Democrats and their Leftmedia sycophants are in hysterics (again) today over the sway Elon Musk has over what’s happening with budget negotiations in Washington. He’s the “shadow president,” they gasp. That made me wonder what DC would really be like with a shadow president. Let’s ask The Wall Street Journal.

“How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge,” blared its new headline over a thorough 3,800-word story detailing what aides, Cabinet officials, and other Democrats are now admitting about Joe Biden’s severe age-related decline over the last four years. All the while, the Journal’s subheader says, “The administration [publicly] denied Biden has declined.” They lied.

Oh.

Biden has been the shadow of a president for four years. Tell us something we didn’t know in 2020, you’re thinking. Same here.

But stick with me because the Journal’s reporting goes deep into the workings of the White House, and it illustrates why “Biden is sharp as a tack” should have been the Lie of the Year every year since 2020. Because Biden is sharp as a marble.

First, a relevant and current question: Where’s the president regarding those budget negotiations in which only Donald Trump and Co. seem to be engaged? NBC News reports, “Biden stays on the sidelines as Congress scrambles over a looming shutdown.” Fox News adds, “Where’s Biden? Lame-duck president slammed for ‘quiet quitting’ amid major government funding battle.”

Oh.

Maybe all the left-wingers hyperventilating over Trump and Musk shouldn’t have spent the last four years propping up a cognitively impaired puppet and pretending he was in charge.

Here are some not-so-shocking specific excerpts from the Journal’s report, which “is based on interviews with nearly 50 people, including those who participated in or had direct knowledge of the operations.”

To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, [aides] told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members — including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen — were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.‘s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan. …

Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race. …

There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed. …

If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.

Some people are on the record talking about how hard or infrequent it was to speak directly to the president.

Washington Congressman Adam Smith chaired the powerful House Armed Services Committee and yet got only one call from Biden in four years. “I spoke with Barack Obama on a number of occasions when he was president,” Smith noted, “and I wasn’t even chairman of the committee.”

Likewise, Connecticut Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said, “I really had no personal contact with this president. I had more personal contact with Obama, which is sort of strange because I was a lot more junior.”

It wasn’t just congressional Democrats; it was Biden’s own Cabinet. “Over four years,” the Journal noted, “Biden held nine full cabinet meetings — three in 2021, two in 2022, three in 2023 and just one this year. In their first terms, Obama held 19 and Trump held 25.” Furthermore, “At least one cabinet member stopped requesting calls with the president.”

Next, the Journal recounted events leading up to Biden’s disastrous and revealing interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur over his mishandling of classified documents. The interview was made public in February — over administration and Democrat objections. It was immediately clear why they protested, as the interview revealed that Biden struggled to remember basic facts, such as when his son died, even within several years. Hur’s devastating conclusion was that he wouldn’t prosecute Biden because any jury would let him off as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

The Journal’s news is that it wasn’t just the interview, which could have felt adversarial and thrown off even a younger man. The Journal reports that Biden spent a whole week running “prep sessions” that “took about three hours a day.” His “energy levels were up and down” during those sessions, and “he couldn’t recall lines that his team had previously discussed with him.”

Another revelation is that even with donor events, Biden was given two or three questions in advance to control interactions. Even so, he still “made flubs, which confounded the donors who knew that Biden had the questions ahead of time.”

Again, we’ve essentially known all this — at least that Biden was unfit — the whole time. So, who cares now? Why is the Journal “breaking” this news? Why are sources talking to the press? Why do the details matter when we already knew the big picture a long time ago?

Well, when Biden first dropped out of the race was kicked to the curb in July, Democrats hailed him as being just like George Washington in his humility and self-sacrifice for the good of the country. That ridiculous hagiography lasted until it became apparent that Kamala Harris would lose the election. When she did, the gloves came off, and Democrats now feel unencumbered by any need to lie about what they really think.

In fact, they’re so angry that Trump won that they’re looking for a scapegoat. That’s Joe Biden, and they will destroy his legacy as a reckoning.

The Journal’s reporting follows one earlier this fall that initially broke some of the same ground. There may be more in the coming days from the Journal and elsewhere detailing just how thoroughly the Biden administration, virtually every Democrat, and the press corp lied about Biden’s true condition with all the righteous indignation they could muster — all while gaslighting the American people that critical observers were the ones lying and running “cheap fakes.”

The enormity of the Orwellian deception is truly astounding, and it put our entire nation at risk for four years. Indeed, the level of deceit was arguably criminal and may be the biggest presidential scandal in history.

All of that said, do you know what would be the most hilarious thing ever? Remove Biden now, install Harris as the 47th president for all of four weeks, and let the Democrats forever live with the admission that the First Female of Color™ president was literally never more than a DEI placeholder.

Do you know what would be the most hilarious thing ever? Remove Biden now, install Kamala as the 47th president for all of four weeks, and let the Democrats forever live with the admission that the First Female of Color™ president was literally never more than a DEI placeholder.

— Nate Jackson | Patriot Post (@NatriotJackson) December 20, 2024

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