Since Joe Biden announced his 2020 campaign for president, elite Democrats and parts of America’s media apparatus have been playing a strange, bewildering, and ultimately untenable game. Whatever else you might have thought of him, the then former vice president had often been reasonably quick on his feet: able to hold his own in debates and project basic political confidence — even, as was so often the case with Biden, when he was fibbing or talking nonsense.

The Biden of 2020, however, was a visibly different man: prone not only to strange statements, and rambling, digressive answers but also incessant verbal flubs that suggested something more than the alleged “stutter” commonly invoked to explain them away. Asked during one primary debate about the legacy of slavery in America, Biden began to speak about institutional segregation and then seemed to pivot to the idea that black parents don’t know how to raise their children, bizarrely concluding: “It’s not that they don’t want to help. They don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio. Make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night.” In the span of just ten days, he seemed unable to recall Barack Obama’s name, confused then British prime minister Theresa May with Margaret Thatcher, suggested that Martin Luther King Jr had been assassinated in the late 1970s, and bungled the timeline of the Parkland school shootings.

Biden had always been a gaffe-generator and, throughout his career, had frequently treated the truth as something to be bent around whatever he found expedient to say in a given moment. Nevertheless, the signs of frailty and mental decline were so ubiquitous and obvious throughout 2019 and early 2020 that they seemed impossible for anyone to deny.