It’s one thing to have been duped into voting for Joe Biden. After all, 81 million (ahem) of our fellow Americans did so in 2020.

But imagine being a Democrat megadonor right about now — someone like tech entrepreneur Mark Pincus, or venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, or former Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson. Imagine having paid nearly a million dollars to the Biden Victory Fund after having met Joe Biden in the Map Room of the White House to discuss his reelection campaign and his second-term agenda. And imagine now having your name exposed for having done so.

Talk about embarrassment.

But that’s what happened to the above-named billionaires, who participated in just one meeting “of roughly a dozen featuring a small group of longtime Democratic donors at the White House between last summer and March of this year, according to the White House visitor logs.”

The meetings served two purposes: first, to cultivate major donors for Biden’s reelection since grassroots donorship hasn’t been when it once was; and second, to allay these donors’ concerns about the president’s cognitive state by seeing him up close in a small-group setting. They appear to have been successful on both fronts.

“All told,” reports Politico, “of the 50 largest contributions to the Biden Victory Fund through the end of March, just over half (27) of the donors or their spouses had a meeting with a small group of people at the White House. Many of them — and additional donors — also attended other meetings or holiday parties or, in a handful of cases, state dinners at the White House.”

We’re not sure how unusual it is for big-time donors to have been feted at the White House. Probably not terribly so. Recall, for example, how the Clintons whored out the Lincoln Bedroom for this same purpose. And they weren’t alone. As Politico adds, “Dozens of former President Barack Obama’s campaign donors visited the White House more than once for meetings, parties and state dinners. Former President George W. Bush hosted at least nine donors for overnight visits.”

But still. Given the Bidens’ already awful reputation for money-grubbing and influence peddling, one would think they’d at least be sensitive to appearances. One would think. As Politico notes:

The meetings came at a time when the Biden reelection campaign was ramping up and when it became more readily apparent that the president would need to rely more fully on megadonors rather than the grassroots fundraising spigot that had propelled his 2020 campaign. They began last summer and continued through the fall and winter and often included four to eight donors and Biden campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg, who has been a powerhouse fundraiser for Democrats prior to taking a role in Biden’s campaign.

In defense of the Biden Crime Family, here’s White House spokesman Andrew Bates: “The President occasionally hosts supporters at the White House, a routine practice during every modern presidency regardless of party. We have been transparent and disclosed these meetings because President Biden set the highest ethical standards of any administration in history — including making this information available to the American people by releasing White House visitor logs, which the Trump Administration did not do.”

Got that? There’s nothing to see here “because President Biden set the highest ethical standards of any administration in history.” So high are these standards, in fact, that his wartime consigliere is a convicted felon, a connoisseur of Russian hookers and cocaine.

In any case, this doesn’t instill any confidence in good government. “Certainly the optics on these things are very bad,” says Brendan Glavin of the watchdog group OpenSecrets. “We’re talking about people giving nearly a million dollars and getting access to the White House. That’s the type of thing that really feeds and fuels citizens’ loss of faith in the system when they hear about things like this.”

Which brings us to a final point about this story: Nothing will come of it. If Republicans, after countless congressional hearings, can’t hold this corrupt administration to account for its rank influence peddling, much of which was handed to them on a silver MacBook Pro, then what are the odds that this story will elicit anything more than a shoulder shrug?

Where this administration is concerned, we’ve set the bar awfully low.