Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden laughs with audience members during a meeting with local residents, Monday, Dec. 2, 2019, in Emmetsburg, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

This seems like a totally normal suggestion to be made by a “journalist,” and I’m not even really being sarcastic because it’s 2020 and all.

MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle was interviewing former Obama bro Jim Messina today, who was ranting about Donald Trump, calling his press briefings a clown show. Instead of asking her guest to pull it back a bit or countering that ridiculous charge, Ruhle smeared herself with honey and ran right into bear country.

Here she is actually suggesting Joe Biden set up his own “shadow government” to counter Trump.

MSNBC's @SRuhle suggests Biden create "shadow government" to counter Trump during pandemic crisis pic.twitter.com/pxT8RvBuTU

— Kyle Drennen (@kjdrennen) April 15, 2020

There are a few different, more technical words to describe that, but I’ll just stick with crazy because I don’t think she actually means what it sounds like she means. Regardless, the idea that a presidential candidate should form his own mock government to fight against the current president would be widely mocked by the media if a Democrat were in office. How do we know? Because Mitt Romney barely criticizing Barack Obama during Hurricane Sandy earned him near-universal scorn. But shadow governments during a pandemic? All good.

Of course, there’s a reason Biden hasn’t done this. He’s simply not capable of it.

This is a guy who can’t function off a teleprompter at this point, and many times, he can’t function on one as was illustrated today. Biden is not going to slyly begin soothing the American spirit with lofty speeches and policy proposals in competition with Trump. He’s lucky to know what day it is.

But this does show how insane our mainstream media are. They are quite literally suggesting full-on sedition and undermining of the government during a crisis just for partisan gain, whether they mean to escalate it to that level or not.