I found it hard to watch. Horribly, horribly hard to watch. There is no joy in seeing an old man suffering, let alone one who has spent so many decades in public life, witnessing layers of dignity and respect stripped away in the withering glare of the studio lights. 

From the moment he stepped on the stage everyone could see something had gone terribly wrong. His voice came out as a whisper, his words slipped out in a half audible rush, mostly in the right order. He was blinking, confused and looked panicked. He seemed to have a sore throat. 

This was a man visibly too old to fight an election, yet having to do so

Nothing got better. In fact it frequently got worse. Entire minutes long answers devolved into complete unintelligibility. He rushed, he stumbled, he missed words, he rambled, and looked unutterably lost. There were gaffes. 

Biden rallied briefly, halfway through — when he gets to Trump’s misdeeds, he finally becomes animated, and sounded almost normal, at points. It didn’t last. 

Trump hammered him. There was the usual absurdity and braggadocio. But he steered the debate relentlessly back to Biden’s failings in government. Every other word was “border”. The other 50 per cent was “inflation”. As he spoke, Joe Biden was trying to assume a look of what, I suspect, was meant to be jovial outrage. Instead it looked like an expression of open-mouthed, punchdrunk horror. 

This wasn’t a seasoned campaigner having a catastrophically bad night. This was a man visibly too old to fight an election, yet having to do so. Joe Biden is not to be blamed for this. He won the 2020 election, and was perhaps the only person who could have. He was one of the few sane, normal politicians running in the Democratic primary race, and just about the only one aiming his message at working class voters, whilst other candidates desperately sought to prove their intersectional, identitarian credentials. In office, he has had genuine successes and achievements. He has been able to achieve bipartisan legislation in one of the most divided times in US congressional history, and made serious attempts to mobilise the US economy to counter Chinese influence. 

No, the people to blame for Biden’s performance are those who provided no viable alternatives in 2020, and who, incredibly, could find nobody better than Kamala Harris to run alongside him, then or now. 

Political discourse is in the gutter and rapidly heading for the sewers

A point of conflict in the debate was the question of whether America was, in the words of Trump, “a failing country” or, as Biden asserted, “the most admired country in the world”. It’s a hard question to answer. From one standpoint, looked at from fast declining Europe, America is still a huge, energetic, fast growing country whose citizens enjoy opportunities and resources far in excess of those found elsewhere. But the sight of two absurd, bickering octogenarians, one cheerfully shameless, the other half dead, was reminiscent of something from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Materially America has never looked so secure, spiritually and politically? Something is going badly wrong.

As a citizen of America’s imperial periphery, there was something uniquely unsettling about the whole, tragicomic spectacle. I felt tremendous pity for Biden, but it is rather disturbing to find oneself pitying the most powerful man on earth. Trump is very entertaining and easy to watch, by comparison, with his extraordinary pouting and smirking, like some orange Mr Toad, designed to generate outraged laughter. But here was a former President of the United States saying, on live TV, “I didn’t have sex with a porn star”. Political discourse is in the gutter and rapidly heading for the sewers, as we all well know, but this was so bad as to be rather unnerving. 

When Rishi Sunak replaced Liz Truss, the British press blithely announced that the “grown ups” were back in charge. But what his time in government, and indeed the last 20 years of politics across the English speaking world, has demonstrated to me is that there are no grown ups left. Biden was the last of them, but he is no longer really a grown up — he is now an old man, as of course is Trump. Watching two leaders of the free world argue, at one point in the debate, over their golf handicaps, was funny, until it wasn’t. “Let’s not be childish” said Trump. “You are a child” replied Biden. God help us all.