Joe Biden: too frail for office?

As a young senator, Joe Biden was so given to verbal missteps that he called himself the “gaffe machine”. And during his 2020 campaign, his team played loud music whenever he mingled with the public, seemingly to drown out any off-colour remarks he might make. But lately, a tendency to say the wrong thing has morphed into something far more worrying, said Freddy Gray in the Daily Mail. At 81, the US president is not only physically frail – he wears trainers to aid his mobility, and has a glacially slow, shuffling gait – he has also become prone to what look like moments of senility. At the commemorations to mark D-Day, for instance, Biden was about to sit down at an event, then realised it was the wrong moment and for “several excruciating seconds”, he just stood there, in mid-squat. Last week, he seemed to freeze during a concert at the White House. His team claim that, behind the scenes, he is as sharp as ever. But Washington insiders have described private meetings at which he’d seemed confused about his brief, or to doze off; and voters won’t forget the words of the special counsel looking into his mishandling of classified files, who noted that the leader of the free world comes across as an “elderly man with a poor memory”.

The Republicans are pushing this line hard, said Oliver Darcy on CNN. You’ll hear it on Fox News every night. As for the Washington insiders who spoke to the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, they were by no means all neutral observers: one of the few people quoted on the record was the former house speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who is not a “serious person speaking in good faith”, but rather “a Maga Republican who has for years lied on behalf of Trump”, and who has previously praised Biden’s mental agility. But while right-wing news outlets pore over speeches and video clips, looking for segments they can selectively edit or use out of context to suggest that Biden is gaga, they draw no such inferences from the 78-year-old Donald Trump’s bizarre and incoherent rants, or the times he seemed to nod off during his hush-money trial.

Clearly, this issue is preoccupying voters, said Aaron Blake in The Washington Post. Polls have shown that up to 80% of Americans think Biden is too old; and that 62% think he is not mentally fit to be president. Voters are also concerned about Trump’s fitness for office – and in particular, his mental stability and his ability to handle a crisis. His erratic behaviour has not passed them by. But ultimately, these people are outnumbered by the Biden sceptics. And given the exposure Trump has already had, it’s unlikely that anything he does in the next few months of campaigning will “offset Biden’s liabilities”.