The president of the United States, often referred to as the “leader of the free world” and the “commander in chief,” seems not to be his own man. 

President Joe Biden, who ostensibly wields the awesome power of the Oval Office, yielded to a loud pressure campaign demanding that he step aside in the 11th hour of a presidential race that Donald Trump seemed destined to win.

Jubilant fellow Democrats hailed Biden’s decision to step aside, but his move raises a far more ominous question: Who, exactly, is in control of the U.S. government?

The answer may surprise you.

It seems the answer may be former President Barack Obama. After all, Obama notoriously joked to late-night TV host Stephen Colbert that he wouldn’t mind having a “stand-in, a front man or front woman” in the White House, whom Obama could direct from afar using an “earpiece.” After all, pressure from Obama appears to have convinced Biden to drop out of the race.

Yet if Obama is pulling the strings from afar, he seems to be doing so rather loosely. Biden’s White House has echoed Obama’s policies, employing bureaucrats who once staffed the Obama-Biden administration, but they seem to be following the current trends on the Left more than Obama’s own slick messaging.

The real answer isn’t any one man but a vast network of left-wing nonprofits that work with administrative agencies to draft policy.

Remember that fancy Constitution you learned about in school, with its nifty checks and balances to prevent the tyranny of the majority? Well, forget about all that. Today, the administrative state writes the rules we all must live by, in conjunction with woke pressure groups.

It works like this. Congress passes a law such as the Clean Air Act, saying: “We need clean air. You, Environmental Protection Agency, you give us clean air.” The EPA then makes regulations, and if they’re too harsh, Congress theoretically can defund the EPA, but it usually doesn’t.

When making those regulations, the EPA will consult with a climate alarmist pressure group such as the Natural Resources Defense Council. Gina McCarthy, who headed the EPA under Obama, became president of NRDC after Obama left office and before she became the Biden White House’s national climate adviser.

Bureaucrats such as McCarthy come in and out of government, often finding a home in the woke pressure groups that influence federal policy. Sometimes, these pressure groups actually write official memos for federal agencies.

In 2009, a federal investigation into the Bureau of Land Management found that the agency was consulting with staff at the National Wildlife Federation, a climate group. The federation’s staff were writing and editing official bureau materials to promote the organization’s own policies.

The federal government often relies on such pressure groups for policy ideas, and these pressure groups in turn rely on a vast, left-wing funding network that often employs what many on the Left demonize as “dark money.”

Many conservatives are familiar with George Soros, the Hungarian-American billionaire philanthropist whose Open Society Foundations directs money to all sorts of left-wing causes, most notably the “reform prosecutor” movement that imposes lenient sentences on criminals.

Yet Open Society is just one among many. Eric Kessler’s for-profit firm Arabella Advisors set up multiple nonprofits—most notably Sixteen Thirty Fund and New Venture Fund—that direct millions to left-wing pressure groups, cloaking which donors are giving to which causes.

Big labor unions such as the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, and SEIU direct hundreds of thousands of dollars through these Arabella network nonprofits, as do teachers unions such as the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. These unions take workers’ hard-earned money and funnel it into activist groups that influence federal policy.

The end result is a behemoth, a monster I refer to as the Woketopus. It’s the subject of my forthcoming book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”

This Woketopus shoves its policy agenda into the administrative state on wide-ranging issues from immigration to labor policy, to LGBTQ+ activism, to “green” initiatives, and even to weaponizing federal law enforcement against its ideological and political opponents.  

This Woketopus relies on Biden—and Vice President Kamala Harris—to enable its agenda, but it often works around these figureheads. In some cases, as on the issue of U.S. policy toward Israel after the Hamas terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, it actively seeks to undermine the current president, becoming a “deep state” even against its preferred candidate.

So, who’s really in control of the U.S. government? A far-left network of donors, activist groups, and bureaucrats who use the government as a revolving door, going back and forth between woke nonprofits and the administrative state. It may sound far-fetched, but my new book has the receipts.

This Woketopus will be fine if Harris replaces Biden, but all bets are off if something else happens.

That’s why the switcheroo took place, and why Biden is less in control than he appears.

This first appeared in the Daily Signal.