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Was Joe Biden Even a Real President? Amerigo’s Least Qualified Reporters Investigate
Four years, one Corvette, an alarming amount of ice cream and not a single pair of eyes we could verify. We followed the aviators wherever they led. It began, as all great investigations do, with a guy at a party. “Name one thing Biden did,” he said, holding a hard seltzer with total confidence. The room went quiet. Someone said “infrastructure.” Someone else said “the bridge thing?” Nobody could name the bridge. And so, armed with a corkboard, a spool of red string and a deadline we had already missed, Amerigo set out to answer the question no serious publication would touch: Was Joe Biden ever actually president? Exhibit A: The aviators Consider the sunglasses. In photo after photo, the man wears the same pair of aviators, tilted at the same jaunty angle. Have you ever seen his eyes? Really seen them? You have not. You have seen the reflection of a helicopter. Our photo desk ran several images through enhancement software. After a great deal of whirring, it produced a slightly sharper helicopter. Exhibit B: The ice cream By our count, which we did not technically do, the 46th president was photographed holding an ice cream cone in front of roughly every ice cream shop in the continental United States. A man cannot eat that much chocolate chip and also run a country. Either he was not running the country or he was not eating the ice cream. Our team believes it may have been neither. Exhibit C: The paperwork Critics have spent years arguing about the autopen, the machine that reproduces a signature. Our team took this to its logical conclusion. If the signatures came from a machine, and the speeches came from a teleprompter, and the eyes came from a sunglasses store, what, exactly, was left? We sent a reporter to Delaware to find out. He came back four days later with a sandwich, a sunburn and no new information. He has since been reassigned to horoscopes. “We sent a reporter to Delaware. He came back with a sandwich and no new information.” — Amerigo’s investigations desk Exhibit D: The vocabulary Then there is the word “malarkey.” No American has said “malarkey” unprompted since roughly 1953, and yet this man said it on national television, on purpose, as if it were a normal word. Add “C’mon, man” and a lifelong devotion to Amtrak, a railroad that most of us only know as a rumor, and the picture gets murkier. Who loves a train that much? A real person? Or a very committed bit? Exhibit E: The Corvette Biden famously owns a green 1967 Corvette Stingray, which he loved to talk about and was almost never allowed to drive, because the Secret Service frowns on presidents doing donuts. So we have a car that is never driven, owned by a man whose eyes are never seen. When investigators searched his Delaware garage in 2023, they found classified documents near the car. Our team asks the question nobody else will: What was the Corvette reading? Exhibit F: The dogs Then there are the dogs. Major, a German shepherd, was sent home to Delaware after biting people at the White House. His successor, Commander, bit Secret Service officers so many times that he was eventually moved out, too. Dogs are excellent judges of character, and possibly of reality. Two separate German shepherds looked at this administration and said, essentially, no. Exhibit G: The laser eyes The internet ran its own investigation and came back with Dark Brandon, a version of the president with glowing red laser eyes. His own staff happily played along. Our team has a theory: What if the aviators were never a fashion choice? What if they were a safety measure? It would explain why no one ever saw his eyes, and why the White House lawn always looked so neatly trimmed. Exhibit H: The Easter Bunny In 2022, as the president drifted toward reporters at the White House Easter Egg Roll, a staffer in a full Easter Bunny costume stepped in and steered him away. Consider what this means. At the most powerful address on Earth, the final authority over where the president walked was a giant rabbit. We are not saying the Easter Bunny was president. We are saying the Easter Bunny has not been ruled out. The tip line When we announced this investigation, our tip line lit up. One reader insisted the president was three men from Scranton stacked inside a trench coat, which would explain the stamina but not the height. Another believed he was a hologram projected by Amtrak to boost ridership. A third sent a blurry photo of a pair of aviators on a bench in Rehoboth Beach with the caption, “He’s right there.” We followed up on every lead. The trench coat turned out to be just a trench coat. The aviators belonged to a retired dentist named Gary, who asked us to stop calling. Finally, we reached out to Mr. Biden himself for comment. We did not hear back, which is exactly what someone who doesn’t exist would do. It is also, our lawyers point out, exactly what a busy former president would do with an email from a magazine asking whether he exists. Our conclusion After weeks of rigorous research, most of it conducted in a group chat, we have reached a verdict. According to the National Archives, the Electoral College, the courts, Congress, roughly four years of the federal register and several million photographs, Joe Biden was the 46th president of the United States, serving from 2021 to 2025. We regret this finding. It made for a much worse story. Still, we can’t shake the feeling. Next week, our team asks: Was Millard Fillmore real? Our sources say yes, but then again, they would, wouldn’t they? Editor’s note: This is satire. Joe Biden was absolutely, verifiably a real president. Please do not email us.