Has Biden lost it?

I watched the Trump-Biden debate Thursday night and was stunned. The president began badly. His sentences were confused, wandering, incoherent. He veered onto tangents and then corrected himself repeatedly. It was painful to see. Worse than I could have imagined.

As the debate wore on, his performance improved a little, especially when he could channel his palpable anger towards Trump, but it was never great.

Trump, in contrast, was Trump. Lying constantly (illegal immigrants are NOT going on Social Security, Nancy Pelosi did NOT turn down National Guard troops on January 6, food prices have NOT quadrupled, every legal scholar did NOT think overturning Roe v. Wade was good, etc.), bragging about his greatness (I was the best, under me America was the best), but his lying and bragging was high energy and the contrast with Biden was stark.

So now what?

First, how badly is Biden impaired? I don’t know. None of us know. I’m bugged by how many folks are confidently stating that he has dementia. Having absolute confidence that we can judge Biden’s overall mental state from a single debate appearance is unmerited. After all, the very next day saw Biden give a solid appearance at a public rally. And now the story being shopped around by his staff is that he’s quite sharp from 10am to 4pm, but after that he starts to fade.

I can believe that. Maybe.

I play poker. Not so long ago—in my early 50s—I was in games that went 24 hours straight. Obviously this was bad for my mental acuity! I became increasingly zombie-like as we meandered into the next day. Yes, this was dumb, but my theory was the other players were also fading so it was ok. Which might have been true, but also suggests that my judgment was getting worse as time went on!

At the end of those sessions I was completely out of focus and tongue-tied, my brain in a fog. My ability to say anything beyond “you owe me 500 dollars” was shot.

I can easily imagine an 81-year-old Joe Biden tripping over his words at 9:15pm even though he had been clear and coherent six hours earlier. Of course, that’s still bad. I don’t want a president who’s only good for six hours a day. It’s a hard job and a nuclear crisis can hit at 3am.¹

And that’s the best case scenario. I can also imagine “fairly clear during the day” Joe is a myth spread by his staff to cover up the steady decline of the man. Maybe he’s already deep in dementia and fading fast. He’s obviously far from his peak, but the first 30 minutes of the debate had me worried that he could no longer function at all.

Of course, my speculation means next to nothing. Perhaps if we heard form a panel of respected medical experts, we could have a clearer understanding of Biden’s mental health, but I don’t how that could be convened (or whether its findings would be accepted by the nation).

Kat Rosenfield, a writer for whom I have immense respect, suggested that if Democrats (and the rest of us) picked Biden over Trump, they were prioritizing winning over democracy. She was not endorsing Trump—in her next tweet, she argued the best choice for democracy would be to pivot to Vice President Kamala Harris—but she argued that picking a muddled Biden was anti-democratic.

Framed that way, it sounds reasonable—picking the cognitively functional man over the one ensnared in dementia—except we don’t know that Biden actually has dementia, and, just as importantly, there are deep questions as to whether Trump himself is cognitively functional enough to be president.

Yes, he sounded more vibrant than Biden, his voice more confident. He still has that con-man sparkle. Each glib sentence rolls out of his mouth without hesitation, even when (as is often the case) they don’t make a lot of sense. His rambling style today is markedly different from the sharp businessman persona that allowed him to shine on talk shows in the 1980s and 1990s. The past four years have not been kind to him. A few weeks back, for example, during a long meandering stump speech, he went on a bizarre tangent about whether it would be better to be electrocuted or be eaten by a shark. Is that functional?

And Trump’s reputation has always been that of an incurious man averse to deep thought. Even before he became president, he said he wanted short briefings, and he got them. His daily briefing was cut down to 3 pages, compared to Obama’s 12-14 pages. “I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.” World crises boiled down to a page. Is that functional?

[Tom] Bossert [Trump’s former Homeland Security Advisor]…[said] Trump had Situation Room aides produce “books of chyron prints” – a way to boil down cable news to the messages displayed at the bottom of screens. Stephanopoulos and Hickey call this “surely one of the most prosaic tasks ever required of the highly trained intelligence officers serving in the White House”.

Bossert was not the only official who criticized Trump’s phobic reaction to learning the facts of his job. Secretary of State under Trump Rex Tillerson reportedly called Trump “a fucking moron.” Defense Secretary under Trump Mark Esper called him a “threat to democracy” National Security Advisor under Trump John Bolton said he was “unfit to be president.” And there are many others. This level of contempt by a president’s senior staff is unprecedented. Does that sound functional?

And how lucid was Trump during the debate? Here he is at the 30 minute mark, being asked about whether he would accept Putin’s seizure of Ukrainian territory:

BASH:  … I’m going to come back to you for one minute. I just want to go back to my original question, which is, are Putin’s terms acceptable to you, keeping the territory in Ukraine?

TRUMP:  No, they’re not acceptable. No, they’re not acceptable.

But look, this is a war that never should have started. If we had a leader in this war – he led everybody along. He’s given $200 billion now or more to Ukraine. He’s given $200 billion. That’s a lot of money. I don’t think there’s ever been anything like it. Every time that Zelenskyy comes to this country, he walks away with $60 billion. He’s the greatest salesman ever.

And I’m not knocking him, I’m not knocking anything. I’m only saying, the money that we’re spending on this war, and we shouldn’t be spending, it should have never happened.

I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelenskyy as president-elect before I take office on January 20th. I’ll have that war settled.

People being killed so needlessly, so stupidly, and I will get it settled and I’ll get it settled fast, before I take office.

BASH:  President Biden, you have a minute.

BIDEN:  The fact is that Putin is a war criminal. He’s killed thousands and thousands of people. And he has made one thing clear: He wants to re-establish what was part of the Soviet Empire. Not just a piece, he wants all of Ukraine. That’s what he wants.

And then do you think he’ll stop there? Do you think he’ll stop when he – if he takes Ukraine? What do you think happens to Poland? What do you think of Belarus? What do you think happens to those NATO countries?

And so, if you want a war, you ought to find out what he’s going to do. Because if, in fact, he does what he says and walks away – by the way, all that money we give Ukraine and weapons we make here in the United States. We give them the weapons, not the money at this point. And our NATO allies have produced as much funding for Ukraine as we have. That’s why it’s – that’s why we’re strong.

Trump’s answer was confidently delivered but politically incoherent. Trump said it was not acceptable for Putin to keep the Ukrainian territory he had captured, but immediately follows up by saying that Zelensky should never have been given any money. “The money that we’re spending on this war, and we shouldn’t be spending.” This is insane. Without any money, Putin would have overwhelmed Ukraine’s defenses. Then Trump confidently adds that he will have the war settled before he takes office on January 20, 2025, which is pure piffle. Why would Putin settle with a guy who says he doesn’t want to give Ukraine any more aid?

Biden, on team rational, states the obvious: that Putin wants to control Ukraine which is why the United States and its NATO allies have opposed him.

So who do I want in the White House? A man who’s ready to give Ukraine to Russia (but claims he isn’t) or a man who knows it will take US military aid to keep Ukraine free? Biden is clearly more compos mentis on this topic. (Even if he seemed to suggest Belarus was a NATO ally!)

Biden is your old duffer of a grandpa who can get a bit confused but has a basic understanding of the world. Trump is your fast-talking crooked old uncle who never read a book and babbles lunatic conspiracy theories. It’s not a great choice, but I’ll take the duffer.

If it was truly a question of a “dementia-addled Dem party puppet” up against a clear-thinking, sane Republican with whom I disagreed on many issues, I could pull the “R” lever in November; but Trump is no Nikki Haley or Ted Cruz. He’s a short-attention-span narcissistic blowhard and airhead who has been condemned by wide swathes of his senior staff and who was willing to undermine democratic norms in an attempt to stay in office, and who therefore should never be allowed in the Oval Office again.

If you don’t believe me, listen to Mike Pence, the man Trump tried to pressure into not certifying the 2020 vote:

I believe anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again

Which doesn’t mean Joe Biden should president either. I agree with Kat Rosenfield there. His performance at the debate was bad. This doesn’t mean he’s the drooling idiot described by Twitter experts, but I see a tired old guy who’s well past retirement, not a strong president. Under normal conditions, if he’s well rested, it’s quite possible he’s able to make good decisions about appointing staff and choosing policy directions. That’s not dementia or being a puppet but it’s not great. And, of course, he could have dementia. I’m not a doctor specializing in cognitive decline. At the very least, he seems below what we should demand from our leaders.

This is why Democrats should replace him. Even if somehow you could prove to me that he has a better chance of beating Trump than some other Democrat, it’s wrong to choose someone who can’t handle the stresses of the job at something close to peak efficiency.

Of course, the same applies to Trump, with the added baggage of being temperamentally and morally unsuited to being president.

If Biden and the Democrats choose to soldier on, I’ll vote for him in November, but it will be with a heavy heart. The Republican Party has already shown itself wiling to get behind someone incredibly unfit for the most important job in the world. I can only hope Democrats, and Biden, make the better and more patriotic call. Our ballot options shouldn’t have to be “awful” and “not as bad.”

1. Although much of the hand-wringing about wanting an alert president in case he needs to respond to nuclear attack is pointless. If the president gets word that missiles are winging their way towards Chicago and Los Angeles, we’re all screwed, no matter how smart the guy in the Oval Office is.