Joe Biden isn’t working. That much has been clear to anyone who has followed American politics for the past four years. The 81-year-old often has no idea what he is saying or where he is. Yet it’s only now, months away from his possible re-election, that the Department of Justice, apparently in an attempt to exonerate him for committing a crime Donald Trump is accused of, has admitted the obvious: he’s not really in charge of himself, let alone the country.

After interrogating Biden about his hoarding of classified documents, Special Counsel Robert K. Hur reported:

We have also considered that, at trial, Mr Biden 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.

Hur also said that Biden ‘did not remember when he was vice president’, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 – when did I stop being vice president?’) and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still vice president?’) He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.’

Madness has engulfed American politics. In Washington, DC, a court ruled this week that Donald Trump did not have ‘presidential immunity’ in regards to his behaviour in the run up to 6 January 2021 (his document hoarding is a separate matter). By contrast, Mr Hur’s point was not about presidential immunity – just that the Commander-in-Chief is too-far-gone to be prosecuted.

Biden hit back at Hur’s assessment yesterday:

I’m a well-meaning, I’m an elderly man and I know what the hell I’m doing. I’m the president and I put this country back on its feet. I don’t need his recommendation.

‘How bad is your memory and can you continue as president?’ a reporter asked. ‘My memory is so bad, I let you speak. .. My memory is fine. Take a lot of what I’ve done since I became president.’

Even by his standards, though, Biden has been having a rotten brain week. He’s called the French President Emmanuel Macron ‘Mitterrand from Germany’, mixed up Helmut Kohl with Angela Merkel and said that the Egyptian leader el-Sisi the President of Mexico.

How can a man in his condition be expected to fight a presidential election campaign?

Biden’s defenders have long pointed out that Biden has a speech impediment. He was called ‘the gaffe Lamborghini’ long before anyone questioned his cognitive health, but he’s increasingly a shadow of his former self. How can a man in his condition be expected to fight a presidential election campaign? Does anybody expect him to take to the debate stage against Donald Trump? And if re-elected, how can he possibly last another four years?

Polls suggest that the American public is highly concerned about Biden’s frailty and job performance – so much so that they will probably elect Donald Trump in his place in November. The Democrats find themselves in a difficult bind. If Biden isn’t willing to stand down, or his wife Jill can’t persuade him to, the party appears to be heading towards defeat against a man who, by Biden’s own admission, could be beaten by ‘probably about 50’ other Democrats. ‘Maybe nominate one of them?’ said Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate who is now supporting Dean Phillips’s 2024 challenge to Biden. ‘My biggest problem with Joe Biden as the nominee is that he’s almost certainly going to lose to Trump.’

Biden’s cabinet could, in theory and with the support of two-thirds of Congress, use the 25th amendment to vote Biden out. But the Democratic National Committee knows that, even if it manages to remove Biden before or during the party’s election convention in Chicago in August, it would then have to find a way to push Kamala Harris, who is even more unpopular than the President, off the presidential Biden-Harris ticket. Again, though, if Harris is unwilling to make way, it’s hard to see how the Democrats can subvert their own delegate system in order to nominate somebody who might beat Trump.