Wait — Doesn’t Joe Biden Know He’s a Puppet?

Old Joe Biden has been pretending to be president of the United States for a year and a half now. While it has never been entirely certain who exactly is in charge (Barack Obama and White House chief of staff Ron Klain are two of the candidates most commonly bruited about), Old Joe himself has made it clear many times that it he isn’t, saying on numerous occasions that he is going to “get in trouble” with unnamed people if he departs from the instructions they have given him. That’s why it was all the more surprising on Tuesday when NBC News revealed that Biden is angry about White House aides constantly walking back his statements when they’re wacky, inaccurate, incendiary, or dangerous. Does he actually think he is president of the United States after all?

Biden has many times intimated that he is not the man who is calling the shots, and knows it. In June 2021 at the G7 Summit, he said, “I’m sorry, I’m going to get in trouble with staff if I don’t do this the right way.” At a press conference in Nov. 2021, he gave the impression that someone had directed him not to take too many questions: “I can take…I’m going to get in real trouble…this is the last question I’m taking.”

On Sept. 8, 2021, Biden announced to the world, “I‘m supposed to stop and walk out of the room.” On Aug. 30, 2021, he told a reporter, “I’m not supposed to take any questions, but go ahead.” But when the question turned out to involve his catastrophic mishandling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said: “I’m not gonna answer Afghanistan now,” and summarily walked away.

There is also evidence, provided by Biden himself, that his press conferences are scripted and carefully directed. On June 19, 2021, he said, “I’ll take your questions, and as usual, folks, they gave me a list of the people I’m going to call on.” He has referred to his list of reporters on other occasions as well; apparently, he knows what questions he is going to be asked, and has prepared answers ready.

But now, at least according to NBC, the puppet-in-chief is annoyed with his aides, “bristling at how they’ve tried to stifle the plain-speaking persona that has long been one of his most potent assets.” He is “rattled by his sinking approval ratings and is looking to regain voters’ confidence that he can provide the sure-handed leadership he promised during the campaign.” One of the ways he plans to do this, apparently, is to say all the nutty things he says without having some White House aide come clean up after him.

Biden is “unhappy,” says NBC, “about a pattern that has developed inside the West Wing. He makes a clear and succinct statement — only to have aides rush to explain that he actually meant something else. The so-called clean-up campaign, he has told advisers, undermines him and smothers the authenticity that fueled his rise. Worse, it feeds a Republican talking point that he’s not fully in command.”

Well, yeah. That’s because he’s not fully in command, and some of the things he has said could have landed us in World War III. He told American troops what they could expect to see when they got to Ukraine. He said that the United States would respond in kind to a Russian chemical weapons attack. He declared that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.”

But after the White House walked back that last one, according to NBC, “Biden was furious that his remarks were being seen as unreliable, arguing that he speaks genuinely and reminding his staff that he’s the one who is president.” Even in this, however, the White House is still correcting Old Joe: an unnamed Biden administration official maintained that “we don’t say anything that the president doesn’t want us to say.” Sure. The question is, does the president say anything he doesn’t want to say? And is someone directing this mess, or attempting to do so?

Biden, says NBC, is “mystified that his approval rating has dropped to a level approaching that of his predecessor, Donald Trump, ranked by historians as one of the worst presidents in history.” Well, Joe, have you and those Leftist “historians” done a comparative study of gas prices during the Trump administration and yours? Of the state of the economy in general? Of the level of global conflict? History is likely, if free people write it, to be much kinder to Trump than contemporary historians are, while Biden is almost certain to be judged as just as much of a disaster as he looks to be.

But whose disaster? Joe wants it to be known that it’s all his own. Okay, Joe. You own it.