In Iowa, Biden appeared to think he was still the vice president. He also believed that 40 students were shot dead at Kent State, not four. At another event he remembered the assassinations of RFK and MLK occurring a decade after they happened. In August, he was unable to name the prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Over the years, Biden’s racked up thousands of these micro-gaffes and mini-controversies, accumulating over deep time like the fossil record. He provided a memorable summa to his cake-soft campaign, when he said at another campaign stop over the summer, ‘we choose truth over facts’. Biden has chosen an agonizingly senile and very public deterioration over a relaxing retirement.

Retirement is the very last thing Biden ought to consider though. No, instead Biden should be craned out of a cryogenic chamber every four years, ritually defrosted with great pomp and ceremony, and wheeled out to Des Moines to bitch at voters, a half-alive testament to the Democrats’ cack-handed response to the Trumpian moment. They could call it the Joe Biden Experience. It would be awfully similar to what Martin Amis said about reading Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Amis compared it to ‘an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies.’