President Joe Biden’s self-aggrandizement has been a running joke for the 50 years he’s been in politics. But he saved the best (or worst) ’til last. Since the 2020 election campaign, he’s been telling the most laughable whopper of all, puffing himself up as the second coming of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Biden does this to depict himself as a transformational leader and healer of the nation. Sadly, he is transformational only in the irreparable damage he is inflicting on our finances, culture, and international standing. And he is no healer, being as divisive and partisan as his immediate predecessor.

His delusional FDR comparison is founded in part on the fact that he is unwilling, perhaps also incapable, of seeing America as it really is. Biden descries a nation apparently frozen in time in the year he was born, 1942. He does not recognize the vast economic and social transformation wrought by the past 80-plus years.

Last Sunday was a case in point when he delivered a repellent commencement address to young black men graduating from Morehouse College. He depicted America in ugly pre-civil rights era colors and stoked racial division with excessive rhetoric of a type perfected over the past 16 years by himself, former President Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party.

He invoked the 2020 death of George Floyd, for which a police officer was convicted of murder and imprisoned, and used it to indict America as a whole.

“It’s natural to wonder if democracy you hear about actually works for you,” the president goaded. “What is democracy if black men are being killed in the street?”

Black men are killed in the street mostly by other black men, not by the police or members of other races. In 2019, the year before Floyd died, 2,906 black people were the victims of murder in cases where the race of the perpetrator was known. The racial breakdown of the murderers was 2,574 black, 246 white, and 86 other or unknown. Black people were, therefore, more than 10 times as likely as whites to be the killers.

But Biden, pandering to his left wing and to his audience, suggested the balance of society is the opposite of this, with black people suffering a tenfold ratio of prejudice against them.

“What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot?” he asked. “And most of all, what does it mean … to be a black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?” Such rabid, dishonest race-baiting is hardly better than his 2012 suggestion that the mild-mannered GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney was going to “put [black people] back in chains.”

The country Biden describes is a fiction or, more bluntly, a lie. It is as though the president were talking to a crowd of indigent laborers desperate in the Great Depression for menial work denied to them by racist white plutocrats, not to an educated and motivated throng of young men who have every opportunity to go out into the world and make successes of themselves.

Biden talks as though the civil rights era never occurred and as if our society did not strain every nerve, even to excess, to avoid racial prejudice. Aspirational black people are not barred from upward mobility and achievement but encouraged toward it. With decades of affirmative action, they have indeed been given and continue to be given because of their race opportunities that are denied to young men and women of other races who are equally or better qualified. It is a form of racial reparation by a society trying desperately to make up for the sins of its past, which Biden dishonestly pretends still exist.

It was FDR who converted black citizens into Democratic voters, drawing them away from the Republican Party of President Abraham Lincoln, which had ended slavery and set them free. Since then, black votes have been cast lopsidedly for Democrats. Blue party candidates depend on them for their margin of victory in presidential and other races.

But black voters are disproportionally members of the working class, and they are drifting away from Democrats because Democrats have abandoned them in all but rhetoric. Biden, and before him, Obama, have instead sided with those who have become a ruling class — elites in wealth, education, and influence — whose increasingly loony-Left preoccupations leave the working classes, black and white, cold.

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Instead of adopting polices that create opportunity, Democrats keep heaping restrictions and regulations on citizens. As these suppress freedom and stanch social mobility, Biden seeks to bribe the victims with subsidies and to bamboozle them with deceptive racist rhetoric that depicts a country that has long since passed into history.

Invoking systemic racism, as Biden did to the privileged graduates of Morehouse College, and echoing back to the chains of slavery, is hollow and deplorable — a cynical substitute for good government by a man desperate to retain his sclerotic grip on power.