As we approach the first debate for the Democratic nomination for president, Joe Biden is going out of his way to define President Trump as a threat to our very existence.

Thanks to a conveniently “leaked” copy of his new stump speech, headlines about Biden calling Donald Trump an “existential threat to America” abounded hours before Biden even showed up at his Tuesday rally in Iowa City, Iowa.

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CNN, committed as ever to the destruction of Donald Trump, rushed to predict that Biden was set to “eviscerate” the president that afternoon.

As with most uses of the word “existential” in contemporary discourse, Biden made a weak attempt to put an intellectual gloss on a distinctly simple-minded assertion. Taken literally -- as Biden characteristically insisted his listeners do -- the former vice president was saying that he thinks Donald Trump is a threat to the very existence of the United States.

Then again, perhaps this notorious intellectual lightweight was just improperly using the word “existential” as an intensifier, the way he continues to do with the word “literally.”

There are real existential threats to America. I know that as well as anyone because I spent most of my adult life fighting them, developing plans to protect our country from them, and deploying overseas to neutralize them.

It’s also a strange claim coming from someone who has repeatedly demonstrated that he can’t identify an actual threat to this country even if it figuratively bites him on the nose.

There are real existential threats to America. I know that as well as anyone because I spent most of my adult life fighting them, developing plans to protect our country from them, and deploying overseas to neutralize them.

Donald Trump isn’t one of those threats, but China certainly is.

China is an increasingly unrestrained, totalitarian power that aspires to global hegemony, and it uses the economic leverage it has gained against America through decades of rampant trade abuses to advance that aspiration.

If you want to know what a world under Chinese leadership would be like, just look at Hong Kong, where a million people took to the streets this week to protest a communist-imposed law that allows Hong Kongers to be extradited to the mainland, where those who dare to criticize the government will disappear into the deep, dark holes of the gulags of the People’s Republic.

That, Vice President Biden, is an existential threat.

So is uncontrolled illegal immigration.

Hundreds of millions of foreigners would move to the United States if it weren’t for the overtaxed immigration enforcement system and border security apparatus Donald Trump is desperately trying to save. Opening the borders to all of them would mean an abrupt end to our 243-year experiment in self-government.

Yet, on both China and the border, Biden doesn’t show even a hint of the faux-intellectual resolve that he self-righteously directs at President Trump. In fact, he’s running on a platform of undermining President Trump’s tough approach to China and stopping the border wall that Biden himself admitted we needed, once upon a time.

And have we completely forgotten about the threat of terrorism? Has the former vice president forgotten that American servicemen and women still to this day are fighting overseas to protect our country from the spread of another clear existential threat?

If we follow Biden’s logic and ill-conceived rhetoric, he has just placed terrorism below the President of the United States on the list of threats.

So what roused Sleepy Joe Biden from his slumbers? Why is he suddenly seeing “existential threats” all around him?

At best, Biden’s got it half right. If Donald Trump is an existential threat, it’s not to America, but rather to the globalist establishment in Washington -- the only thing to which Joe Biden has ever really shown any loyalty over 45 years of ever-shifting policy positions and constant reinvention in the pursuit of power.

Throughout his career, the only real hiccup that Joe Biden’s big government agenda has ever encountered is Donald Trump’s election in 2016. That wasn’t supposed to happen. If Hillary was going to lose, it was supposed to be an establishment GOP politician like Jeb Bush.

Under the rule of a Clinton or Bush revival, the White House would have been occupied by the kind of person Biden and his backers could work with -- somebody who agreed on all the important stuff, like cheap Chinese goods and cheap illegal immigrant labor.

That’s the ideology of the globalist elite, which doesn’t concern itself with such quaint anachronisms as American greatness. To them, the well-being of Middle America -- or any part of America outside their own zip code -- is of little concern.

President Trump is, indeed, an existential threat to that system so long as he’s in the White House, and therein lies the real meaning of Biden’s new stump speech: vote for me and I guarantee America will kowtow to China to keep cheap goods flowing and surrender the border to keep the cheap, illegal immigrant labor coming -- forever.

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Oh, and he’ll also cure cancer.

So, as the Democrats prepare to debate for the first time in Miami on June 26 and 27, be prepared for more over-the-top claims from Joe Biden about the threat to the existence of America that President Trump poses. The truth is, thanks to Donald Trump, Biden and his globalist elite ilk are the ones becoming extinct.

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