The cheap-fake presidency

From almost the outset of Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, everyone — from his family to close aides to the White House comms shop — has engaged in careful stagecraft and clever editing to hide him away from the public. It’s all coming out now, though, thanks to Biden’s catastrophic debate performance that laid bare whatever condition he is suffering from for the entire country to see.

Every carefully orchestrated step the White House took to shield Biden is now coming under a microscope. Whether it’s the president’s tire-tread tennis shoes, or using the small stairs on Air Force One — these tactics are just the beginning. Last February, the White House pulled out of a live Super Bowl interview, claiming it would not serve Biden to speak to that audience. In fact, Joe Biden hasn’t given a live, unscripted interview in years.

In what should have been a genuine media scandal, Biden was caught answering pre-submitted questions from journalists during a Rose Garden event. The notecard had the photo, name and exact question from a Reuters reporter, and the words “YOU” and “YOUR” were in all capital letters. So if you want to know why there hasn’t been a stronger effort on the part of White House journalists to ask why this president is being hidden, it’s because many of them have clearly been in on the scam.

In the past few months, the White House has released a series of video shorts of Biden speaking to several cameras, and viewers have noticed the number of jump cuts in a clip as short as thirty seconds. Jump cuts are usually meant to change up angles in films and keep a fast pace going. In this case, however, they appear to mask that fact that Biden could not give a straight thirty-second statement on camera without a script.

Leading up to the debate, recall, the White House was responding to critics of these tricks by labeling them “cheap fakes,” alleging the clips are edited to make Biden look aged and confused. In reality, the clips from Biden looking befuddled and decrepit at the G7 Summit, or in Normandy at a veterans ceremony, were showing the real Joe Biden without guidance from aides, or his family.

Where do we go for our apology?

Joe Biden’s entire presidency has been edited, scripted and staged, and staged into one big cheap fake — and the reason Democrats and the media are in a full-blown panic over it is because they know they can’t hide it anymore. Their days of corralling Biden with Easter bunnies and publishing press release “in the president’s words” are over.

After the debate, Biden gave one rehearsed speech at a rally, then went away for the weekend, as he has done every weekend. Yesterday, in response to the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, Biden appeared for just over four minutes, gave a scripted statement — and again, disappeared without taking questions from reporters.

The floodgates are open and Biden can’t hide anymore. While he might very well still win this election, almost no one believes he’s currently running the country unassisted, nor do most believe he will finish out a second term. Whether or not he can do so should be THE question this president should have to answer — unedited, and not cheap-faked.