New York Post, July 26, 2023

Aides and the press have created a Potemkin presidency, hiding if Joe Biden is up to it     Biden Potemkin Presidency Collapse

President Biden is merely pretending to do his job. But will the charade collapse before he can finagle another election victory?

In czarist Russia, a Russian governor named Potemkin built a fake village to deceive Catherine the Great about the condition of the peasants she ruled.

In today’s Washington, the media are partnering with Team Biden to concoct a Potemkin village to deceive Americans about Biden’s faltering fitness for office.

Last month at the Air Force Academy graduation in Colorado, Biden stumbled leaving the podium. It took multiple Secret Service agents to eventually get Joe back on his feet.

In a bizarre finish for a recent MSNBC puff-piece appearance, Biden practically jumped out of his chair and shuffled off stage like a hungry geezer responding to the dinner bell at the nursing home.

Biden has gotten lost on stage so many times that Waze should create a special app for Joe to navigate his next steps.

The Atlantic noted last year that Biden’s “aides look visibly nervous at times” when he is giving a public speech. What do they know that we don’t?

Biden has stumbled several times going up the steps to Air Force One. White House staff “fixed” that problem by having the president take the short stairway into the plane’s belly to “reduce the risk of a televised fall that goes viral,” NBC News reported Monday. As long as Biden is not being loaded onto the plane via a hydraulic medical lift, the media will pretend there is nothing to see.

The White House built a fake Oval Office equipped with a teleprompter for Biden’s announcements. But the president struggles reading routine words aloud.

Visiting Japan for a May summit, Biden uncorked a 40-second, utterly incoherent answer to a question that mystified even his biggest devotees. Some commentators speculated the jet lag and time difference undermined the drugs that Biden routinely takes to spur apparent mental sharpness.

But Biden is often detached from reality even on East Coast time, such as his false claim that he swayed Congress to enact his federal student-loan-forgiveness scheme or his wacky claim Tuesday: “We ended cancer as we know it.”

And then there are Joe’s ludicrous assertions his son “did nothing wrong” despite Hunter admitting guilt in a corrupt wrist-slap plea bargain.

“Joe Biden’s age is his superpower,” according to Biden re-election campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg. In reality, Biden’s “superpower” is a craven press that shamelessly pretends he is mentally and physically fit for another five years of the presidency.

Biden won in 2020 in part because the media enabled his “basement campaign strategy” — purportedly because COVID made mass gatherings unsafe except when denouncing the police.

The biggest Potemkin village nowadays is the pretense that Biden is really in charge of the federal government and national policy. Major media outlets assiduously avoid even recognizing the curtain hiding DC’s actual power brokers. Who is actually making the decisions?

“Trust us — we are insiders who had higher SAT scores than you did” — the ultimate Beltway proof.

But deferring to the media’s storyline is folly considering the sordid record of the press corps betraying truth to snare Oval Office access.

In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson was left partially paralyzed and mentally incapacitated from a severe stroke. In 1920, New York World reporter Louis Seibold scored the first interview with Wilson after his illness. He claimed he saw Wilson “transact the most important functions of his office with his old-time decisiveness, method, and keenness of intellectual appraisement.” Brazenly lying about Wilson’s competence won Seibold the 1921 Pulitzer Prize.

Flash forward a couple decades and the press corps propagated the sham that President Franklin Roosevelt was fit for a third term — even though he was obviously dying by late 1944.

How many Biden “senior moments” has the White House press corps covered up? Thanks to a Judicial Watch lawsuit, Americans belatedly learned this week that Biden’s German shepherd “Commander” attacked seven Secret Service agents late last year and early this year.

If Americans didn’t even hear about Biden’s dog badly mauling a Secret Service agent, what are the chances we hear about all of Biden’s own stumbles?

The media may help Biden dodge political debates, frequent public appearances or even interviews with anyone who refuses to kowtow. But it is a riverboat gamble whether Biden’s worsening debility can be hidden until November 2024.