Did Joe Biden’s presidency really happen?

Trees fall in forests, and forgotten statesmen make speeches. Last Saturday, Joe Biden gave his first post-presidential speech to something called National High School Model United Nations, which seems to be a conference for people who maybe don’t exist and nobody outside the room noticed. The event was, according to Philip Wegmann at RealClearPolitics, closed to the press, with no recording of Biden’s remarks made.

It’s spooky. The 46th presidency only ended eight weeks ago and already Biden is a ghost. Donald Trump constantly evokes his name – the worst president ever, a catastrophe for this country etc. etc. – and yet the man himself has evanesced.

On Tuesday, Trump proudly pulled back a curtain to show Fox News’s Laura Ingraham the Declaration of Independence, which he has mounted in the Oval Office. “Do you think Joe Biden would do this?” he said. “I don’t think so. Do you think he’d think of it? Do you think he knows what it is?” He also told Ingraham that the “only thing” he admired about his predecessor was Biden’s ability to fall asleep when all the cameras were on him. Well, now the cameras are leaving “sleepy Joe” alone.

Given the enormous interest in Biden’s cognitive state over the last few years, you might think the media would be more alert to his movements. But no. Biden’s whole presidency has been utterly buried by the news blizzard of Trump’s first 100 days.

The only Biden update that has made waves is the autopen story. A project from the Heritage Foundation has been claiming that Biden and his aides routinely used a machine to add his signature on key documents. Trump then declared that some of Biden’s pardons are void because he hadn’t actually signed them. The media of course called the claim a mad right-wing theory: fact-checkers pointed out that almost all presidents, going back to Thomas Jefferson, have used a signing machine; that the Heritage Foundation was looking at digital files which replicated Biden’s signature as a matter of course; and that Trump himself had used an autopen. (“Only for very unimportant papers,” Trump replied.) When the media gets in such a flap about an outrageous Trump claim, it usually means it’s true.

But the veracity of the autopen story is secondary to its mythic power. It taps into the idea, now widely accepted as correct, that Biden was for years too demented to be president, that his aides effectively ran the country while he doddered about ice cream, and that the media helped cover up the fact that the Commander-in-Chief was not all there.

Now, 60 days into Trump 2.0, the strangest part about Biden is that, even though he’s still alive, he’s abruptly disappeared from the public eye in a way that no other president has. He is Schrödinger’s president – neither dead nor alive, but existing in some liminal space on the edges of our human understanding.

Did Biden’s administration really happen? Or is America so cognitively impaired and inattentive that it cannot remember what occurred just the other day? Don’t think about that for too long, because Donald Trump just did something else.

The above is taken from Freddy Gray’s weekly Americano newsletter. To subscribe click here.