Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has demonstrated the importance of rhetorical leadership, and, in so doing, the painful contrast between his style and Biden’s.

Our last two presidents have utterly failed at this core job skill. To complicate matters, there is no obvious Demosthenes waiting on the horizon. Biden’s successor may well be the man who preceded him: Donald Trump. (Biden said recently that he’d be “very fortunate” to face Trump in a rematch. This strikes me as an unwise statement. Democrats rooted for Trump to win the 2016 Republican primary, assuming he’d be easy to beat.) America deserves better than a binary choice between an evil senior citizen and an incompetent one.

Meanwhile, Biden’s heir apparent, Kamala Harris, clearly went to the “Veep” school of communications. This means that moving on from Biden is not a simple fix because his two most likely replacements would probably be worse.

Meanwhile, Biden’s first term is only going to get harder. With Republicans poised to take control of Congress, we can expect two years of Hunter Biden investigations and gridlock for Biden’s nominees and policies.