“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Special Counsel Robert Hur wrote in his report explaining why he chose not to prosecute Joe Biden for his handling of classified documents discovered in his garage last year.

We’ve heard that defense of the current White House occupant before. But laughing at Biden makes him seem harmless and it trivializes how dangerous his continued service in office has become to the country. Keep laughing and the right will sleepwalk into another loss by embracing the same strategy that cost Biden’s critics the last election.

Imagine, as we’re meant to, that Scranton Joe sits on his front porch shouting incoherently and declaring MAGA insurrectionists the greatest threat to democracy the country has ever seen. He’s a frail old man, incapable of carrying out any plans or real mischief. He’s the hapless tool of deep state operatives, harmless, flailing, and a personality we’re meant to poke fun at or dismiss.

But that old man on his front porch is not, in fact, harmless. He is holding the equivalent of a high-powered rifle in the crook of his arm. He views his imagined opponents through a sophisticated and deadly-accurate scope. The magazine holds plenty of high-powered ammunition. His threats and ravings don’t sound funny now, do they? Any sane person would immediately try to take the gun away from crazy grandpa Joe before somebody gets hurt. And nobody would be cracking jokes.

Of course, Joe Biden is not pointing a high-powered rifle at anyone. It’s much worse than that. Instead, Joe Biden has weapons like the Justice Department, the FBI, the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. military, the U.S. intelligence apparatus, and a corporate-government partnership that allows push-button censorship of any unfavored political speech with one email from the government.

It’s not funny when Joe Biden brags about imprisoning the election protestors who dared to question his legitimacy for “more than 840 years in prison.” One protester, Matthew Perna, committed suicide. The Justice Department convicted him of four federal crimes because Perna entered the Capitol through an open door and walked inside the velvet ropes.

It’s not funny when Biden launches a government harassment campaign against Elon Musk’s companies because Musk refuses to censor Biden’s political opponents.

It’s not funny when Biden abuses immigration law for political objectives and our border is overrun with illegal immigrants, drugs, human trafficking, and potential terrorists.

It’s not funny when Joe Biden’s IRS sends an agent to intimidate a journalist, as they did in the case of journalist Matt Taibbi the day he testified before Congress about the infamous “Twitter Files,” which revealed that the social media behemoth, before its sale to Musk, was cooperating with the government to censor opposition.

It was not funny when Biden warned us that he would “demonstrate that [Trump] will not take power if he does run.” The anti-Trump lawfare is obviously timed to influence the 2024 election or to put enough stress on Trump that his health fails. Biden has a cruel heart and limitless power at his disposal.

When Joe Biden says it’s “criminally negligent” not to vote for the new Ukraine bill, it carries a different meaning than it might have done before one took into account all of the above. Just repeat that to yourself: This president, who has a history of arresting his political opponents, told Congress it might be “criminally negligent” if it doesn’t vote for more money for his son’s patrons in Ukraine. It’s no longer unthinkable to wonder whether Biden might use his Justice Department against his political opponents in Congress.

The United States has lurched closer to Soviet-style autocracy than at any time in our history. Our government fights tooth and nail in court to continue censoring Biden’s political opponents with domestic surveillance and political censorship. Indeed, it has taken into custody hundreds of political prisoners. The tyranny is already here.

Biden’s incompetence rivals his vindictiveness. Abroad, we’ve lost U.S. military service members during Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and, more recently, in Jordan as part of the spin-off violence from the new war in the Middle East. Ukraine has lost an entire generation in a war the Biden administration may have prolonged unnecessarily. We’ve lost count of the wars that have started on Joe Biden’s watch.

Conservative personalities like Ben Shapiro have made it a staple of their brand to mock and joke about Biden’s feebleness. This kind of trolling for cheap laughs is foolish because it trivializes the danger. Joe Biden has made no secret of his obsession with crushing the MAGA movement beginning with its candidate. The mere mention of a desire to “make American great again,” according to President Biden, “threatens democracy.”

Never mind that Biden’s main target, President Trump, now appears to be more popular than he is. Never mind that Trump appears poised to defeat Biden in a head-to-head popular vote match-up. Democracy, as President Biden defines it, no longer has anything to do with voter preference. If Joe Biden gets his way, there will be only one name left on the ballot—the same way the Soviet Union used to practice “democracy.”