Sure, it’s a real story that deserves attention, and the Biden debacle is getting plenty. The new book “Original Sin,” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, doesn’t mince words in its subtitle: “President’s Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”

I take a somewhat more benevolent view of Biden’s failure to recognize and accept his limitations, and “cover-up” is probably too strong a term to describe the unwillingness or inability of those around Biden to confront him with a truth that in retrospect seems obvious: Biden was not capable of effectively competing for or completing a second term.

But hindsight is always 20/20 and, as often as not, it’s only after Grandpa has hit the gas instead of the brake and rammed his car through the front of a convenience store that his family realizes that they should have taken his keys away long ago. But nobody calls this a cover-up.

It’s a very common human failing. And I think I could argue somewhat persuasively for this more benign take on the Biden fiasco. After all, it’s one thing to confront Grandpa; it’s quite another to confront the leader of the free world.

But President Donald Trump prefers that we keep talking about Biden, which is one of the reasons that he keeps talking about Biden. But while we’re talking about Biden, here’s just a little of what we’re ignoring:

Climate change: You can skip this paragraph, if you like. Fact is, neither Democrats nor Republicans are doing much about climate change, which, unless it really is the hoax that Trump claims it is, represents the single biggest, slow-burning threat to humankind. It’s the silent backdrop to everything else we talk about. But we’re unlikely to talk about it very much, even if we weren’t talking about Biden. Still, while we ignore it, it continues to get worse; in fact, the Trump administration is largely reversing whatever modest progress we’ve made against climate change.

But what else are we ignoring?

The war in Ukraine: I’m not sure how many voters actually believed Trump when he said he would end the war in 24 hours, even before he was inaugurated. But that unkept promise has encountered reality during the last four months. Trump has failed to end the war, and he appears to have become impatient with the deadlock.

Can the free world endure the military conquest of an aspiring democracy by a brutal authoritarian kleptocracy? Let’s hope so. A bigger question: Can the rules-based, tolerant, free, democratic paradigm that has thrived since World War II endure if its leader can’t be bothered to distinguish between the belligerents in Ukraine and, in fact, seems to favor Russia? No wonder Trump would rather talk about Biden.

Finally, the emoluments presidency: Remember when President Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, was forced to resign in 1958 because he accepted a fancy overcoat from a textile manufacturer with a case before the Federal Trade Commission? Remember when Republicans exploded with outrage when President Bill Clinton allowed his friends who were donors, and vice versa, to spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom? Remember the sketchy efforts by Hunter Biden to profit off his family connection to the presidency that so exercised Republican critics?

How quaint. The monetization of the current presidency—well-catalogued elsewhere—exceeds by many orders of magnitude the commonplace corruption and graft of the past. Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, says Trump is making these windfall millions of dollars during his “personal time.”

But this is patently bogus: Presidents don’t have “personal time,” any more than popes do. Leo is always the pope and Trump is always the president; that’s the price they pay for assuming these exalted offices.

And speaking of the pope: In the Bible, this is called straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. While Trump’s allies love to keep us focused on the Biden debacle (the gnat), we swallow camel after camel after camel.

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