From Biden’s Potemkin Presidency to Trump’s Potemkin War

By James Bovard

In this age of social media and A.I. illusions, an old Russian scam provides the best lens to understand America’s two most recent presidents.

In eighteenth-century czarist Russia, a fake village was built by a Russian governor named Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin to deceive Catherine the Great about the condition of the peasants she ruled. “Potemkin Village,” according to Time magazine, “signifies any deceptive or false construct, conjured often by cruel regimes, to deceive both those within the land and those peering in from outside.”

In Washington a few years ago, the media partnered with the Biden administration to concoct a Potemkin Village to deceive Americans about President Joe Biden’s faltering fitness for office.

The White House built a fake Oval Office equipped with a teleprompter for Biden’s announcements. But the president still struggled reading simple words aloud like an Arkansas television anchor grappling with five-syllable names of East European cities. Biden  got lost on stage so many times that WAZE should have created a special app for Joe to navigate his next steps. Biden often seemed detached from reality, such as his false claim that he swayed Congress to enact his federal student loan forgiveness scheme. At a White House summit, Biden repeatedly called out for a dead congresswoman to come to the podium, forgetting that his political ally had died in a car crash.

Most of the media colluded with the White House to hide Biden’s growing debility. Biden 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. As long as Biden was not loaded onto the plane via a hydraulic medical lift, the media could pretend there was nothing to see.

Yet, in 2023, Biden reelection campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg declared, “Joe Biden’s age is his superpower.” In reality, Biden’s “superpower” was a craven media that shamelessly pretends he was mentally and physically fit for another term as president.

The biggest Potemkin Village pretense was the notion that Biden was actually in charge of the federal government and national policy. If the Wizard of Oz was a Biden era political story, the media would overwhelmingly side with the guy behind the curtain.  As long as the string-pullers in the Biden White House perpetuated progressive policies to continue bloating Leviathan’s power, Biden’s reign was “close enough for government work” to the “will of the people.”

Donald Trump is not as physically feeble as Joe Biden though he is a shadow of his vitality in his first term.  But Trump’s delusions on the Iran War seem as bad or worse than any imaginary vision that sent Biden wandering off stage at the wrong time.

Perhaps Trump was already utterly deluded before he gave the order to kidnap Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela.  But Trump was certainly deranged when he assumed that he could topple the Iranian government as easily as he sent U.S. troops into Caracas. If the top aides around him encouraged Trump to believe than fantasy, they are even more deluded or corrupt than Trump.

After the U.S. and Israel launched a surprise attack that killed the Iranian government leadership, Trump began boasting every few days that the U.S. had already won the war. At last count, Trump had made more than 40 such victory boasts.

Trump began supplementing those assertions with dozens of proclamations that the Strait of Hormuz is open.  The Iranian government quickly strangled oil transit through that key world waterway.  But Trump’s declarations did nothing to stifle the fears of shippers and insurance companies who watched oil tankers get hit by Iranian forces.

The Iranian government has made a mockery of Trump’s bluster. The president sought to reach higher ground via endless social media posts portraying himself as the conqueror of Iran.  On Sunday afternoon, as Harry Sisson recounted on X/Twitter, Trump posted the following A.I. images on social media:

3:31 PM – AI poster of the U.S. attacking Kharg Island in Iran

3:31 PM – AI image of him taking over an Iranian oil tanker

3:32 PM – AI image of him taking over an Iranian oil tanker x2

3:33 PM – AI image of him taking over an Iranian oil tanker x3

3:47 PM – Posts an AI image of an Iranian ship being blown up

4:36 PM – AI image of him taking over an Iranian oil tanker x4

4:36 PM – AI image of him taking over an Iranian oil tanker x5

4:37 PM – AI image of him taking over an Iranian oil tanker x6

4:39 PM – AI image of him cosplaying as a Navy Commander

4:45 PM – AI image of himself saying “Guardians of the world”

4:47 PM – AI image of American jets saying “Guardian Angels of the world”

4:48 PM – Another AI photo of an Iranian ship being blown up

4:54 PM – AI image of an eagle and a jet saying “America is back”

5:00 PM – Posts graph downplaying American casualties in Iran

Social media has provided a real-time tool for tracking Trump’s unraveling as the Iranian war wrecked his presidency and credibility.

But Trump’s delusions are probably too deep to be expunged by any degree of failure – especially since he is personally making billions of dollars of corrupt profits as president regardless of the wreckage his policies inflict on America and the world.

In March, Trump granted an interview to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for their book on his presidency. Trump handed the reporters a two page document that asserted: “Donald Trump is, without question, the most powerful man that the planet has ever known- by a long way.” The document asserted that Trump had far more power than Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler, and Stalin, among other scoundrels.  The document proclaimed that the USA was “the first truly global superpower. President Trump is the first leader to be willing to use that power on a global scale. That makes him by far the most powerful person that has EVER walked this planet.”  During the interview, Haberman and Swan wrote, Trump proudly recited “the names of some of history’s most powerful figures, explaining how each fell short of his own power as U.S. president.”

On June 18, Trump posted the document on Truth Social – “Presidential Historian Dave King – Sounds good to me!”  Actually, Dave King was simply a golf caddy for a friend of Trump. But since he exalted the 47^th president, that made him one of the greatest historians in the land.

Trump’s actions on Iran vivify how he believes there is no constraint on his absolute power either at home or abroad.  He felt no obligation to notify Congress to the American people before he took the nation to war.  He felt no obligation to justify the carnage he inflicted in the name of the United States.  He felt no obligation to admit wrongful killings or atrocities that forces under his command committed, such as the 171 people killed at the girls’ school at Minab, Iran. He felt no obligation not to erase four dead American soldiers from the war’s death count simply to burnish his own bragging rights about the low cost of the great victories he delivered.

 In 2024, Donald Trump sought re-election by promising to ‘end the endless wars.’   If he had been honest with voters and instead proclaimed, “I want more power than Hitler!,” even Kamala Harris could have whipped his ass. How many more people will perish before Trump’s Potemkin War on Iran ends?