Is it some kind of deep mystery why all of the late night comics have spent the last 3 years going easy on Joe Biden? I don't think so. But to be fair, the article does offer some answers that I haven't seen in print before.

The story starts with the largest Democratic fundraiser of all time, which featured Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton at Radio City Music Hall. The event was moderated by Stephen Colbert:

Colbert’s ultra-friendly exchanges with Biden, Obama and Clinton as emcee of the largest Democratic fundraiser ever — it raised a whopping $26 million for Biden’s reelection effort — were emblematic of a new era in late night comedy. It’s more proudly partisan. More one-sided. More cautious in its targets. And it’s generally soft on Biden.

By any metric, Biden is a rich vein of material for late night or sketch comics. He arrived in the White House with a hard-earned reputation as a gaffe machine. The oldest president ever, he was first elected to the Senate during the era of eight-track tapes and rotary telephones. Since his ascendancy to the White House, he has fairly consistently stumbled over his own words, mixed up the names of world leaders and countries and even physically stumbled on stage himself, tripping and falling at a U.S. Air Force graduation. His speaking style can be jarring: He can sound something like an old-timey preacher, delivering surprising anecdotes while vacillating between a yell and a whisper...

As these hosts approached the task of poking fun at Trump, they moved from being comic mercenaries to understanding themselves as part of a media apparatus that had to stand up to the dangers of Trump. And as he’s loomed over the Biden era, they’ve pulled their punches on the new president, styling themselves as sentinels of the Trump resistance rather than stiletto-wielding stand-ups for whom anyone was fair game.

Sentinels of the Trump resistance is right. Comedy comes a distant second for these hosts. And lest you think it's all about them being committed partisans, the article points out they have another motivation as well.

“Fallon’s congenial treatment of Trump really hurt his audience share,” he says. Fallon routinely beat Colbert in the ratings through September 2016, but in the late night season that ran from September 2016 to May 2017 — the period immediately following the tousled hair incident — Colbert passed Fallon, giving him and CBS the first full season late night ratings victory over NBC in two decades. Colbert found success hammering Trump in the cold open of his show almost every evening, leaning into his political background.

Like every network, the late night hosts quickly learned that basing Trump was key to ratings. CNN has known this for years. But again, I'll give Politico some credit for pointing out what happens when someone in this little club steps out of line. Case in point, Jon Stewart's tougher take on Biden a few months ago. That led to a lot of criticism like this:

Mary Trump, the former president’s niece and a leading critic, piled on, writing on X, “Not only is Stewart’s ‘both sides are the same’ rhetoric not funny, it’s a potential disaster for democracy.”

Politico concludes: "Largely liberal late night audiences don’t want to hear about Biden’s stumbles — in fact, much of the audience finds that criticism somewhat offensive."

Bottom line, the late night hosts have a number of reasons to give Biden a pass. For one, they are partisans. For two, it helps their ratings. For three, anyone who criticizes Biden is liable to get blasted by a bunch of people for daring to do so. There's just no upside to playing things down the middle, so they don't. And the result is that there's really nothing Biden can do that will elicit a harsh joke at his expense. The late night monologues should be counted as a campaign donation because that's pretty much what is happening this year.