Hard-left podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen interviewed Biden. The topics were what would expect—Biden’s race- and sex-based Supreme Court nominee, claims that Trump and other Republicans support Putin, boasts about his strategic genius, etc.—but the real surprise was Biden’s claim that COVID has made Americans so psychologically unstable they can’t understand that the Biden economy is wonderful.

Here’s what Americans know: They are facing hard times. The economy is creeping back, but it’s nowhere near what it was under Trump before COVID. In 2019, unemployment was 3.6%. It went up to 6.7% in 2020. It’s now 4%, still short of the pre-COVID rate.

That 4% doesn’t even include the millions of people who dropped out of the workforce. CBS blames long COVID but it’s a good bet stimulus checks have also depressed the workforce. If people are paid not to work, they won’t work. When government money finally ends, they might come back.

Inflation is a problem, too. While wages have increased, those increases haven’t kept pace inflation’s 40 year high. A 3.5% raise is meaningless if life’s necessities (food, shelter, energy costs) increase in price by 7% or more.

Reagan rightly said of inflation that it’s “as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hitman.” People don’t care whether the inflation is because of the supply chain problem or because Biden’s green energy (or, really, green lack-of-energy) policies have dramatically bumped up the price of fuel. What matters is that their money is losing value daily.

People also feel despair because it’s frightening to live in the shadow of a potential third world war. They worry that an increasingly desperate, angry Putin, rather than retreating from Ukraine may, instead, go on the attack against Sweden and Finland. They also understand that other tyrants are watching. China, Iran, and North Korea (which just launched a ballistic missile) are gaining courage because they recognize that Biden is weak.

Image: Joe Biden. YouTube screen grab.

This is why 62% of Americans say Putin would never have attacked Ukraine if Trump were still in the White House. Perhaps they remember Trump’s 2019 threat to Erdogan. In a jovial letter, Trump said work with me for a good deal or I’ll destroy Turkey’s economy. The media sneered, but Erodgan retreated. Biden, however, invited Putin to engage in a “minor incursion.” Putin took that invitation and ran with it.

Things really are bad and Americans know it. Biden’s theory, though, is that everything is great. The problem, he says, is that Americans have become delusional thanks to COVID stress.

COHEN: Speaking of that, looking back inward at home, you know we're in this rare sliver of time where Democrats have unified control of government in the House, the Senate, and the White House, and yet our agenda has been moving slower than we would have liked. What’s your message to Democrats who say that our elected officials can't deliver and so what's the point of showing up to vote?

BIDEN: Well, two things. One, I think the biggest impact on the psychology of the country has been COVID. Almost a million Americans have died of COVID and I think it’s hard for people to get their arms around the fact that we have the fastest growing economy in 40 years. Wages are actually up, not down, unemployment is the lowest it’s been in under, under, you know it’s just incredibly low, and it’s around in the three-point range.

We find ourselves in a position where it’s hard to fully appreciate that when you wake up in the morning and wondering whether or not your uncle, aunt, mother, father, son, daughter who has COVID are going to be okay.

And as Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General points out, I think one of the significant things we’re going to find 10 years from now is a phenomenal negative psychological impact that COVID has had on the public psyche. And so you have an awful lot of people who are, notwithstanding the fact that things have gotten so much better for them economically, that they are thinking ‘But how do you get up in the morning feeling happy that everything’s all right’ even though your job is better, even though you have more income, even though...and then on top of that, because of COVID....

The interview goes downhill from there, if you want to listen to him babble about tiny little computer chips and how he’s “ordered millions of pills, over 20 million pills that fires [sic] have come up with even you [sic] haven’t had a vaccination and you get COVID, you take the pill you’re not going to go to the hospital, and shots in arms and the ability to have boosters....”

What we see is a man clinging to minimal coherence, denying the truth, having strange fantasies about the world he’s created for Americans, and insulting Americans’ perfect understanding of reality.

There are rumors going around that Putin is mentally ill. With that in mind, a friend emailed me to say that there can be few things scarier than having the leaders of the world’s two nuclear countries both be mentally impaired.