For President Trump and many of his closest aides and allies, every day is a great day to beat up on Joe Biden. They treat bashing the previous occupant of the White House as proper political hygiene, best repeated and ritualized, the autocrat’s equivalent of flossing your teeth.

Even so, Trump outdid himself last weekend. Apparently unsated by his ludicrous insistence that Biden saddled him with a broken economy, bored with histrionic rants about “the Biden crime family” and convinced that “worst president in American history” doesn’t do justice to Biden’s wretchedness, Trump identified Biden’s frequent use of an automated writing instrument as some kind of smoking gun — or at least smoldering pen.

It proved Biden’s utter incapacitation. It revealed him as a puppet of unelected operatives. It was manipulation, deception and corruption all in a swirl of letters and a stream of ink.

Thank heavens for Trump. He’s difficult but not drooling.

That’s the message. The ploy. Trump attends to nothing more energetically than creating comparisons, excuses and distractions that prevent voters who aren’t already done with him from straying.

The worse he makes Biden and Democrats look, the brighter he shines. So what if they’re out of power and the election was more than four months ago? They’re still useful scapegoats and flattering yardsticks. Best to keep them around.

Many wise economists, astute political analysts and all-around sages say that Trump’s policies and his tantrums (there’s enormous Venn-diagram overlap of the two) point toward failure. But what if failure doesn’t matter anymore? What if it can be cloaked, reclassified, contested, inverted?