If only he had walked out the open door and retreated to the safety of the Oval Office. If only he hadn't returned to the presidential podium to ask a question about the Gaza war, a crisis he seemed almost relieved to address after being harshly criticized by the White House press corps for his diminishing memory and advanced age.
On another day, Joe Biden's response that Israel's military behavior in Gaza “went too far” — his harshest rebuke yet — might have made the headline. But then, almost in a whisper, he confused the president of Mexico with the president of Egypt, a confusion that immediately turned into a meme. A misstep heard around the world.
The worst political slips of the tongue always draw attention to a pre-existing condition. Cognitive decline has long been an Achilles' heel for the 81-year-old president. The main reason Biden got to the microphone in the first place was to address the nation about a stunning report released by special prosecutor Robert Hoare, who decided not to prosecute the president for mishandling classified documents, in part because “Mr. Biden is more likely to introduce himself.” He appeared before the jury, as he did during our interview, as a sympathetic, well-meaning old man with a weak memory.
In an assessment that was arguably more hurtful than an indictment, Biden was unable to recall key dates from his years as vice president, according to Hoare, or even when his beloved son, Beau, died of cancer — an accusation that Biden angrily denied.
So, on the Richter scale, Biden's Mexican gaffe registers as a major earthquake. His remarks were delivered in prime time, watched by millions. The White House had designed the event to confront the problem that Biden ended up exacerbating. It capped a week in which Biden had already conflated France's president, Emmanuel Macron, with his predecessor from the last century, François Mitterrand, and former German chancellor Helmut Kohl with his protégé, Angela Merkel. He immediately gave undecided voters, concerned about Biden's age but concerned about Donald Trump's authoritarianism, permission not to vote for him. In short, it highlighted the insurmountability of Biden's age problem, and how addressing it makes it inexorably worse.
In the age of list-based journalism, Mexico's gaffe immediately joined the list of notorious gaffes. There, though not quite on equal footing, Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables,” and Vice President Dan Quayle misspelled the word “potato” in front of a class of schoolchildren who knew it didn't end with ” e,” and Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, strolled around in a tank wearing an oversized helmet that made him look like one of Hogan’s heroes.
Although Trump is more active, he also suffers from memory problems. In what some have described as a game of sudden aging, the 77-year-old has confounded the leaders of Turkey and Hungary, and most recently misunderstood his Republican rival, Nikki Haley, and his Democratic opponent, Nancy Pelosi. The hashtag #DementiaDon has been trending on social media.
But the cumulative effect of Biden's missteps has been to produce an electoral calculus in which his 81 years become more salient than Trump's many gaffes or even his 91 criminal charges. In a poll conducted by L New York times70 percent of voters in key battleground states agreed with the statement that Biden is “too old to be an effective president.”
