CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

From Biden’s Potemkin Presidency to Trump’s Potemkin War

AI image that Trump posted to his social media accounts.

In this age of social media and A.I. illusions, an old Russian scam provides the best lens to understand America’s two most recent presidents.

In eighteenth-century czarist Russia, a fake village was built by a Russian governor named Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin to deceive Catherine the Great about the condition of the peasants she ruled. “Potemkin Village,” according to Time magazine, “signifies any deceptive or false construct, conjured often by cruel regimes, to deceive both those within the land and those peering in from outside.”

In Washington a few years ago, the media partnered with the Biden administration to concoct a Potemkin Village to deceive Americans about President Joe Biden’s faltering fitness for office.

The White House built a fake Oval Office equipped with a teleprompter for Biden’s announcements. But the president still struggled reading simple words aloud like an Arkansas television anchor grappling with five-syllable names of East European cities. Biden  got lost on stage so many times that WAZE should have created a special app for Joe to navigate his next steps. Biden often seemed detached from reality, such as his false claim that he swayed Congress to enact his federal student loan forgiveness scheme. At a White House summit, Biden repeatedly called out for a dead congresswoman to come to the podium, forgetting that his political ally had died in a car crash.

Most of the media colluded with the White House to hide Biden’s growing debility. Biden stumbled several times going up the steps to Air Force One. White House staff “fixed” that problem by having the president take the short stairway into the plane’s belly to “reduce the risk of a televised fall that goes viral,” NBC News reported. As long as Biden was not loaded onto the plane via a hydraulic medical lift, the media could pretend there was nothing to see.

Yet, in 2023, Biden reelection campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg declared, “Joe Biden’s age is his superpower.”........

© CounterPunch