It was the ultimate deal with the devil: Help us deny Donald Trump a second term, and we’ll ignore your obvious unfitness for office.

That’s essentially what desperate Democrat power brokers were thinking back in mid-February 2020 when it looked like their hard-left primary voters were going to nominate the first-ever socialist to run as the presidential nominee of a major party.

Joe Biden had finished a pathetic fourth in Iowa — behind a homosexual Millennial, a septuagenarian socialist, and a fake Indian. For an encore, he finished fifth in New Hampshire, and then Bernie Sanders clobbered him by 26 points in Nevada. Oo-ooooh, that smell? It was the smell of death surrounding Scranton Joe Biden.

Next up was South Carolina, and that’s where the Democrats and the mainstream media (but we repeat ourselves) made that devilish deal. They pulled Biden off the mat, and they shivved Sanders. Why? Because they knew Sanders had a hard ceiling of support and therefore couldn’t challenge Trump in a general election, and they knew that black voters, who are crucial to the Democrats’ electoral success, would never vote for a gay white guy like Buttigieg. So Joe Biden it was. South Carolina’s kingmaker, Congressman James Clyburn, made sure of that, and his endorsement of Biden in the state’s mostly black Democrat primary carried the once-moribund Biden to a resounding 28-point win.

From there, the already cognitively addled Biden cruised to victory on Super Tuesday, and the rest — including the rigged 2020 election — is history.

But ever since, the devil has been collecting his due. They propped him up, and now they’re paying the price.

The Afghanistan debacle marked the end of Biden’s honeymoon, but were it not that, it would’ve been something else. It would’ve been the open border or the inflation or the general embarrassment he began to visit upon us at every public event. His cognitive deficiencies were no longer hidable. He couldn’t execute the demands of the presidency from his basement. And by now, only the most delusional of Americans believe Biden has what it takes to serve another four years. His poll numbers are the worst in presidential history, and Trump is outpolling him in both the popular vote and the all-important swing states.

Thus, the Democrats are in an awful spot, and they’re freaking out about it. In a piece titled “Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden,” a trio of sad scribes write at Politico:

A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party over President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, even among officeholders and strategists who had previously expressed confidence about the coming battle with Donald Trump.

All year, Democrats had been on a joyless and exhausting grind through the 2024 election. But now, nearly five months from the election, anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives. And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects.

They’re about half a year late to the party, but whatever.

The Politico piece drones on about the fears of one Democrat fundraiser or consultant after another, all of them deeply fearful but none of them willing to speak on the record. And the piece mentions Trump 43 times, but it pays precious little attention to why they’re all freaking out — namely, Biden’s now thoroughly exposed cognitive decline and his utter unfitness for office.

As Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld quipped, “One insider actually called it a freakout, as in, ‘We’ve got to get this freak out of the White House.’”

Biden spokesmouth Karine “The Binder” Jean-Pierre, though, has lately been the administration’s version of Alfred E. Neuman: What, me worry? When asked by Fox News’s Peter Doocy whether the White House was in “full-blown freakout mode,” KJP responded: “What are you talking about? What are you talking about, Peter?” Mmm-kay.

A new Rasmussen poll showing 54% of Democrats now approve of dumping Biden. But for whom? California Governor Gavin Newsom? The guy has nice hair, sure, and he can talk a slippery game, but he’s pretty much disappeared lately, and he’s not even popular in his own hard-left debt-ridden tent-city state.

The overriding thing to remember is this: Biden’s one and only term is Barack Obama’s third term. These are the same radical left-wing policies that Obama espoused, and they’re the same radical left-wing policies that a Biden replacement would hew to. Think about it: If the Democrats do a last-minute switcheroo, will the replacement renounce Biden’s ruinous policies and vow to chart a more moderate course? Of course not. So, the Democrats are stuck. And they’re bleeding their base. Blacks, especially, are taking another look at Trump’s economic populism, and they’re increasingly coming to grips with the fact that the Democrats only pay attention to their plight during election season.

Joe Biden may or may not ultimately be his party’s nominee for president. Our Mark Alexander long ago speculated that he won’t be. But the devil is in the details. How does a political party remove its president if said president doesn’t want to be removed? And if the Democrat power brokers did manage to remove Biden, what about his lady-in-waiting? Perhaps the only politician in America who’s less popular than Biden is the person in line to replace him.

No wonder the Democrats are freaking out.