Biden’s evident incapacity to keep up with events — and his belligerent denial of the facts and his responsibility for them — have become so evident that even the media, which covered for his debility in the 2020 elections and have protected him since, have turned on him. CNN and the BBC are now fact-checking their savior. On Saturday night, ABC’s Jonathan Karl bluntly said that what Biden is saying ‘simply don’t comport with reality’.

Donald Trump would never have let this happen: he is too vain. If Trump had gifted Blackhawk helicopters and a lifetime supply of Humvees to our enemies, condemned thousands of our allies to the nastiest of fates and made the United States military and diplomats a laughing stock before the entire world, the media and the Democrats would be calling for impeachment and dusting off the articles of treason.

If Trump had confused his Vice President with a ‘general’ or fumbled with his cue cards because he couldn’t match a scripted question to a scripted answer, as Biden did at his press conference on Thursday; or shown the bizarre callousness and failure of short-term memory in his ‘That was four days ago, five days ago!’ outburst; or spontaneously abandoned the policy of strategic ambiguity on Taiwan in an interview with ABC, as Biden did with George Stephanopoulos on Thursday, the psychiatrists would be lining up outside the cable stations to explain why the 25th Amendment needed to be deployed now.