Now that President Joe Biden has finally bent to the will of his party’s leaders and donors, the praise for his presidency is nearly universal on the left. The paeans to his personal greatness and acclaim for his time in the White House accelerated once his infirmity became clear in the June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump.

Liberal corporate media spent years covering up the president’s cognitive decline, including accusing any journalists who brought up the subject of spreading “misinformation.”

But once the lies were exposed, those who were mostly likely to know the truth about Biden—like former President Barack Obama, Vice President Kamala Harris, congressional leaders and Hollywood fundraisers such as actor George Clooney—turned on him, albeit while still improbably praising him as one of our greatest presidents. Like Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, they “came to bury” Biden, but thought to praise him first.

Trump’s iconic defiance after a failed assassination attempt, a Covid diagnosis and the closed purses of big Democratic donors were the final blows that appear to have forced Biden to drop out, thus rendering the process by which he had gained the nomination a sham. That Biden announced his withdrawal via a social-media post—and on Elon Musk’s X, which liberals have denounced for its free-speech policies, at that—rather than bothering to record a message telling the country himself, was perhaps a fittingly feeble end to this dispiriting drama.

This will now be followed by the extravagant and equally disingenuous choruses of praise for Harris, as she now likely becomes the focus of the Democrats’ last-ditch efforts to prevent a Trump victory. But before we begin the task of separating truth from partisan hyperbole with respect to the vice president, it is appropriate to take a moment to unpack the notion that the Biden presidency was as great as those slipping the knife between his shoulders have been telling us.