Some have compared the cleansing in El Paso, Texas, before President Biden’s border visit to the fake villages that Grigory Potemkin is said to have set up along a route traveled by Catherine the Great. Those fake villages were intended to fool Catherine by hiding the truly horrible conditions. The more apt comparison is to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, which, like what happened in El Paso with the full knowledge of the president and his advisers, was designed to fool the public.