Joe Biden's Mussolini meltdown moment in Philadelphia, which was summed up to voters with the image below, left a lot of people on both sides of the political aisle scratching their heads.

After all, as the meme says, "If you're going to dedicate an entire speech to 'my opponents are Nazis' don't specifically go for this visual".  Just days earlier, Joe Biden had been denouncing Republicans as "semi-fascists." In the wake of the Philly speech, voters learned that apparently, it was the "semi" part that upset him. Why settle for "semi-fascist" when what he was offering was full-blown fascist?

It didn't help him any politically, and internal polls must have been horrific. Politico reported that the remarks had been three months in preparation, so they were hardly unintentional gaffes. Biden's desperate walkback of them the following morning exposed him for a clown, a boob, and a phony. They called to mind President Obama's admonition to "never underestimate Joe's ability to f*** things up."

Grotesquely enough, though, the Biden team still likes it. They still consider it a masterpiece of oratory. According to Politico:

But Biden’s team also rolled its eyes at the media coverage of his address, which fixated on the dramatic red backdrop and the pair of U.S. Marines positioned behind the president. They found the substantive criticisms unpersuasive, too.

“Standing up for democracy has only recently become a contrast issue and it’s a very sad commentary that it can be seen that way,” said one senior administration official. “The premise of the speech was that every American can unite around the principle of living in democracy and that it’s worth defending… That’s not a divisive issue 10 years ago.”

With that the case, American Thinker contributor Patricia McCarthy raised the important question that maybe the public ought to know who actually wrote those disgusting statements so that he can come out and take a bow.

A lot of names have been bruited about. But Poltico reports that the culprit was Jon Meacham, a famous presidential historian. He's the guy who wrote the Mussolini meltdown speech Joe made a fool of himself delivering.

According to Breitbart News, Meacham has quite a history of his own:

Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his 2009 biography on populist president Andrew Jackson, has given heavy praise to President Biden as well as the far-left Democrat agenda.

Meacham spoke glowingly of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill Biden signed into law last November, asserting it would do for Biden’s legacy what the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act did for President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s legacy.

“It will rank, I think, with what President Eisenhower was doing in the 1950s,” He told MSNBC’s The Beat. “The fact that we’re still talking about President Eisenhower and what happened with the Interstate Highway Bill, I think, proves the point.”

He has also asserted that the Founding Fathers wanted radical ideas like “critical race theory and ‘The 1619 Project‘” to be included in America’s political discourse.

Joe's been consulting a lot of historians lately, as Politico noted in its report. Historian after historian, searching, searching, for something. Meacham seems to be the one who's caught Biden's eye, owing to his capacity for flattery, which obviously, "F***-up Joe" doesn't think he gets enough of.

What we can discern from these two reports is that Biden is obsessed with history, with grandness, with defining who's great, and Meacham, based on his obsession with grandness, is, too. Meacham relishes his power as historian to presumably have the last word on these things. Joe is drawn to him like a moth to a flame.

Worse yet, the dynamic continues, as Meacham loves to flatter Biden as a grand man of history, and Joe believes every word of it.

Although comparing Biden to the Biblical Jesus is repulsive in every way, Meacham seems to serve the role of the devil tempting and promising his "Jesus" all the riches of the world if he'll just fall down and worship him. Unlike Jesus, though, Biden takes the bait.

And the result spoke for itself -- Biden ended up looking like Hitler, saying things he now says he doesn't believe, and running as far away from that speech as he can, even after all those months of preparation.

To take a perhaps better analogy, given that this is Joe Biden, he's kind of like the emperor with no clothes, susceptible to court flatterers and willing to go naked for them, which is something he always does anyway. It all works so well until it doesn't and a little kid calls him out.

Well, now Biden has to live with himself, revealed for all to see as a phony, while the "Mussolini" meme will become the defining historical image of his miserable presidency.

But it also reveals a lot about Biden's motivation. Despite his obvious unfitness for the job, given his dementia, and despite his obvious illegitimacy, given his electoral fraud, he wants to hear flattery. The gushing he wants to hear from his courtiers is not that he is Ordinary Scranton Joe, as his earlier spinners have put it, but that he is grand, that he is greater than his own history, that he is, somehow, a great man.

It's a vainglory unlike any other.

There's never been a greater disconnect than that vision Joe has of himself, and the miserable reality that defines him. His bad judgment about this is what's leading him to the crazed dictator images that he's presenting to the world now. He tops Jimmy Carter now in the reality that he's a small, bitter, pathetic, little man.  He's a clown now, a mouse whose ambitions were only to become a rat.

Image: Meme, via Power Line