We’re still stuck with Joe Biden as president for six months. He might have passed the political torch to VP Kamala Harris, but he still has control of the nuclear football. Or maybe Dr. Jill and Hunter do.
Either way, it’s a frightening message to send to the world: The US president is too cognitively impaired to run for re-election in November, but he’s staying on as commander-in-chief until January.

You can bet that leaving the president in place, despite the obvious peril to America, was part of the deal Biden struck to go quietly as Nancy Pelosi and the Obamacans ratcheted up the pain.

Last week, when the president was digging in his heels in Rehoboth Beach amid damaging leaks from his own side that only got his Irish up, one insider told me: “This is not a contest. This is the president’s decision …

“Publicly pressuring him when they have no alternative [candidate challenging him] instead of trying to work something out with the leader they want to retire is backfiring.”

Of course, “working something out” for his own benefit has always been the point with Biden, whether it’s his donors providing grace-and-favor jobs at inflated prices for his wayward son and other family members, or Chinese President Xi Jinping blessing Hunter’s lucrative business venture after he flew into Beijing with Dad on Air Force Two.

Staying in the White House until Jan. 20 gives Biden plenty of time to orchestrate pardons for Hunter and his brother Jim and whomever else in the family is in legal trouble. Regardless of what he claimed before Hunter’s felony gun conviction, the pardon was always coming. No way does the family trust Cackling Kamala to do the deed.

You can bet Air Force One and Camp David will be working overtime for as many dream holidays and bucket list wishes for as many extended family members as he can squeeze in. Perhaps another ancestral trip to Ireland, or to Rome for a last blessing from his favorite pope. It will be one long victory lap.

Six months is plenty of time to burnish Biden’s legacy with the help of the so-called historians who have been wearing a hole in the carpet of his office and the compliant media who have ignored his corruption and cognitive decline for four years.

Plenty of time to bask in the saccharine praise of his traitorous fellow Democrats.

It’s already rampant on MSNBC and X as sycophants trip over each other to wax lyrical about the greatest president who ever lived, a good and decent man, Honest Joe, who always put his country first.

“One of the most selfless things a president can do,” gushed MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “He put his ego aside.”

I guess that’s one way of describing saving your own skin when there’s a gun to your head.

You know that financial incentives must have been part of Biden’s exit package as well. After all, for over 50 years, he and his extended family have lived high on the teat of his power and influence in Washington. That all comes to a screeching halt next January unless he engineers a golden parachute.

For an insight into how it might work, there are few people more knowledgeable about the backroom deals of the Chicago political machine than Rod “Blago” Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor and Barack Obama intimate who was impeached and spent eight years in a federal prison on public corruption charges over a deal to sell the Senate seat Obama vacated when he became president.

“When you know the guy who’s the conductor of the orchestra — and that’s Obama, someone I have known since 1995 — it’s very easy for me to see his hands all over [the deal to remove Biden from the ticket],” says Blago, 67.

“It’s classic sneaky Chicago backroom politics. The leaking of dirt using third parties and a coordinated campaign that was planned and has been unfolding for the past few weeks. It’s clever and unless you’ve experienced it yourself, you may not see it. It’s just as obvious to me as the DNC working with the DOJ who is working with Biden and the Oval Office using the DOJ as a political weapon to use against Trump.”

He saw Obama’s solicitousness when Biden froze on stage during a Hollywood fundraiser last month as a signal to the party that it was time for the ailing Big Guy to go.

For a campaign that was supposed to run on “saving democracy,” we now see another election in which the Democratic bosses, not the American people, are choosing the nominee.

Obama and Nancy Pelosi, together with Hollywood elites, Wall Street financiers and Silicon Valley billionaires (except Elon Musk), decide just how much democracy we deserve.

Blago says Obama & Co. knew that Biden’s brain was kaput in 2020 when they selected him as the candidate to kill off Bernie Sanders’ populist momentum.

“They were able to hide him in the basement [during the 2020 campaign] because of the unique situation with COVID. What surprised me is they got away with it for so long because the media protected them.”

After Biden’s disastrous debate against Donald Trump last month, in which he was barely coherent, “the truth was able to put its pants on and what Obama and the Democratic bosses knew along, that he was not fit to be the candidate and therefore the president, got too obvious. So from the back room like an old-fashioned Chicago political boss, Obama organizes an effort to push Biden aside. It shows how the Democratic elites have complete contempt for the American voter.”

As for what Biden extracted from his capitulation, Blago suggests a deifying presidential library along the lines of the one Obama’s donors have funded for him on the shores of Lake Michigan at Hyde Park in Chicago, which Blago drives past every day.

Board seats with fat salaries for family members could be in the cards. Donors will provide, one way or another, says Blago, who adds this warning: “Obama sent an emissary to make a political deal with me and I ended up in jail for eight years.”

Whatever goodies the Bidens end up with, the next six months will be a grift fest to behold, with Dr. Jill kicking off proceedings. She jets off to Paris for the Olympics this week.

Grifters gotta grift!