OPINION:
First lady Jill Biden — that’s “doctor” to you! — has been widely portrayed in recent weeks as some kind of scheming Lady Macbeth, propping up her husband and concealing his mental deterioration in a desperate bid to cling to power for herself and her family.
Sure, she loves the fast cars, spotlights and photo shoots.
Twice she has found herself gracing the cover of Vogue magazine, posing for glam shots and talking about her favorite expensive dresses.
Her first cover shoot, during the Bidens’ first summer in the White House, she was heralded as “A First Lady for All of Us.”
By last week, after President Biden’s catastrophic debate performance on June 27, Mrs. Biden’s tone had shifted from a woman of the people to something more like: “Go pound sand, America — especially you stupid Democratic voters.”
The title of last week’s Vogue cover was an actual quote from the first lady. “We will decide our future,” she sniffed.
You know, democracy.
It went downhill from there.
The first line of the story introduced the former “first lady for all of us” thusly: “If you want to know what power feels like, try to get yourself driven around in a motorcade. Flashing police chaperone lights form a perimeter as you blaze down an empty highway, waiting cars backed up on entry ramps as you pass.
“It’s as if the world is holding its breath. For you.”
Indeed, power corrupts — especially if you were already corrupt.
But Mrs. Biden is concerned with more than just power, motorcades and magazine covers. She is frantically afraid of running out of money.
The Bidens have famously used their 50-year political career to amass inexplicable wealth that most Americans could not imagine, especially for a couple who have spent a lifetime on government salaries. Selling access to power around the globe can be moderately lucrative — estimated to be somewhere in the single-digit millions range.
But the Biden cash haul is nothing like the kind of money that, say, the Clintons or the Obamas made off their presidencies. The Clinton Foundation, for instance, has raised billions from Democratic donors, corporations and foreign governments since Bill Clinton left office in 2001, certainly aided by the expectation that Hillary Clinton would someday be president.
The Obamas converted their presidency into a personal fortune in the tens of millions, with estimates of more than $100 million. Not bad for a community organizer.
The Bidens face a very different financial future. Netflix is not paying them tens of millions for their over-chewed, elaborated story. Mr. Biden is not hitting the speaking circuit, except maybe as a patient in medical trials for a neurological clinical study. And without Mr. Biden in public office, their children have zero prospects — unless they want to get into selling drugs as opposed to buying them.
In short, the Bidens have already sold all the access, power and promise they ever had. They ran their political racket on future credit — perhaps a technique they learned from the Delaware credit card companies Mr. Biden has always shilled for in office.
One thing you can bet on is that right now as you read this column, the wealthiest, most powerful and most connected donors in the Democratic Party are conspiring in the shadows to put together a political golden parachute to bribe the Bidens out of office. This would not be the first such attempt.
Michael Lewis’ marvelous 2023 book, “Going Infinite,” revealed that top Democratic donor and bitcoin fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried attempted to pay Donald Trump $5 billion not to run for president again. And in 2020, Facebook founder and major Democratic donor Mark Zuckerberg quietly spent $400 million of his own money in a single election cycle for the party’s get-out-the-vote efforts.
Money is no obstacle for these people. Neither is democracy.
The only question for big Democratic heavies right now is if they pay off the Bidens to leave and replace him with someone else, will they lose anyway?
And the only question for the Bidens is: Have they already cashed in on their last grift?
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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