…. The other oddity of this happy meeting was the fact that Old Joe was palling around with the guy that the Democrats were calling Hitler just a few days ago. In fact, X is still full of videos of hysterical leftists wailing about the descent of fascism upon our once-free country, and the beaming old man to Donald Trump’s immediate left (of course) at the White House on Wednesday was largely responsible for that hysteria.

This did not, of course, start with the election season. The Democrats’ fearmongering about Trump began the moment he announced his candidacy for the 2016 Republican nomination, and it never let up in the intervening years. It reached its apex on Sept. 1, 2022, when Biden, in a dark, threatening, nationally televised speech before an ominous red-and-black background and flanked by two Marines in full dress uniform, declared that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

For the first and only time in American history, a president declared that his primary political opposition was outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse. The message couldn’t have been clearer: The establishment left, entrenched in power but deeply afraid of losing that power, was intent on criminalizing political opposition. Dissent from Biden’s agenda, and you could end up with the thought police breaking down your door at 4 a.m. The FBI, on the other hand, comes at 6 a.m., as Polymarket’s Shayne Coplan just found out.

“As I stand here tonight,” Biden declared in front of his ersatz National Socialist background, “equality and democracy are under assault. We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise.” Biden said equality and democracy were under assault, and then he proceeded to assault them. He said he intended to “speak as plainly as I can to the nation about the threats we face,” but he wasn’t referring to China, Russia, North Korea, or the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and certainly not to the woke America haters who infest our public schools, colleges, and universities. No, Biden’s big threat to the nation was Trump, along with the Americans who dared to vote against him and reject his policies. Old Joe came closer to calling for war upon American citizens than any president since Jefferson Davis.

“MAGA Republicans have made their choice,” Biden declared. “They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.” This was the “accuse your enemy of what you’re doing” strategy to a T. Old Joe added, “Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans: We must be stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to — to destroying American democracy.”

And yet, there he was on Wednesday, cheesin’ and grinnin’, as Barack Obama would put it, with the sinister destroyer of democracy himself. Why, it’s as if the whole thing was a put-on. There never was any threat to democracy, except from Old Joe himself and his henchmen. Trump and his supporters never represented “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” and Biden likely knew this even as he was saying it back in 2022. But will Old Joe, in his present happy mood, call on leftists to calm down and tell them the whole “threat to our democracy” shtick was just a vote-getting tactic? Don’t hold your breath.