The President Isn’t Home

This week began with an NBC poll finding that just 23 percent of voters thought that Joe Biden had “the necessary mental and physical health to be president.” It ended with Joe Biden whisper-shouting dissuasively, “I am well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing.” Minutes later, he confused the president of Egypt with that of Mexico.

Also this week, Biden recalled talking to François Mitterrand last year, despite the former French premier’s death in 1996. A few days later, he mentioned a 2021 conversation he had with Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor who reunited Germany in 1991, left office in 1998, and died in 2017. He told a Democratic audience that he was a Catholic and opposed to abortion on demand, but thought that the Supreme Court was wrong to overturn Roe (which mandates abortion on demand). Then a report came out of the Department of Justice explaining that Biden had mishandled classified documents, but that prosecuting him would be fruitless because he “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”