During one of his Oval Office afternoon televised announcements, US president Donald Trump was asked if he had noticed a cognitive decline in his predecessor, Joe Biden, when they met at the White House following the November election.
The question was set up for Trump to indulge in one of his favourite pastimes of hammering his predecessor. Nor did it come out of the ether. The memoir of the former first lady, Jill Biden, View from the East Wing, was published on Tuesday – a title dripping with irony now that a wrecking ball has reduced that side of the residence to rubble to make way for the current occupant’s dance hall.
“The innards of the East Wing were spread out for everyone to see,” she writes of her former dwelling, “like a rare and precious animal that had been hunted down and killed.”
Maybe Trump was in sanguine mood. While the meeting was to announce a “clean, beautiful coal” initiative, he slipped into his role of modern-day Vitruvius as he proudly showed illustrations of the restoration of the reflective pool, whose floor has been coloured “American-flag blue” in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
He claimed the administration has refurbished 22 water features across the city which “hadn’t worked in half a century”.
One of those is the Columbus Fountain in Union Station, whose water feature last worked in 2007. It was recently blasted clean of graffiti and decades of exhaust fumes and is as pristine as the Trevi Fountain. The water is running and it is, without question, an eye-catching improvement.
Whether Americans are in the mood to listen to renovation projects in a city 70 per cent have never visited during a time of acute and sustained economic pain is a different matter. So, when he thought back to his election with Biden, Trump struck an unusually passive note.
“No, not really. He was the same guy I was watching for a long time. I mean you can go back 40 years, I watched him 40 years, 30 years ago. He was never the sharpest guy, you do know that. It wasn’t like he was sharp as a tack. But no, it was the same guy. They actually invited me here before the election, which was strange.
“But then we met also, as you know, we did the ritual and he was fine as far as I was concerned. I dunno, something happened him during the debate. It could have been me,” he said, speculating that Biden might have been dumbfounded by Trump’s own performance.
“I would say this: he did not have a good night. No, he spoke softly, very softly. I mentioned this to people – he spoke very softly, very low and as we talked we got along really well. And I thought he was fine.”
The resurrection of that infamous debate is something the Democratic Party could have done without as they attempt to rebrand and reset their collective image in advance of the midterms. But Jill Biden’s book brought the nightmares of that extraordinary, cruel summer rushing back as the former first lady gave her account of her husband’s ruinous performance in Atlanta.
“Is this a stroke? Has he been drugged?” she recalled thinking as she watched. “To this day I wish I’d thought of asking for a blood test.”
The insistence of the Biden camp that it had been a flu, the three disastrous weeks before he announced his intention not to run, followed by the underwhelming 100-day campaign by Kamala Harris is a broad-daylight nightmare from which the Democrats have yet to fully awaken. This month will mark the two-year anniversary of Biden’s catastrophic public lapse.
And it will also mark the 80th birthday of Trump, who has found his own mental and physical health under hawkish scrutiny of late.
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Details of his latest medical report have been analysed without offering any insight to the physical ailments which have been picked up by the cameras – periodic bruising on his hands; apparently swollen ankles and accusations that he is prone to nodding off in the Oval Office chair when one of his secretaries or guests, usually standing behind him, natter on for too long.
It is surely significant that Trump’s puckish hints at running for a third term have fallen silent this year. Last May, Steve Bannon, his former White House strategist and Maga podcast host, repeatedly insisted Trump would run for a third term. But while Trump’s sharpness in his day-to-day combat with White House press corps members deemed hostile to the interests of the administration is frequently on display and his belligerence towards Democratic opponents still savage, the vigour and fire are not what they were even when he took office in January 2025.
It’s an exhausting job at any age and when it came to giving Sleepy Joe another verbal kicking on Thursday afternoon ... maybe he didn’t have the energy.
