Only one politically wounded old man now stands between the United States and a new president who seems sure to interpret the Supreme Court rulings as a passport to autocracy.
Joe Biden, 81, is still struggling to overcome his disastrous debate performance as Democrats whisper behind the scenes about whether he should fold his reelection race at this late stage in favor of a younger, more vigorous candidate.
In one sense, the conservative majority's bombshell ruling only underscored the rationale of Biden's campaign — that Trump is a menacing danger to democracy and America's core values and should not be let back in the Oval Office.
But it also intensified debate over whether Biden is now too cognitively impaired to win the election.
Biden and his family gathered at Camp David for a previously planned retreat on Sunday and Monday. The signals coming from the presidential retreat are that he's determined to stay in the race. His campaign spent the weekend attacking liberal journalists and media commentators who broke ranks and said it's time for him to abandon his reelection bid. So far, the Democratic Party's grandees are publicly sticking with the president, arguing that a debate in which he was incoherent and confused was just a bad night. But there is increasing despair in the ranks, with many Democrats starting to reconcile themselves to the growing possibility that Biden could lose to Trump in November and cost his party Congress.
Watch for two things now. If polling expected in the coming days shows a cratering of the president's already fragile standing in swing states that will decide the election, pressure for him to step aside will grow. Secondly, Biden is under extreme pressure to crank up his so far anemic pace of campaigning. But any new on-camera freezes, trip-ups or errors that can be put down to age may make his position untenable.
The Biden campaign has long said that when he finally got on stage with Trump the contrast between them would turn the race in his favor. But his appalling debate performance destroyed the comparison in front of 50 million viewers.
Biden is asking voters to send him back to the White House despite overwhelming numbers of them concluding he's too old. It's going to be a Herculean task to convince them he's fit to serve until he's 86.
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