Can Joe Biden do another four years as president?

Joe Biden walked slowly to the centre of the White House East Room and took his place behind a lectern marked with the presidential seal.

To his left and right were about a dozen Democratic mayors, governors and other officials, watching cautiously as the 81-year-old began reading pre-written remarks from the glass teleprompter in front of him.

Several senior White House aides were there too, anxiously waiting to see how America’s oldest president would deliver one of the biggest election policies of his campaign so far: an executive order to crack down on the US border crisis.

I remember leaving the announcement that day asking myself the same questions I’d been asking for months. Can he really do another four years in this job? Is he actually going to make it to election day? Why don’t Democrats have a Plan B?

Sure, his scripted remarks started steadily enough, but it didn’t take long before his voice became so soft that it sounded, in parts, like he was mumbling. His gait seemed stiffer than ever before, which according to his doctor is the result of an arthritic spine and a past foot injury.

And from my vantage point in the middle of the room with other selected members of the press, there was no passion in his delivery: just the tones of a “well-meaning elderly gentleman” that many Americans fear is no longer up to the task of being their commander-in-chief.

I started covering Joe Biden about four years ago, when I came to Washington on a brief secondment ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

It was an extraordinary time in history: the US was the epicentre of the global pandemic; race riots had erupted across the country following the murder of black man George Floyd under the knee of a white police officer; and the nation felt like a powder keg after four tumultuous years of Donald Trump.

As I noted back then, Biden couldn’t excite a crowd like progressive senator Bernie Sanders, nor did he have the youthful cut-through of rising star Pete Buttigieg, or the policy smarts of senator Elizabeth Warren – all of whom had also run for the presidential nomination that year.

But in an exhausted nation ravaged by COVID-19, economic shock and racial injustice, he turned out to be the right man for the moment: a genuinely decent leader whose tragedy-steeped life allowed him to connect with a nation in its own collective trauma.

So much had changed when I returned to Washington as North America correspondent in January 2022, including Biden himself. His horror debate performance last month was emblematic of just how much.

It was obvious from the moment he walked onto the debate stage, slow and sluggish, that something was wrong. This was a man, after all, who had asked for the contest in the hope of turning the blowtorch on Trump, and had spent almost a week prepping with a team of advisors for his big prime-time moment.

But when he lost his train of thought, struggled to string together coherent sentences and then froze up within minutes, the Biden mirage that his inner sanctum had long sought to cultivate had suddenly vanished.

Like many people his age, Biden has often experienced times in which he has mangled a sentence or made the occasional gaffe. (Mind you, so too has Trump, 78, who, unlike the president, never had to overcome a childhood stutter.)

Australians might recall the day Biden unveiled the new AUKUS submarine pact in 2021, when he forgot Scott Morrison’s name, awkwardly describing the then Australian prime minister as “err … that fella Down Under”.

Or last week when he appeared to refer to himself as the first black woman to serve in the White House alongside a black president, apparently fusing his time as Barack Obama’s vice president to now having Kamala Harris as his own deputy.

But in recent years, these occurrences have become far more frequent and far more worrisome, giving Trump and his allies ample ammunition to undercut the president’s significant legacy of policy achievements.

Yet questions about Biden’s cognitive decline would be consistently rejected by White House officials. Moments of vagueness or disorientation were regularly dismissed as misinterpretations. And global leaders and diplomats who had spent time with the president would often describe him as sharp and engaged.

In March last year, for example, Australia’s departing US ambassador Arthur Sinodinos, described how he’d seen Biden conduct two-hour briefings at the Pacific Island summit “and he is totally in control and on top of his brief”.

In November – a few weeks after the APEC forum in San Francisco – the current ambassador, Kevin Rudd, told this masthead: “We have found him to be a first-class interlocutor in dealing with all the complex issues that we’re wrestling with in the world.”

Loading

Nonetheless, I was somewhat surprised by the lack of pushback within Democratic ranks when Biden announced he was running for yet another four-year term.

After all, in the lead up to the last election, he had presented himself as a transitional figure who would unite the country and then pass the torch to a new generation of leaders.

What’s more, the coronavirus had upended the 2020 election to such an extent that Biden was able to spend much of it campaigning “virtually” from his home in Delaware. Four years later, he would not have the same luxury.

Having criss-crossed the country speaking to voters, I’ve also heard no shortage of concerns – including, most notably, from Democrats.

In South Carolina, for instance, I met 31-year-old Chris Salley, a former Democrat county chair who quit the party in October. He was angered by Biden’s response to the war in Gaza, concerned the president was too old for office, and fed up that young, black voters like him were not being heard.

In New Hampshire, another party member, Kris Make, voted for Biden’s 55-year-old challenger Dean Phillips in the presidential primaries, convinced the octogenarian incumbent was too weak to beat Trump, and “that terrifies me”.

And in Florida, former Republican Ron Filipkowski told me that “Joe Biden was the first Democrat I ever voted for in my life and I did it because I never expected he would run for re-election”.

“I thought that he was a transitional figure who was going to get us out of MAGA Trump world and bring us back into a normal era before passing the baton to someone else,” the lawyer said. “But that hasn’t happened. And if anything, the right has gotten worse.”

As the calls for Biden to stand down get louder, the president and his inner circle are digging in.

He insists his debate performance was just a “bad night” and not emblematic of a more serious cognitive condition. He has vowed to fight on against Trump, suggesting that only “the Lord Almighty” could get him to quit.

And today, he dared his critics and the party “elites” to challenge him for the candidacy at the Democratic National Convention in August.

Loading

“If any of these guys don’t think I should run, run against me,” Biden said during a surprise phone call to MSNBC’s Morning Joe, one of his favourite cable news programs. “Go ahead, announce for president. Challenge me at the convention.”

Time will tell if he makes it that far.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.