Poor Joe.

            No.

            Poor us. Poor United States. Poor Democratic Party.

            We’ve been suckered. While we were fearfully obsessing over the ethically-challenged Donald Trump, a much more talented grifter—Joe Biden along with his hidden passel of co-conspirators—conned the electorate, the news media and most of his own party’s leaders out of the American presidency.

            The Bidenite scam sounds like a fourth entry in Alan J. Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy” of 1970s political thrillers.

A populist socialist senator takes an early lead in the 2020 primaries. Ruling-class elites panic. Who can stop him? Alarmed party bosses and their mouthpieces in the corporate media recruit an unlikely centrist champion to take him on: the oldest person ever to run for president, a washed-up hack who came in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire. Even more worrisome, the elderly man presents with signs of dementia. He “campaigned unevenly and delivered uncomfortably meandering performances at the debates that often worsened as each debate dragged on,” a major national political magazine pundit observes.

A 19^th century-style boss who controls a chunk of the Black vote yanks his secret levers of power: just before Super Tuesday, several of the younger candidates drop out and simultaneously endorse the demented old man. “Rarely, if ever, have opponents joined forces so dramatically,” The New York Times reports. A narrowed field and the Black bloc finishes the hit. The socialist drops out a month later.

The dementia problem remains. A leftist columnist (cough cough) argues in March 2020 that the emperor has no brain (“Biden obviously has dementia and should withdraw from the race”); right-wingers agree. They are ignored by the media, the vast majority of whom live deep inside the mushy, muddled, moderate middle where common sense goes to die. 40% of voters (including 20% of Democrats) tell a June 2020 Rasmussen Reports poll that they think Biden suffers from dementia. They are called victims of Republican disinformation.

To the party elites—the DNC, Congressional leaders like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, media allies like the Times op-ed page and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough—Biden’s diminished mental acuity is a feature, not a bug. Never the fastest car in the showroom to begin with, nor possessed of a strong moral center, the enfeebled Democratic nominee will say and do pretty much anything they want. All the scammers have to do now is get Biden into the White House without the voters figuring out that he isn’t all there.

            With the Democratic nomination nailed down, Biden’s co-conspirators receive a gift from the gods: the Covid-19 pandemic prompts incumbent president Donald Trump into ordering a national lockdown. 2020 becomes a campaign like no other—one perfect for a Biden who can’t campaign or speak extemporaneously.

No rallies. No press conferences. No town halls. No unscripted interviews. “Everybody says, you know, ‘Biden’s hiding.’ Well, let me tell you something, we’re doing very well. We’re following the guidelines of the medical profession,” Biden explains.

            Biden spends the campaign in his Delaware basement, reading prepared speeches to a TV camera. On Election Night he acknowledges his win against Trump remotely to a parking lot full of socially-distanced cars.

            The Bidenite plot is breathtakingly audacious. For the next four years—a time span as long as America’s involvement in World War II—Biden’s puppeteers will keep on hiding him. A hidden junta will disguise, deflect and distract from the mental condition of the President of the United States, the most powerful political leader on the planet holding an office that calls for countless public appearances, gaslighting like crazy while they call the shots. This digital Potemkin presidency will be propped up by Teleprompters, even in intimate private fundraisers with big donors, fake interviews in which “reporters” are spoon-fed questions that Biden responds to by reading prepared text, and pompous accusations of ageism fired at skeptics.

            It was a ridiculous scheme, carried out in plain sight. And it worked.

Biden gave hardly any press conferences or interviews. A minute cabal of staff and family members kept the president, like a hostage, in a bubble. “Biden’s closest aides—often led by Jill Biden’s top aide, Anthony Bernal [a thuggish figure nicknamed “Biden’s Rasputin” by insiders], and deputy chief of staff Annie Tomasini—took steps early in his term to essentially rope off the president,” Axios would report after Biden’s 2024 debate performance revealed his mental condition. Even the White House residence staff hardly ever saw him.

Reality, however, intruded. In 2021, Biden said he had discussed the Jan. 6^th Capitol riot with German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017. He also confused French President Emmanuel Macron with his predecessor Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996: “Mitterrand from Germany—I mean, from France—looked at me and said, ‘You know, what…why…how long you back for?” He called out for a Congressional ally at a rally—a woman who had died a month earlier in a widely-reported car crash and whose family had received a condolence call from him: “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?,” he asked. “She was going to be here.” Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden said in 2023 was “clearly losing the war in Iraq.” He recently introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as Putin.

Voters noticed. An August 2023 AP-NORC poll found that 69% of Democrats (and 89% of Republicans) thought Biden was too old to run for reelection. The press kept covering.

The ruse fell apart twice.

First came Biden’s hubristic quest for a second term. Had Biden kept his implicit promise to serve only four years before passing the torch, media and voter attention would have been focused on the Democrats who wanted to succeed him, including Vice President Kamala Harris. As with Ronald Reagan’s last few years in office, Biden’s mental diminishment would have been tacitly understood as a temporary problem. The crisis we’re currently facing is as if Reagan had run in 1988, asking for four more years and making lame excuses—he has a cold, he has jet lag, he stutters—while visibly suffering from Alzheimer’s.

Second, not sticking to the plan. Once underway and committed to a reelection campaign, Operation Hidin’ Biden’s control team ought to have refused to debate Trump. Debates aren’t mandatory; the excuse that Trump was a contemptable convicted felon and insurrectionist would have gotten journalists off Biden’s back. Clearly a big part of Biden World got spooked by low polls—low because citizens like to see their presidents. So, to prove to the world that they were right and that voters should no longer believe their lying eyes, panicked Democrats foolishly demanded an early, high-profile debate that, with the benefit of hindsight included rules that hurt Biden. Democrats should have wanted Trump to talk over Biden. They should have asked for a big, noisy, disruptive audience to drown out Biden’s rambling, confused word salad.

They crossed their fingers and hoped for the best and prayed that Joe would have one last good day. As anyone experienced with dementia patients can tell—my mom died of Alzheimer’s—there comes a time when the last good day is in the past. Biden has been there for quite some time.

I look forward to reading the first solid tell-all book about this debacle. Congressional Republicans have signaled that they plan to investigate Biden’s physical and mental health. The legislative branch must exercise its constitutional oversight powers to find out how it happened and who is responsible.

But let’s be something that the president can’t be: clear. Joe Biden and the people behind him do not deserve our sympathy. Save your pity for we, the people of the United States.

Biden was elected under false pretenses. He was “president”*, not President. We don’t know who really made the big decisions in the White House.

This is not how democracy or representative government work. BidenGate was the cooption of a major political party, a coup d’état and an insidious attack that the American people couldn’t defend themselves against because they never knew it happened. A stooge was installed, so perfectly ironically, by those who loudly claimed to be defending democracy from a wannabe fascist. The Democratic Party traitors who carried out and knew about this obscenity should be held legally and politically accountable.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)