In The Washington Post’s self-righteous telling, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It says so every day, right there below the paper’s masthead.

But democracy also dies in historical revisionism, of the sort found Dec. 29 in the Post’s front-page lead story, directly below the masthead and across five columns, titled plaintively: “Joe Biden’s lonely battle to sell his vision of American democracy.”

Tyler Pager’s fourth installment in a four-part Post series dubbed “How Biden Leads” reads like a cross between a postmortem defense of Joe Biden’s failed (my adjective, not his) presidency and a sycophantic hagiography.

There are so many “what might have beens” in Pager’s 2,349-word magnum opus, it’s hard to know where to begin in dissecting and dismantling all of the historical revisionism.

The article begins anecdotally with Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., who was instrumental in getting Biden nominated in 2020, recounting a meeting with the president early last year as Biden prepared to run for reelection. A lachrymose Clyburn lamented that Biden’s supposed campaigning on “substance” was no longer a good fit in an era—a scant four years later—where style now supposedly trumps (pun intended) substance.

(Just as an aside, it was as if Clyburn had conveniently memory-holed Barack Obama’s performative “hope and change” candidacies, which were nothing if not style over substance.)

“After Donald Trump’s ascent, Biden believed that he just needed to show Americans that traditional democracy still worked—by listening to experts, working with Republicans, passing popular policies—and voters would rally around him,” Pager wrote, claiming with scant evidence that Biden “had succeeded in Phase One of his plan.”

When you begin with such a dubious—if not demonstrably false—premise, however, much of what follows is likely to be wrong as well.

“[P]hase Two never happened,” Pager wrote. “The truth of Biden’s presidency is that he failed in what was, by his own account, his most important mission: making Trump’s presidency seem like an aberration.”

Biden and Pager might regard Trump’s presidency as “an aberration,” but an American........

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