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You could almost feel sorry for Joe Biden when he crashed his wife Jill’s debut book talk in New York last week.

Standing in the shadows at the 92nd Street Y, and with no microphone in sight, the former president looked lost as he rasped at his wife: “Who do you love most in the whole world?”

Up on stage, resplendent in a pastel skirt suit in her starring role alongside Whoopi Goldberg, Jill responds, “Whoopi,” laughs and turns on her stiletto heel.

Maybe it was a comedy routine the former first couple had practiced, but it fell flat. There wasn’t much laughter from the audience.

Who humiliates her 83-year-old husband in public to try to boost lackluster book sales?

“Dr.” Jill Biden, that’s who: a 76-year-old egotist who, in her delusional attempts to rewrite history, claims that she thought Joe was having a “stroke” when he malfunctioned and started babbling more unintelligibly than usual during his first and final debate against Donald Trump almost exactly two years ago.

“Joe said something nonsensical about beating Medicare. Is he short-circuiting? I thought. Is this a stroke?” she wrote in her book, “View from the East Wing: A Memoir,” which was released Tuesday and was languishing at No. 42 on Amazon as of Sunday.

“It felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching. Has he been drugged? Oh God — will people watching assume that this is how he is all the time?”

Yep, that’s exactly what we assumed, since we had been watching Joe glitch for more than four years, despite the best efforts of his “American Politburo” of minders, led by the ambitious Jill, to conceal her husband’s frailties.

How could we miss the baby stairs for Air Force One to try to avoid yet another presidential pratfall; the phalanx of staff surrounding him to hide his disintegrating gait as he shuffled across the tarmac; the Roomba-like wandering; the slack-jawed, vacant stares; the infrequent public appearances, apart from the odd set speech when he was hopped up to the pupil-dilated eyeballs and angrily shouting or whispering; the gigantic teleprompters, the gaslighting and the lies? None of it fooled anyone with eyes to see.

But Jill is still trying to maintain the fiction that there was nothing wrong, that the debate performance that blew away the emperor’s clothes was a one-off, that she had never seen her husband in such a state before or since.

Hard to believe

“To this day, I still don’t know what happened,” she writes. “Why wasn’t he making any sense? It was inexplicable to me … I wish I’d thought of asking for a blood test, just so we’d know what was in his system.”

President Trump believes Joe just “choked” under pressure and doesn’t believe Jill’s version of events: “Why would she bring him to a Waffle House if he had a stroke?”

Good question.

After that debate, even though she suspected her husband had suffered a life-threatening health event, and even though he was still zoned out, Jill dragged old Joe over to the anchor desk to schmooze with the startled moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

Then, instead of taking him to the hospital or home to sleep, at 11 p.m., Jill whisked Joe off to a watch party at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta, where she took to the stage and patronized him in a sing-song voice as if he were a toddler on the potty: “Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question. You knew all the facts!”

Then she hauled him off to a Waffle House for a pretend late-night to-go order where he looked like death warmed over, as his staff tried to tell reporters he just had a “cold.”

Yet still she didn’t let him rest, marching him off to the airport to fly to Raleigh, North Carolina, for another campaign stop with supporters (and a band) on the tarmac at 2 a.m.

Strange way to treat a husband whose brain misfired so badly in public that you thought he was having a stroke.

No more Dem cover

But that’s just the way it is with the Bidens. They have their tall tales, and they stick to them.

The difference is now Joe has no power, and Democrats are done covering for the Bidens.

They’re fed up with the selfishness, the grift, the secrets and lies. Republicans and independents were fed up long ago.

Polls show Joe to be the least popular of any former Democratic president, with a net approval rating of minus-19 points, according to CNN pollster Harry Enten, and Jill is by far the most unpopular Democratic first lady, 41 points behind Michelle Obama.

“The American people have one message for the Bidens: Go away, “ says Enten. Joe is “an anchor to the Democratic Party and potentially their fortunes in the 2026 midterm elections.”

Obama podcast bros and assorted Democratic strategists vented their rage all week at Jill and the “selfishness” of the Bidens, who have reopened old wounds at a time when the party is trying to move on from 2024 and win the midterms.

But Joe is still wily as a fox on his good days, and he has one last trump card. That’s why pity was the wrong emotion when you watched his awkward hijacking of his wife’s event last week.

“My book, which comes out in September — read it,” Joe said pointedly after he delivered the corny love line.

Democratic clean-up merchants rushed out to declare he was wrong, that no publication date has been set, and surely he wouldn’t inflict a score-settling memoir on them on the eve of the midterms. Hah!

Joe’s boast was a threat: You keep beating up on my wife, and I’ll haunt the weeks before the midterms to remind everyone why they voted for Trump.

And then there’s Hunter. The former crackhead first son has posted incendiary tweets around 500 times since his dramatic return to X last week, along with assorted long podcast interviews with gullible hosts.

The Bidens are the wrecking ball that Democrats can’t escape.

Serves them right.

Time’s up for fraud

And the award for the Most Self-Aggrandizing, Phony Performance by a TV Journalist goes to … Scott Pelley.

The fired “60 Minutes” legend-in-his-own-mind appeared in a long weekend interview with the New York Times, oozing faux gravitas and with tears welling in his red eyes as he cast himself as a chivalrous defender of his CBS “family,” who, he claims, have been “murdered” by CBS News boss Bari Weiss.

It was a master class in pompous self-importance. His greatest upset came toward the end, when he was asked about President Trump’s caustic comments about him in my “Pod Force One” podcast last week.

Trump said Pelley is a “stiff [who is] part of this gang of crooked, stupid people that don’t care about our country.”

That made Pelley mad. Fighting fake tears, he claimed: “I’ve been in combat for this country, in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kuwait. I’ve been shot at … I’m not aware that the president of the United States has ever done any of those things for his country.”

Umm … Donald Trump has been targeted for assassination three times, including when a bullet narrowly missed killing him in Butler, Pa., and only nicked him in the ear because he turned his head just in time.

Pelley has been a left-wing hack posing as an impartial journalist as long as anyone can remember. He has never been “in combat.” What a fraud.

Like countless other journalists, I also have been to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan on assignment, and never in a million years would I pretend that was “combat.” Talk about stolen valor. How embarrassing. CBS was smart to get rid of him.