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In “The West Wing,” Aaron Sorkin gave us President Josiah Bartlet, a leftist fantasy of what a president should be — sharp-tongued, quick-witted, wise, and very, very far to the left. All these years later, Sorkin has taken to pages of the New York Times to give us his latest fantasy about the presidency. The Democrats, he says, should kick Old Joe to the curb and nominate none other than Willard Mitt Romney, the failed Republican candidate for president in 2012 and Never-Trump senator from Utah. Sorkin’s dotty recommendation shows two things above all: top Democrats are getting desperate, and they’re way, way out of touch.

Sorkin is, after all, a fiction writer, and his op-ed, published just hours before Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race, demonstrates that he has only the most glancing understanding of the distinction between fantasy and reality. He refers to Biden’s “bad night,” that is, his debate with Trump, as if Old Joe hadn’t been repeatedly demonstrating his cognitive decline for over three years.

Diving deeper into his fantasy, Sorkin likens Biden’s disastrous debate performance to an illness that his fictional President Bartlet had, but concealed from the public, and asks this question about whether Bartlet should have come clean: “What if Bartlet’s opponent had been a dangerous imbecile with an observable psychiatric disorder who related to his supporters on a fourth-grade level and treated the law as something for suckers and poor people? And was a hero to white supremacists?”

“What if” indeed. This is a leftist coastal elitist’s caricature of Trump. The “dangerous imbecile” presided over a far healthier economy with far lower inflation rates than the Biden regime has brought us. When he was president, there was peace in Ukraine and Gaza. Sorkin, who no doubt is extremely worried about the future of “our democracy,” shows no indication of caring, or even knowing, about how the Biden regime worked to suppress the speech of COVID dissidents, or about just how flimsy the legal charges against Trump are, or about the Biden regime’s decidedly un-democratic weaponization of the “Justice” Department against his principal opponent.

The “hero to white supremacists” business is still more leftist fantasy. In the left’s paranoid nightmares, all opposition to their America-Last socialism is, at its core, nothing more or less than racism, with Donald Trump cast as the chief Klansman. Back in the real world, Trump is gaining unprecedented support from minority voters who are fed up with being bought off and taken for granted by Democrats, but Aaron Sorkin doesn’t live in the real world.

The clearest indication of that fact is Sorkin’s proposal for a replacement for Old Joe: “The Democratic Party should pick a Republican. At their convention next month, the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney.” Sorkin shows again how out of touch he is by identifying Romney first and foremost as a Republican. Romney is technically a Republican, but he was the only member of the GOP to vote to convict Trump in both of his impeachment trials.

Those votes made Romney the first senator in American history to vote to impeach a president from his own party. No wonder Sorkin loves him. Romney also showed his Republican bona fides by marching in a Black Lives Matter protest, despite the fact that they were animated by Marxist agitprop and fact-free race hate propaganda.

Nominating Romney, Sorkin says, “would be putting our money where our mouth is: a clear and powerful demonstration that this election isn’t about what our elections are usually about it, but about stopping a deranged man from taking power.” He means Trump, not Biden. “Surely Mr. Romney, who doesn’t have to be introduced to voters, would peel off enough Republican votes to win, probably by a lot.” Really? Sorkin clearly has no clue how much rank-and-file Republicans despise the leftist RINOs who have made the party virtually indistinguishable from the Democrat party for so long.

A Romney Democrat candidacy would given Nikki Haley supporters “somewhere to go,” Sorkin claims, although he piously adds that Haley “disqualified herself when she endorsed the leader of an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the government.” Does Sorkin really believe Trump sent a guy with Viking horns ambling into the Capitol to overthrow the most powerful government and military on earth? Are leftists really this stupid? Uh, I guess that’s obvious.

Sorkin even claims that nominating the unprincipled opportunist Romney would resonate emotionally with Americans: “The Democrats need to break the glass and this is a break-glass plan, but it’s more than that. It’s a grand gesture. A sacrifice. It would put a lump in our throats.” Mitt Romney? A lump in our throats? Only if it’s from our gorge rising.

But this ridiculous suggestion, and the fact that the New York Times printed it, shows unmistakably that the Democrat camp is desperate, and it’s not just ordinary desperation, but full-on, shaking, night-sweats desperation. If only they could nominate Josiah Bartlet.