After eight years in the Trump era and only months before the next election, one had the feeling minor affairs (like wars, criminal indictments, rape allegations, gaffes) come and go but the grand events run their inevitable course undisturbed toward some November cataclysm.
What a change an hour or two can make.
Ten minutes into the Biden-Trump debate, the Democrats were united in horror, and ten minutes after it, they split into two camps. The staunch Biden supporters argued that Biden should do what every other presidential candidate has done after a bad interview or speech. Follow it up immediately with a string of rapid appearances to prove that the misstep was a fluke. Instead, Biden retreated into his family circle for the weekend and appeared in two, very friendly interviews with carefully curated questions the next week. He failed to come across as reassuring even in them ("...I'm proud to be the first black woman...serving with the first black president..."). Then he sent out an irritated letter to fellow Democrats in an act of defiance. The White House came out with some miserable explanations of a bad cold and a jet lag that we are to believe had lasted for 12 days. It's a shit show.
The other camp, and yours truly, said that even if Biden followed the advice and gave three live TV interviews a day for a full week with cartwheels and juggling, it wouldn't matter. He already demonstrated during the debate, that at the minimum, he has spells during which he is unable to make an argument or even to form coherent sentences. That was the test and he failed. World events don't follow the schedule of an 81-year-old man to occur only on his good days, and even on those only between 10AM and 4PM. What if there is a crisis in the middle of the night, and the president of the United States can't even formulate an order?
The debate proved that Biden doesn't have the mental capacity to do the job anymore. His actions since that he is delusional beyond the point of even recognizing how much he has declined in the past years.
Biden die-harders broadly come with two lines of arguments. One is the electoral advantage of the incumbent over any other candidates. Biden has a proven track record, he beat Trump already, he is the incumbent, he has the highest name recognition, and (amazingly) it was just a bad interview from a perfectly capable man. Don't believe your lying eyes. The other describes the administrative difficulties of changing horses mid-race.
None of these matter. Joe Biden has been a great president, but he is now in a serious mental decline. He cannot hold the most important job in the world, period. Even if his good days outnumber the bad days now, the ratio will only get worse. By the end of his second term, he would be 86. The famous video where he seems to wander off from a group of world leaders was doctored to hide the fact that he is approaching a group of parachuters instead of just having a senior moment. But even on the full video, you can see that it takes him around twenty seconds to get his sunglasses out of his pocket and put them on. Can you imagine him in 4 years?
This is a crisis that cannot be wasted. Except for Joe Biden, anyone and his dog would have wiped the floor with the thin-skinned, incoherent, blatantly lying Donald Trump in the debate, whose abysmal performance was only saved by Biden's meltdown. The Democrats will find a candidate who can do it.
The right-wing media outlets reacted to the sinking realization in proportion to their pretensions of being impartial, principled actors. WSJ by suddenly publishing an opinion on why choosing Kamala won't help Dems, and the National Review by issuing an indignant complaint over the Democratic elites who want to subvert the will of their base by replacing a democratically elected candidate. They got scared and with good reason.
Biden will eventually resign with the amount of dignity left to him. And then, a new show starts.
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