avoid a partial government shutdown, and though it ultimately proved unnecessary on Friday when a scaled-down compromise bill easily cleared both chambers of Congress, there had been a chance of a tie vote in the Senate that the VP would have been required to break with her constitutional vote.