US Politics

To the US, where one likely candidate for the presidency delivers hour-long rambling speeches in which he explains that he’s going to be a dictator, but all the chat is about whether the other candidate has lost his marbles. And yes, let me pre-emptively apologise, because I can already tell that we will only be on about the third paragraph of this column before I have exhausted the Guardian’s approved list of euphemisms for being a couple of world leaders’ names short of a full set.Anyway, our business today is with the president, Joe Biden, who called an impromptu press conference on Thursday night in which he hotly insisted that his memory was just fine. The occasion was the publication of a justice department report that cleared Biden of criminal charges over his handling of highly classified materials. This year-long investigation was carried out by special counsel Robert Hur, who happens to be a registered Republican, and whose report specifically mentions the president’s “significantly limited” memory. Mr Hur says that part of the reason he didn’t bring charges was 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.” Oh dear. A real muffin-basket of an attack-line gifted to Donald Trump there, and confirmation of my long-held conviction that fake sympathy is far deadlier a tone than open attack.Biden had almost left the stage last night when he returned to the podium to take a question on the Israel-Gaza conflict, in which he unfortunately referred to the Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as “the Mexican president”. On the one hand, this was always going to happen just at the moment he was insisting his memory was great, just as it is a truth universally acknowledged that people correcting someone else’s grammar or spelling will normally involuntarily commit some howler of their own in the process. Call it the pedants’ curse – or indeed, the pedant’s curse.On the other hand … oh dear. According to polling, Biden’s age and cognitive glitches are his biggest vulnerability with voters. As for his likely opponent, for my armchair diagnosis, the most terrifying thing about Donald Trump is that he is completely sane (unless you count advanced narcissism, which I suppose we have to these days). But Trump is a mere three years younger than Biden, often walks with a wobble, and himself recently confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi in a rant. So is it fair that the one should face infinitely more scrutiny on the lost-plot front than the other?Alas, fairness isn’t one of the base notes of political life. I’m afraid we could be dealing with Ye Olde Vibes Theory of Politics (est 2022), which holds that the feels-based way in which a politician presents is more important than such trivialities as the facts or their record. Listen – I don’t make the rules. But during the first 2022 Conservative leadership contest in the UK, remainer Liz Truss presented as more Brexity to the party grassroots than leaver Rishi Sunak. Why? Vibes. Just … vibes.The vibes on Biden’s seniority are not great. Yes, he has led his country’s exceptional and internationally envied economic recovery from the pandemic, so the large rational part of me judges that unfair. But another part of me, perhaps the irrational, can no longer watch any Biden speech or address without picturing his aides also watching backstage, mainlining cortisol, every fibre of their brace-positioned beings willing him to get over the line without making any unforced errors – and to then exit the stage without trying to use a flag as a door.I’m sure this is complete fantasy and the only cortisol levels going through the roof are my own. Nevertheless: vibes. Can’t fight ’em. I remember my heart feeling similarly in my mouth during the aforementioned Tory leadership contest when runaway favourite Truss walked the wrong way off stage after her campaign launch. Did I think Liz Truss literally wasn’t even up to finding her way off a stage? Of course not. Rationally, I knew it was just a silly mistake, of the sort that all of us make every day. At the same time, the irrational half of me felt the satisfying click of the right key turning in the lock. I knew that Liz Truss metaphorically wasn’t even up to finding her way off a stage. There was some kind of ineffable psychological truth to it all that was far more powerful than the facts.As someone who believes the likely Republican candidate is hideously, overwhelmingly worse, I fear that Joe Biden is gearing up for a gruelling election at precisely this vibes-based disadvantage. Both he and Trump are at the stage of life when sensible ordinary people find the strength to turn to their families and ask: be honest, should I still be driving? Yet Trump’s great power is defying rationality, like some dark lord of the vibes. He is possessed of a mesmerising ability to make every single thing feel like it is playing into his hands, which is why we now all watch news reports of various criminal charges being brought against him and go, “Oh this’ll play well for him”. Will it? And if so, why should it? Who really knows, but the vibes say so.After the last time I touched on the gerontocracy in these pages, the Guardian printed three letters from older male readers under the headline, What’s age got to do with it, Marina Hyde? Ageism was mentioned, with one of the correspondents advancing details of how he spent his days, as an argument against what we might kindly have termed my own argument about when big hitters should leave the professional stage. Now, no one more than me welcomes a good bollocking on the letters page, and all the three men were very nice about the rest of my output. Thank you!However. At the risk of drawing further correspondence, I feel I still have to hold to the position that being president of the United States is not the same as “writing, teaching, and volunteering in a residential home”, and is a job for a younger man than either Biden and Trump. Not a younger woman, of course – that would be genuinely insane in the strictest clinical sense of the term. But younger than 86 at conclusion of office. So I end this column with a challenge: if any readers of this newspaper are able to get to the end of the lengthy forthcoming US election campaign and think it showcased a vibrant, healthy and sprightly democracy, then I urge them to write in on 6 November, and suggest mandatory retirement for me.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More

Elena Kagan once referred to Jonathan Mitchell sarcastically as “some genius”. That was in oral arguments surrounding SB8, the bounty-hunter abortion ban that Texas succeeded in passing before the overturn of Roe v Wade, which Mitchell wrote, pioneering a cockamamie scheme for evading judicial review.Mitchell, a far-right lawyer currently vying for a spot in the second Trump administration, is a fan of this kind of bald, legal bad faith: you can’t quite call him duplicitous, because he never quite pretends that the law really leads him to the conclusions he’d like to reach. He’s more about coming up with novel legal schemes to get to his desired outcome and trusting that the federal judiciary, captured as it is by Federalist Society acolytes and wingnut cranks, will go along with him because they share his political proclivities.That’s what worked for him with SB8: the supreme court allowed Texas’s abortion ban to go into effect long before Dobbs: not because Mitchell made a convincing argument, but because he offered them an opportunity to do what they wanted to do anyway.Something similar happened in Thursday’s oral arguments in Trump v Anderson, a question about whether Donald Trump is disqualified from holding federal office under section three of the 14th amendment.The case reached the supreme court after a Colorado court found that Trump’s actions on January 6 disqualified him. The court wanted to disagree and was desperate to find a way to restore Trump to the Colorado ballot without addressing the underlying question of whether Trump committed an insurrection or not. Mitchell, Trump’s lawyer, gave them very little help: he gave a shoulder-shrugging argument to the justices, after filing a bizarre and strained brief that primarily focused on the absurd claim that the president is not an “officer.” Left to their own devices, the justices went fishing, looking for an argument that could plausibly allow them to exit the case, since Mitchell did not provide them one.The winning entry came from Justice Samuel Alito, who first offered the suggestion that a state like Colorado did not have the authority to enforce section three of the 14th amendment without congressional permission. The rest of the justices seemed to like the sound of that and were soon all asking questions about the scope of state authority over the administration of federal elections.It was a bit of an odd argument: the court recently came close to embracing a much more wide-reaching vision of the authority of state legislatures to govern federal elections in their borders, in its address of a rightwing legal curiosity called the “independent state legislature theory”. And the notion that section three of the 14th amendment requires congressional action to go into effect is on its own peculiar: no other section of the amendment has been found to require such instigating legislation from Congress, and the language of the amendment itself suggests that the disqualification of onetime insurrectionists is something that Congress has to act to turn off, but not to turn on.It is strange, too, that the court, which in past years has made dramatic and ruinous changes to American life out of its professed loyalty to our nation’s “history and traditions”, chose to more or less completely ignore the suggestions of history here. The 14th amendment’s section three has seldom been enforced – in part because of the rarity of insurrections – and so there are few impediments to the court’s self-styled originalists delving headfirst into the history of the amendment’s intention and context.But instead the justices chose to dismiss the considerable evidence that the framers of the 14th amendment intended section three to be used precisely to protect the republic from a figure like Trump. They attend themselves instead not to the lessons of the past, but to the incentives of the present.By the end of the arguments, it was clear: what the justices will write will be a 9-0 or 8-1 decision (only Sonia Sotomayor voiced much dissent) saying that section three is not self-enacting, or at any rate that the states cannot enact it themselves. They will have arrived at this conclusion not because the argument was made persuasively or at all by Trump attorney Mitchell – it wasn’t – and not because it is the place where the text compels them to arrive – it isn’t. They will instead have fabricated this reasoning out of whole cloth, because it gets them out of an inconvenient question: the question of whether the constitution’s substantive protections for democracy can withstand the stress Trump applies to them.One point that several of the justices touched on, and which has been taken up by those skeptical of the Colorado case and similar efforts to disqualify Trump from office on 14th amendment grounds, is the notion that his disqualification would be somehow anti-democratic, disenfranchising the people who would like to vote for him and would not get a chance to.But democracy means more than the simple ability to vote; it requires a commitment to constitutional principles – to the limits of an office, to the rights of the minority, to the separation of private and public interests among those in power and to the willingness to place the dignity of the country before the petty preferences of the man who leads it.Trump has no intention of upholding these principles. We know: he tells us all the time. To disqualify him would not be to undermine democracy but to protect it, by averting the seizure of the republic by the man who has been quite frank about his intention to destroy it.Meanwhile, section three of the 14th amendment now seems set to be orphaned – denied its status as self-effecting, curtailed in its enforcement by the states. If section three is still the law, and if insurrectionists are still barred from taking federal office, then how can this law be enforced? And that’s where the court, in its apparent effort to avoid having to take much of a stand on the issue, seems to have planted a loaded gun. Because if states can’t enforce the ban on insurrectionists in office, then only Congress can. And where would Congress do that? At the certification of the electoral votes – on 6 January 2025.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

Illegal immigration via the US-Mexico border remains one of the most pressing problems for Congress. And yet the much anticipated $118bn border security bill, which included aid packages to Ukraine and Israel, was blocked by senators after a chaotic week.
Why did this crucial piece of legislation with bipartisan support get rejected by the very people who demanded it? This week, Joan E Greve is joined by Marianna Sotomayor, the congressional reporter for the Washington Post, to discuss why the border bill failed

How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

Donald Trump was anointed the victor of Nevada Republican caucuses, after staunch loyalists in the state helped maneuver the election process to assure his success.Shortly after the caucuses concluded, the AP confirmed Trump, who was the only major candidate participating, as the winner, capping off a perplexing election week in a key battleground state. Ryan Binkley, a little-known pastor and businessman from Texas, was the only other candidate running.With Joe Biden having easily secured victory in the Democratic primary on Tuesday, the current and former president are one step closer to a rematch in the November general election. Trump’s victory Tuesday came on the same day that the US supreme court appeared poised to reject a challenge to his candidacy in Colorado over his attempts to subvert the 2020 election results.Nevada’s “first in the west” presidential choice contest is usually a crucial milestone for both major parties. But this year’s primaries were a strange and subdued affair, and sparsely attended – only 16% of registered voters in Nevada participated in the primary.The odd, bifurcated Republican voting system may be partly to blame.The caucuses, which were organized by the state’s GOP, came just two days after the Republican primary in which Nikki Haley, despite being the only candidate on the ballot, trailed behind a “none of these candidates” option. Registered Republicans in the state were eligible to vote in both the caucuses and the primary, but candidates could only compete in one or the other. All of the state’s 26 Republican delegates will be allocated based on the caucus, whereas the primary results are non-binding.For years, Nevada held caucuses – calling on voters from each major party to gather at local sites to debate and then vote for a preferred candidate. But after the last presidential election, lawmakers in the state passed legislation requiring primaries instead, arguing that the more traditional style of voting, either at polling stations or by mail, would make it easier for more people to participate.But state Republicans rejected the change. Although they still held primaries on Tuesday, as required by law, they also held their own caucuses that reflect their party’s efforts to limit voting.Those participating in the caucuses were required to come in person, at specific locations, and bring a photo ID. As voters sardined into a high school in Henderson, Nevada, attendees packed into the gymnasium.“He needs our support – look at the treatment he’s getting ,” said Takashi Tamara, 83, referring to the legal cases against the Trump. He had initially been confused about why Trump’s name wasn’t on the primary ballot on Tuesday, until a volunteer with the local Republican party explained that it was only the caucuses that would count toward the nomination process.As the line of voters outside the school grew, snaking around the corner, some began to leave early. Several voters had been mistaken about which precinct they were supposed to report to. Others were annoyed at the chaos inside the packed gymnasium. Leaders of the caucus effort, which included Trump allies who were indicted for their roles in trying to overturn the 2020 election results, said the process was more secure than the primaries. The claim has been contested by election experts, and voter fraud is exceedingly rare.Media, who had in past elections been allowed to observe both Democratic and Republican caucuses, were being barred from observing inside the caucus location by party officials.“We’ve had really disappointing relationships with the press, we are very defensive as a result,” said Jesse Law, GOP chair for Clark county, which encompasses Las Vegas. Law was one of six Republican electors who signed fake electoral certificates declaring Trump the winner of Nevada in 2020, despite Biden winning the state by more than 30,000 votes, and was indicted for his role in the scheme by a grand jury.Voting experts are unclear on how disinformation about the voting process, and confusion around the dueling primary election systems, might affect turnout in future elections.At a Las Vegas rally last week, Trump encouraged voters to ignore the primaries in favor of the caucus. “Don’t waste your time on primary,” he said. “Waste all of your time on caucus because the primary doesn’t mean anything.”Trump won the caucuses here and on the US Virgin Islands – a territory where residents cannot vote in the presidential election, but can help choose the candidate. More

It came out of the blue. The White House announced that Joe Biden would deliver remarks at 7.45pm – giving the press just 23 minutes to prepare. What the sudden speech would be about, no one knew. The element of surprise and uncertainty was reminiscent of the Donald Trump era.As it happened, many White House correspondents were at a meeting near the Watergate building about a mile and a half way. The Guardian was among four who jumped in a car, raced across town and sprinted up sedate Pennsylvania Avenue, greeting the Secret Service in a breathless and disheveled state.Perhaps the press were about to witness history. Was Biden set to announce peace in the Middle East or Ukraine? Was this his Bin Laden moment, a military strike that killed a top terrorist leader? Or after a devastating justice department report said his memory is shot due to old age, was he about to do a Lyndon B Johnson and announce he is not seeking re-election?Reporters and TV and radio crews gathered in the Diplomatic Reception Room, the site of Franklin Roosevelt’s radio addresses known as “fireside chats”. Above the fireplace was a portrait of George Washington and thick hardback books bearing the names of recent past presidents. The posh, old-fashioned room comes with panoramic French wallpaper showing vistas of America.After all the hush and hype, Biden emerged at the lectern and did not resign. Far from it; he was in a fighting mood. Biden was responding to the special counsel’s report, welcoming its conclusion that no charges should be brought against him for mishandling classified information. But the president was also combative, emotional and then – not for the first time – took one question too many and paid the price.Special counsel Robert Hur had described the 81-year-old Democrat’s memory as “hazy”, “fuzzy”, “faulty”, “poor” and having “significant limitations”. Biden commented: “There’s even a reference that I don’t remember” – he paused for a moment and swallowed, as if the words are still hard to say – “when my son died”.Beau Biden died of cancer in 2015. With barely concealed anger, the president continued: “How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business. Some of you have commented. I wear since the day he died every single day, the rosary he got from Our Lady of … ”He reached to show the rosary and appeared to be choking up. “Every Memorial Day we hold a service remembering him, attended by friends and family and the people who loved him. I don’t need anyone, I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.”Tall, blond and loud, Peter Doocy of the conservative Fox News network, which is pushing the geriatric case against Biden hard, noted that the special counsel called Biden a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”. The president parried: “I’m well-meaning and I’m an elderly man and I know what the hell I’m doing. I’ve been president and I put this country back on its feet.”Doocy pressed: “How bad is your memory and can you continue as president?”Biden: “My memory is so bad I let you speak.”Touché.Another reporter weighed in: “Do you think your memory has gotten worse, Mr President?”Biden answered: “My memory is fine. Take a look at what I’ve done since I’ve become president. None of you thought I could pass any of the things I got passed. How did that happen? I guess I just forgot what was going on.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut soon things started to go off the rails a bit. From a raucous cacophony of reporters’ voices, one emerged to ask: “Mr President, for months when you were asked about your age, you would respond with the words ‘watch me’. Well, many American people have been watching and they have expressed concerns about your age.”Biden looked cross again. “That is your judgment!” he said, his voice rising as he pointed an accusing finger. “That is your judgment. That is not the judgment of the press” – presumably he meant to say public.Biden went on to insist: “I’m the most qualified person in this country to be president of the United States and finish the job I started.”More questions. More frenetic noise. More grumpy expressions and finger pointing from Biden. “I did not share classified information!” he almost shouted. “Let me answer your question!”Still, he rounded off with a flourish: “I did not break the law. Period,” and started making his way to the exit. The Biden comms team must have been breathing a huge sigh of relief. A fiery riposte to the critics! No major gaffes! Then imagine their dismay (“Keep walking, don’t turn around, oh my god, he’s going back”) as Biden halted, turned and returned to the lectern, unable to resist a question about hostage negotiations in Gaza.It was then that, having protested his memory is all good and his age is not an issue, that Biden put his foot in it again, mistakenly referring to Egypt’s leader Abdel Fatah al-Sisi as “the president of Mexico”. This followed his assertions that in recent days he met François Mitterrand of France and Helmut Kohl of Germany when both were already dead.Doocy and Fox News had their story after all. Minutes later, the network was running the chyron: “Biden confuses the presidents of Egypt and Mexico.” It followed up with: “Biden raises even more questions about cognitive health after disastrous press conference.”And it’s still only February. More

The US president, Joe Biden, defended his memory in a short speech after a report from the justice department questioned his ability to remember key events and facts. The report also exonerated Biden over his handling of classified materials. Biden disputed some press reporting that he had ‘wilfully retained documents’ and said the special counsel report’s descriptions concerning the date of his son’s death were ‘extraneous commentary’ that ‘had no place’ there. Biden’s remarks came after an earlier statement in which the US president welcomed the finding that he should not face criminal charges More

Nevada’s Republican party is hosting caucuses on Thursday, just two days after the state held a non-binding presidential primary.Donald Trump, the only major candidate running in the caucuses, is assured to be anointed victor by the end of the night. Still, supporters turned up to show their support for the former president, joining snaking lines at high schools, country clubs and even a dental practice to vote.Political analysts and the Nevada Republicans themselves were unsure of what sort of turnout to expect tonight, in a race that is essentially decided for Trump. The only other candidate Tuesday night was Ryan Binkley – a little-known pastor and businessman from Texas – will cap off a perplexing primary week in the key, western battleground state.Due to the manoeuvrings of staunch Nevada GOP allies, Trump is essentially guaranteed the state’s 26 delegates at the Republican national convention. After challenging a state law requiring presidential primaries, the party won the right to hold their own caucuses – not run and financed by the state. Candidates could only participate in one or the other, though voters are allowed to participate in both.While voters in the primary were allowed to cast ballots by mail, or early in person, those participating in the caucuses were required to come in person, at specific locations and bring a photo ID. The state’s GOP has said the caucuses are more secure than the primaries, though as voters sardined into a high school in Henderson, Nevada, attendees complained that overwhelmed volunteers were having difficulties managing the mass of voters outside.At the Green Valley high school caucus site in Henderson, Nevada, spirits were high as voters filed over to the registration tables to have their IDs checked. One organizer delivered a PSA: “If you are one of the people who hung up Trump signs all over, I love it – but you have to take them down.” It was against the school’s policy to allow political signs to be posted around campus.Deby Callahan, 71, and her granddaughter Aubrey Bucher, 20, were attending together. Bucher was also trying to gather signatures for a ballot measure to approve a voter ID requirement for future elections. “I’m excited for president Trump,” Callahan said, who like many other voters do not accept Biden won the 2020 election.Ahead of the caucuses that he is guaranteed to win, Trump urged Nevadans who were voting to sign the voter ID petition – which election experts have said could make it more onerous, especially for older people and people of color, to cast ballots. Republicans across the US have been pushing such measures.“If you are showing up today to vote in the GOP Caucus in Nevada, make sure to sign the Petition for VOTER ID that many people will be circulating at Caucus locations,” Trump posted to his Truth Social. “This is a very ‘BIG DEAL.’ Thank you.”As volunteers methodically checked the IDs of caucus attendees, a queue for the sign in table began to grow, wrapping around the school’s entrance.“Look at the turnout,” said Aydin Delara, 65. “Trump is the only reason everyone is here.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNearly 9,300 Republicans submitted their primary ballots early, by mail or in person, and about 10,400 voted on Tuesday. Confusion about how and whether to vote in the primary, as well as heavy rains, probably affected turnout. Trump, who visited the state last week, encouraged voters to avoid the primary altogether. “Don’t waste your time,” he said at a rally in east Las Vegas. “Waste all of your time on caucus because the primary doesn’t mean anything.”Nevada Republicans have said that their caucuses will be more secure than the primaries, a claim that is roundly disputed by election experts – voter fraud is exceedingly rare. The leaders of the caucus effort include election deniers who have been charged for their roles in trying to overturn the 2020 election results.But the bifurcated process has also caused confusion for voters, many of whom appeared at the polls earlier this week and were surprised to find that Trump wasn’t on the ballot. He still managed to humiliate Nikki Haley, the only major candidate running, who trailed behind a “none of these candidates” option. Trump allies had encouraged voters to show their support for the former president by voicing opposition to Haley.Borrowing a favorite phrase of Trump’s, the former UN ambassador has said the state’s divided election process was “rigged” against her. Haley did not campaign in Nevada, choosing instead to focus on the upcoming elections in South Carolina.Although this election process is legal, the GOP’s manoeuvring has been widely criticised, including by Republicans. Joe Lombardo, the state’s Republican governor, said in October that the duelling contests would be “detrimental to the candidates” and “unacceptable for voters”. Nonetheless, Lombardo said he would be caucusing for Trump. More

The president is not a crook. But there may be something more unforgivable in the court of public opinion. The president is old.That is what will linger from Joe Biden’s pyrrhic victory at the hands of the justice department on Thursday. True, he will not face criminal charges over his handling of highly classified documents when a private citizen, despite an awkward photo revealing papers stashed in a broken cardboard box in his garage, according to special counsel Robert Hur.But most striking among the reasons that Hur gave for his decision was that 81-year-old 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”.The special counsel had delivered an attack line to Donald Trump’s election campaign on a silver platter. Only in America could Trump gain a political lift from 91 criminal charges even as his opponent suffers a political setback from not being charged at all.And Trump, who is 77, is at least as likely to speak gobbledygook as Biden, recently confusing his Republican opponent Nikki Haley with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Yet as in so many other areas, he is somehow given a free ride, in part because he is a white hot ball of anger who just seems younger, in part because his age seems trivial compared to his alleged crimes and misdemeanours, including a far more serious classified documents case.But Hur still wrote that Biden’s memory was “significantly limited” when he was interviewed by members of his prosecution team. It “appeared hazy” regarding the debate about US forces in Afghanistan and could not recall the years when he was vice-president. Most startlingly, Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died”.It is all fodder for Republicans, who have been working around the clock to pin Biden to the wall as a babbling Methuselah who doesn’t know what day of the week it is. Alex Pfeiffer, communications director for Make America Great Again Inc, a pro-Trump Super Pac, said: “If you’re too senile to stand trial, then you’re too senile to be president. Joe Biden is unfit to lead this nation.”Nikki Haley, a Republican candidate for president, posted on social media: “Joe Biden can’t remember major events in his life, like when he was vice-president or when his son died. That is sad, but it will be even sadder if we have a person in the White House who is not mentally up to the most important job in the world.”Biden’s lawyers were quick to dismiss the report as a hatchet job by a partisan hack swerving outside his lane. They accused of Hur, a Republican who served in senior roles at the justice department during the Trump administration, of overreach and “investigative excess”.Unfortunately that defence had already been undercut by Biden himself. Speaking in Nevada on Sunday, he apparently confused François Mitterrand, the former French president who died in 1996, with France’s current president, Emmanuel Macron, while recalling European worries over US democracy and the January 6 insurrection.Then, in New York on Wednesday, Biden referred to former German chancellor Helmut Kohl – who died in 2017 – as talking to him about the same issue when he apparently meant Angela Merkel.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA day later the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, tried to neutralise the gaffes by pointing to recent examples of other public figures – including the House speaker, Mike Johnson, and Fox News host Sean Hannity – mixing up names. She told reporters: “And, look – you know, look, as it relates to the names and – and what he was trying to – you know, what he was trying to – to say, look, many people – elected officials, many people – you know, they tend – they can – they can mis- – misspeak sometimes. Right?”Biden, meanwhile, is not helping his own case. He turned down the chance to do a TV interview before Sunday’s American football Super Bowl, a platform that reaches millions of viewers who might not be following politics closely. He has sat for a quarter as many interviews as Trump at this point in his presidency, and one-fifth as many as Obama, according to the White House Transition Project’s Martha Kumar.Such elusiveness gives the impression of a man whose “handlers” believe that he must be coddled and shielded for his own health and gaffe avoidance.There are eerie echoes of 2016 when then FBI director James Comey declined to recommend charges against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over her use of a personal email system when she was secretary of state but rebuked her as “extremely careless”. Comey reopened his investigation 11 days before the election; Clinton has blamed him for her shocking loss to Trump.What those Comey interventions did was feed a pre-existing narrative that Clinton, wife of former president Bill Clinton, came with a whiff of corruption, an elitist assumption that the rules governing everyone else did not apply to her. Now special counsel Hur has fed a pre-existing narrative that Biden is too old for the job. Should that solidify in the public mind as his defining characteristic, it will be a disaster for the president’s re-election – and the battle to preserve democracy. More