It was a little pathetic to watch Joe Biden on stage last night mumble so incoherently that nobody could doubt he’s simply a figurehead for leader of the free world. It raises the thought: While he’s been presented as president for three and a half years, who has really been executing the powers and duties of the office?

While Donald Trump’s performance showed him in full command of his will and voice, his own four years in office also pointed in a similar direction. It wasn’t because he was merely a prop for president, like Joe Biden. It was because Trump’s insistence that he energetically carry out the mandate voters gave him conflicted very visibly with the belief among many in the federal government that, at this point, all presidents are props — even the ones who have full command of their faculties.

Montana radio host Aaron Flint pointed out that replacing Biden with another Democrat will still leave in power the people currently using him like a presidential skin suit. That’s also true, to a large extent, of replacing Biden with Trump.

Now, there is indeed a serious difference between a president with dementia and a president without. Certainly nobody could use Trump like a skin suit. Even staff, pollsters, and advisers can’t micromanage him like they micromanage many politicians. However, because we’ve already had the benefit of a Trump presidency, we can see that even a president as vigorous and defiant as he struggled to truly exercise authority over the people and institutions that, constitutionally speaking, the president commands.

Some of the most egregious examples of this occurred among cabinet-level national security types. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman under Trump Gen. Mark Milley was one of the worst offenders. Washington Post and New York Times reporters say, according to excerpts from Haley McLean, that Milley deliberately stayed in his position to sabotage voters’ elected commander-in-chief, saying to staffers of Trump, “I’ll just fight him” and “I will fight from the inside.”

Washington Post reporters say Milley led an internal military leadership effort to prevent Trump from quelling the George Floyd race riots in 2020: “Milley began informally planning with other military leaders, strategizing how they would block Trump’s order to use the military in a way they deemed dangerous or illegal.” Milley also disobeyed Trump’s order to pull U.S. troops from Afghanistan, setting the stage for the disastrous Afghanistan pullout Milley oversaw under Biden that seriously damaged U.S. foreign policy goals, killed 13 U.S. soldiers, and left stranded thousands of American citizens.

Milley also called up counterparts in Communist China to let them know he’d spy for them, offering to secretly let them know in advance if the United States were to attack this foreign adversary. Milley of course also supports demoralizing U.S. troops by teaching them the racist Democrat doctrine that white people are inherently racist oppressors.

Milley didn’t do all this alone. He worked with “Democrats close to Biden” such as Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice, a key instigator of the Spygate hoax that weaponized U.S. intelligence agencies to frame Trump as a Russia-favoring traitor. He also worked to sabotage Trump with Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer. This apparent conspiracy seems to have led to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot escalating into a situation allowing Democrats to cast even nonviolent opponents as domestic terrorists worthy of a three-year nationwide dragnet and harsh federal overprosecution.

Milley is just one prominent example of many instances of U.S. national security personnel and other bureaucrats believing that they are truly in charge of the executive branch, not the elected president. Don’t forget “The Resistance,” that cross-agency conspiracy of federal employees who promised to subvert Trump’s policies inside his own agencies at every turn.

The massive Spygate election-interference operation has already been mentioned — that involved multiple FBI, CIA, and other national security bureaucrats, including federal secret-court judges. They fabricated and altered evidence and laundered it through the U.S. national security apparatus and had splendid success at essentially overturning election results and making it extraordinarily difficult for Trump to govern. National Intelligence Director James Clapper helped fuel that machine while running federal spy agencies.

Then of course there was Trump’s Ukraine impeachment, which was entirely predicated on the idea that an unelected bureaucrat’s opinion of foreign policy should trump the foreign policy choices of the elected president.

Most recently, we’ve learned that not just former but then-current CIA contractors helped launder and sell the Hunter Biden laptop lie that interfered on behalf of Democrats in the 2020 election. That little operation also involved the bureaucracy’s successful use of their secret pressure machine on Big Tech to censor online anyone who disagrees with Democrats.

The U.S. military is perhaps the institution most directly under the president’s command, and several of its leaders engaged in directly insubordinate and therefore insurrectionary behavior against the elected commander-in-chief. In other countries, a successful military rebellion against elected civilian leadership is called a coup.

In my new book, I point out that scholars such as Christopher Caldwell have shown that for more than a century the United States has been living under “two Constitutions.” One is the original Constitution that secures consent of the governed, rule of law, and government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The second Constitution, or regime, is that of the “living Constitution,” which I explain is essentially totalitarian because it recognizes no limits on its powers.

That second regime now has the upper hand, and it is run by this cabal of unelected bureaucrats who believe they have the right to saddle, ride, and spur Americans and bend us to their will. They don’t care what we vote for. We’re getting what they want regardless of how we vote. That goes for Congress, too, whom the deep state also treats like window dressing and who usually lives up to that cynical expectation.

So yes, the deep state is shamefully using Biden as their puppet president. But they believe they have the right to ignore the Constitution and voters even when the president isn’t a walking cadaver. For people who know that when the Democrat press starts shouting something it’s proof the opposite is true, this puts a pretty dark cast on all the Democrat shrieks about “democracy.”