It's pretty rare that everybody across the political spectrum agree on anything, no less something so consequential as this. 

But ask a Republican, a Democrat, or a media maven, and they all agree that Joe Biden is politically irrelevant.

Look at the coverage of Congress' battle to pass a continuing resolution and to address the debt ceiling. As far as I can tell, there isn't a mention of Joe Biden, the nominal President of the United States, having the least political influence over the outcome. We read about Trump's negotiations with Speaker Johnson, and the Democrats are obsessed with the idea that they can use their own messaging to drive a rift between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but Joe Biden is absent from both the negotiations and the news coverage. 

I'm not sure I have seen anything like this, although I only vaguely remember the transition in 1980 when Jimmy Carter passed the baton to Ronald Reagan. 

We have already seen that world leaders are treating Trump as the president, but you would expect the current President to be burnishing his legacy and assure the world that he is still in charge. 

The opposite is happening, though. Biden has almost disappeared, Kamala Harris is getting raked over the coals by her own party and is mostly hidden too. And the Pravda Media is finally opening up about how absent Joe Biden was from his entire administration. With the exception of Tony Blinken and Alejandro Mayorkas, the media is admitting that it was nameless, faceless bureaucrats whom nobody outside Washington could name who ran the country. 

Joe Biden went from being the most consequential president since Franklin Roosevelt and the most upright and moral since George Washington to a broken man without a working brain, all in the space of a few weeks. 

Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal did their deep dives into Biden's being a vegetable, and reporters are now admitting that they screwed up the story--although heaven forbid you assume there was any partisan motive. 

Former CNN Contributor apologizes for covering for Democrats by not covering Joe Biden's mental decline:
Chris Cillizza: "As a reporter, I have a confession to make. I should have pushed harder earlier for more information about Joe Biden's mental and physical well-being and any… pic.twitter.com/5XFBGlndRq

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) December 19, 2024

But nobody pretends that Biden is president, and they are acting like Trump is calling the shots. 

All the coverage is about Trump's choice for this seat or Elon's opinion about that issue... Will the Canadian government fall because Trudeau is getting humiliated by Trump?

This benefits Trump, at least so far, but it also presents a problem: it sure looks like the economy is going to tank and that potential crises are popping up, meaning that Biden is leaving Trump a bigger mess than we already knew. Trump will want to hang all the blame on Biden, but if anything goes wrong between now and January 21, Trump will, ironically, own it even though his power is mostly a perception rather than having any control over the executive branch. 

Trump, though, is the luckiest man in politics and has a unique ability to control the narrative, so I expect that he will manage the tast of shoving the blame onto Biden and taking credit for anything good.

In any case, nobody is even pretending that Biden is in control of anything.