Joe Biden making a cynical power play aimed at keeping son Hunter out of prison, him in the White House (2024)

Give the devil his due.

Joe Biden has boasted that he knows how to use power, and recent days have featured a president skillfully manipulating the unique might of the Oval Office to protect his family and advance his own re-election chances.

None of his maneuvers, including the pretend border crackdown, will make America safer or better or more united, but those are not Biden’s goals.

He’s making a cynical power play aimed at keeping his son out of prison and keeping himself in the White House.

The sequence began last Thursday with the conviction of Donald Trump in the New York case.

It was a travesty of justice, a tangled web spun out of odds and ends that should never have seen a courthouse.

But against all decency, New York Democrats pushed the slimy blob over the finish line.

Their success gave most Americans another reason to mistrust government and law enforcement.

‘Convicted felon’ quest

Biden doesn’t care about that because he got what he wanted — the ability to call his opponent a convicted felon, a term he promptly used at a gathering of donors.

For Democrats, red meat doesn’t get any redder than being able to call Trump a felon.

It’s been their Holy Grail since 2016 and from now until November, it will be the favorite word of their keyboard warriors.

Here’s a random example that came in over the transom.

A fundraising pitch from an Arizona Dem House candidate named Andrei Cherny begins this way:

“The number of convicted felons in AZ-01 will be increasing by one this Thursday. That’s right: Donald Trump is coming to campaign at a rally only four miles from our campaign HQ.”

For Biden, the verdict started a weekend that featured two other power moves.

The first was making a show of taking his son Hunter with him on Air Force One to Delaware.

Hunter’s illegal gun trial was to begin there Monday, so the president used the photo ops to make sure the world — and potential jurors — saw his loyalty.

This was a Mafia-like message: Screw with my son and you screw with me.

Never mind that the president is no fan of the Second Amendment and has no known sympathy for other junkie gun owners.

This is personal.

The family’s weekend bike ride underscored the point, as did the courthouse attendance of Jill Biden and other family members at the first two days of the trial.

The first lady might as well have been wearing a sign saying “Jurors, Beware.”

Neither the president nor anyone else was quoted as talking about Hunter.

They didn’t have to.

The pictures said it all.

Too little at the border

The border action Biden announced Tuesday rounded out the power trifecta.

In an age of extraordinary cynicism, it’s hard to top his claim that he has seen the light and is imposing tighter restrictions on new arrivals.

Count it as another Rip Van Winkle moment, with Biden waking up after three and a half years of sleeping on the job.

But even that gives the president far too much credit.

The executive order is full of loopholes and falls so far short of what is needed that it can fairly be called a scam.

It would still allow as many 1.8 million or so illegal crossers into America each year, thus worsening the problem he created in the first place.

And it does next to nothing to deal with the 10 million or so illegal crossers who came here since he took office.

These are staggering numbers that rival the great immigrant flows that dot American history.

For example, about 10 million immigrants arrived in the late 19th century — over a 30-year period.

And America was a far less populated nation then, and requirements for entry were strictly enforced.

But as the current invasion of the unvetted continues, the list of crimes attributed to those who took advantage of Biden’s open border continues to grow.

It now includes the shootings of two New York City police officers.

Suspect Bernardo Castro Mata, a 19-year-old Venezuelan, entered the US illegally last year and has been living in a city hotel room at taxpayer expense.

He’s charged with shooting Officer Richard Yarusso, 26, in his bulletproof vest and Officer Christopher Abreu, 26, in the leg as the cops wrestled to get his illegal handgun away, The Post reports.

The officers, working on a spate of Queens robberies involving criminals on mopeds, reportedly spotted Mata driving a black scooter with no plates the wrong way down a street at about 1:40 a.m.

He shot them in a scuffle and suffered a shooting wound himself.

Biden doesn’t seem to care about crime or wounded cops, but political gurus had told him voters prefer Trump’s border policies, so he finally had to do something.

Or at least pretend to do something.

Which is what he did.

Again, the White House and the campaign were clever in timing and rollout.

Eyes on November

Numerous media reports about the planned order started over the weekend and made for a good contrast in the aftermath of the Trump verdict.

Here was the president being president while his opponent was being threatened with jail.

Incumbency has its advantages.

All that is Politics 101, but it’s not entirely clear why Biden is only pretending to stem the invasion when he could actually slam on the brakes.

The best possible explanation is that he wants to appear to be doing something without sharply changing the status quo.

Look at it this way: The great clamor for tighter restrictions and even mass deportations is not coming from Democrats. Most of it comes from Trump supporters.

Take New York as an example of blue state mentality: The hundreds of thousands of migrants who came to the sanctuary city are hugely expensive and creating all kinds of problems, including crime and disorder.

Yet neither Mayor Eric Adams nor Gov. Kathy Hochul asked Biden to close the border.

They are loyal Dems who want more federal money and faster work permits, but they are not otherwise opposed to the existing policy.

The same can be said for California, New Jersey and a host of other blue states.

The border issue, then, is primarily a political issue for Republicans and a big chunk of independent voters.

Thus, it’s likely Biden’s less-than-halfway measure is designed to placate some of the swing voters angry at the situation without upsetting the left-wing activists who favor open borders.

Whether he can have it both ways remains to be seen.

But for now, it’s clear he and the party believe the Trump conviction opens new possibilities for November.

One sure sign of confidence is that the talk of replacing Biden on the ticket has stopped.

That suggests Dems believe they can squeak out an Electoral College victory without making any major changes.

It’s still early, but the alarming part is that they could be right.