Joe Biden’s presidency is not going well.

That’s been apparent for a long time. It’s not like the transitionary inflation that’s not transitionary, the stagnating jobs market, the border crisis, and the off-putting woke-ism are new to the scene. But perhaps ironically, given foreign policy was supposed to be Biden’s area of expertise (lol), the deadly disaster in Afghanistan has represented a turning point for the president.

No, it’s not because Biden’s breathtaking incompetence, lack of empathy, and visible anger have been surprising (see A Yelling, Defiant Joe Biden Declares Victory in Afghanistan and Blames Americans for Being Left Behind). That’s been baked into the cake since the beginning. Rather, things have changed because, for the first time since Biden took the oath of office, he’s taking heat from an entity he thought was on his side — the deep state.

Yesterday, news broke of a not-so-perfect phone call between Joe Biden and Afghanistan’s coward-in-chief, Ashraf Ghani, the former Afghan president who fled his country instead of staying to lead the fight for its survival. What was revealed is that Biden asked Ghani to falsify the situation on the ground in order to change the “perception” that things were going badly against the Taliban.

“I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,” Biden said. “And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”

Unlike the phone call that led to Donald Trump’s impeachment, there’s no ambiguity here. This is the President of the United States asking an ally directly to lie about something in order to change political perceptions.

Yet, what strikes me the most here is not the substance, shocking and as worthy of investigation as it may be, but the circumstances by which the substance was revealed. On July 23rd, Jen Psaki noted that Biden had spoken to Ghani while suggesting that the readout of the call would be released later that day. It never was, and now we know why. That points to a cover-up by the administration for purely political reasons. Who made the decision to hide the readout?

Further, the transcript was eventually leaked in embarrassing fashion, and the only nebulous entity with the ability to do that is the conglomeration of establishment bureaucrats within the executive and intelligence communities, i.e. the deep state.

That was the last piece of the puzzle to cement Biden’s downfall. To the extent that he could weather the growing media criticism and an ever collapsing situation domestically and abroad, he could only do so without a barrage of leaks targeting his competence and character. Those are coming now, and as Trump can testify to, that’s the one thing that can haunt a president until the moment he leaves office.

In short, the final firewall appears to have been breached, and for Joe Biden, it’s all downhill from here.