If you believe the polls, Joe Biden is less than three months away from being elected president of the United States in a historic landslide. Biden enjoys a massive lead over President Trump, according to our media elite, despite the fact that the Democrat has spent the past several months locked in his Delaware basement, babbling incoherently every time he appears on camera. His most recent major gaffe — insulting African Americans as not being “an incredibly diverse community” like Latinos — was merely another tiny pebble piled atop the massive mountain of evidence that Biden is in an advanced stage of senile dementia.

However much Trump is hated by Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself), Biden’s supporters cannot be confident that a majority of Americans will vote to elect as Commander-in-Chief an addled geriatric so obviously suffering from diminished mental capacity. And so no matter how rosy the poll numbers may be — as of Monday afternoon, Biden led by nearly seven points in the Real Clear Politics average of national polls — the media are engaged in a rather frantic effort to conceal the feeble-minded condition of “Landslide Joe.” If Biden’s basement campaign succeeds, it will be in no small measure due to the deliberate deception perpetrated on his behalf by the national press corps.

Among the basic tricks involved in the journalistic project of concealing Biden’s increasing incoherence are (a) simply ignoring his blunders, and (b) quoting statements issued by his campaign staff as if the candidate himself had actually said whatever words are attributed to him. Consider what happened last week after Biden bungled badly during a live online interview with black and Hispanic journalists. In addition to his gaffe about black Americans’ lack of diversity, Biden also seemed to accuse a black reporter — Errol Barnett of CBS News — of being a drug addict:

Barnett: Mr. Vice President, your opponent in this election, President Trump, has made your mental state a campaign topic. And when asked in June, if you’d been tested for cognitive decline, you’ve responded that you’re constantly tested in effect because you’re in situations like this on the campaign trail. But please clarify specifically, have you taken a cognitive test?

Biden: No, I haven’t taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test? Come on, man. That’s like saying, “Before you got in this program, if you take a test where you’re taking cocaine or not. What do you think? Huh? Are you a junkie?”

Grant that this was a hypothetical analogy, but does Biden think suspicion of narcotics use is just a figure of speech that can be flung carelessly in the direction of African-Americans? No one in the press corps seemed to object to this, however. After all, the whole point of Barnett’s question was to set up an easy teeball-league home-run for Landslide Joe, essentially asking, “Your opponent says you’re losing your marbles. Will you please refute this accusation?” Even in answering such an easy question, Biden provided further evidence that Trump is right, but journalists just pretended they didn’t see it happen.

However, not even the most pliant liberal sycophants in the media could ignore the insulting implications of Biden’s claim that black Americans lacked the “incredibly diverse” quality he attributed to the Latino community. Trump called attention to the remark in an impromptu press conference, then used his Twitter account to highlight Biden’s blunder. (“Wow! Joe Biden just lost the entire African American community. What a ‘dumb’ thing to say!”) This prompted a scramble by Team Biden, which used their candidate’s Twitter account to “clarify” his meaning. The media then quoted this clarification as if they were quoting Biden himself, despite the obvious fact that Landslide Joe can’t even speak coherent sentences, much less type them into a cell phone.

Whether or not such tricks can be carried on successfully all the way to Election Day is a question Biden’s media cheerleaders don’t want to address. For example, if you’re watching CNN, you’ve seen near-zero coverage of Biden’s decline into senility. What counts as “news” at CNN lately is keeping up the coronavirus panic, reiterating on an hourly basis that (a) no one is safe from this deadly pandemic and therefore (b) children should not be returning to school this fall, and also (c) this is all Trump’s fault. This round-the-clock COVID-19 scare campaign is only occasionally interrupted by reports of the latest poll numbers — Landslide Joe is leading Trump! — and by speculation as to who will be chosen as Biden’s vice-presidential running mate, with the announcement expected this week.

Biden has promised to pick a female running mate, and, because of a perceived need to pander to the Black Lives Matter movement, much speculation has focused on California Sen. Kamala Harris (the No. 1 contender according to CNN’s Chris Cillizza). However, my own hunch is that Biden will pick Susan Rice, who served as National Security Adviser in the Obama administration, simply because Rice is viewed as a reliable ally of the Clintons, who are eager to revive their pay-for-play operation at the Clinton Foundation. Not to get too “inside baseball” here, but recall that it was longtime Clinton operative James Carville who led the crusade to thwart Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, warning of “the end of days” to rally support for Biden’s nomination. If Team Clinton has any influence on Biden’s VP choice, obviously their preferred candidate would be Rice, who loyally helped defend Hillary by spinning the 2012 Benghazi attack as inspired by a YouTube video, and who also played a key part in the “Russian collusion” smear against Trump (see The American Spectator articles “It Was Obama All Along,” by Jed Babbin, and “Is Rice Fried?” by Jeffrey Lord).

This kind of “veepstakes” speculation is a quadrennial favorite game of the Beltway pundit class that almost no one else cares about. However, Biden’s advanced age and feeble-minded condition makes his choice of a running mate quite a high-stakes game. Biden will turn 78 years old not long after Election Day, and, even if he were able to complete a four-year term in the White House, no one could possibly expect him to serve eight years, leaving office in 2029 at age 86. If Biden were elected, his VP would immediately become the de facto leader of the administration, with Biden hanging around as a figurehead until 2024, when Rice (or whoever) could then be elected president in her own right.

What Democrats are doing, you see, is a bait-and-switch — vote for Biden, and you thereby elect his running mate as the real president. With the consent of feminists still enraged by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat, this use of Biden as a sort of Trojan Horse to smuggle the First Female President into office is being done more or less openly. That is to say, everybody can see what’s happening, even if nobody in the major media is willing to describe this bait-and-switch trick explicitly. All the Democrat-friendly media have to do, in order to pull this trick off, is to conceal the sad reality of Landslide Joe’s mental condition for a few more weeks — 12 weeks, to be exact. Just keep the protective bubble around Biden until November 3, and then it won’t matter that he is non compos mentis.

Americans are not watching a normal presidential campaign. Instead, we are the audience for a made-by-media performance that might be titled Hidin’ Biden. Whether this is a comedy or a tragedy depends on whether they actually get away with it. If somehow it turns out that the polls are all wrong, and Trump gets reelected, we can laugh at the farcical attempt of the media to foist the Biden presidency on the electorate. On the other hand, maybe the electorate really is stupid enough to fall for this transparent scam, in which case the media will have the last laugh — a triumph for Landslide Joe, and a tragedy for America.