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By Miranda Devine

As if his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and refusal ever to acknowledge responsibility weren’t bad enough, now we learn that Joe Biden forced grieving military families to wait for hours on the tarmacof Dover Air Force Base while he took a nap on Air Force One.

We already knew that he had continually checked his watch and talked about himself when he met the relatives of 13 military members killed by a suicide bomber during the chaotic evacuation from Kabul in August 2021.

But this new report adds an extra layer of callousness to the story.

Biden has long been renowned for being late for everything, well before the onset of his cognitive decline. World leaders at the G20 summit last month finally tired of waiting and took their group photo without him.

If anything said “lame duck,” it was their contemptuous disregard for the so-called leader of the free world.

But Biden, 82, has been a lame duck his entire presidency. The thoughtless three-hour delay of the dignified transfer ceremony at Dover is simply emblematic of his reign.

Now that he is no longer powerful, his bumbling, stumbling, mumbling senility is suddenly newsworthy. No matter that this newspaper consistently charted his decline in real time, only to be accused by the White House of ageism and “cheap fakes,” now we are supposed to be shocked by the “bombshell” that the White House was hiding his problems.

The worst scandal in White House history is the worst held secret in Washington.

Left his Cabinet to rot

Biden held just nine Cabinet meetings in four years, compared to Trump’s 25, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. White House aides secretly rescheduled national security briefings if Biden was having a “bad day.”

He’s barely met with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin the past two years, at a time when the wars in Ukraine and Gaza blew up, and the military has suffered a series of embarrassing setbacks, from Afghanistan to the ill-fated Gaza pier and the friendly-fire shoot-down of a US Navy fighter jet in the Red Sea.

On recent trips to Africa and South America, Biden spoke a grand total of 15 words to the press pool following him.

He has been a president in name only (PINO) since the day he was inaugurated.

The Constitution has an in-built mechanism to deal with such a threat, the 25th Amendment.

But the problem is that it needs people of good character to activate it. The mendacious minders around Biden, including his ambitious wife, were having too much fun abusing the powers of his presidency.

They justified their malfeasance by giving the president free rein on his “good days.” Considering Biden in his prime was an incompetent blowhard, dire consequences for America and the world were inevitable.

Yes, the media and the Democrats were complicit in hiding Biden’s obvious cognitive decline. But we mustn’t allow this latest approved narrative to be the mechanism that lets him off the hook.

He was in no shape to run for president in 2020 but vanity, delusional self-belief, and an avaricious family propelled him to center stage, and a corrupt party rigged a basement campaign to make him president.

He was clearly addled on the campaign trail in January 2020 in Iowa and New Hampshire, perpetually late and having to read his stump speeches from a teleprompter.

But he had enough “good days” to know what he was doing when he walked into the Oval Office and issued the orders to unwind Trump-era border protections, abandon Bagram Air Base, defy the Supreme Court, propel inflation, weaken the military, project weakness to our adversaries, pressure the DOJ to protect his wayward son, and use lawfare to come after his political opponents, all while making divisive speeches attacking half the country.

That was pure Biden. The same guy who played an integral role in his family’s influence-peddling operation as vice president was also compos enough to stick one in the eye to coup plotters Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama in July when he anointed unelectable Kamala Harris as his replacement. Now, in the same spirit of spite and malevolence, he and his wife give Harris the cold shoulder at public engagements.

Legacy of a loser

The electorate was cheated of the opportunity to reject Biden at the ballot box when he was swapped out at the last minute for his hapless VP. But her defeat was his defeat.

There is a growing mood to hold Harris and the rest of Biden’s minders to account for the failures of his presidency. Quite how that can be achieved is never articulated. But he can’t hide behind his infirmity. He deserves most of the blame.

In an interview last week with the leftist Meidas Touch, Biden responded with as much delusion as ever when asked how he wanted to be remembered: “I kept my word — that when I said I was going to do something, I did it.”

Don’t fall for Tammany Joe’s last con.