Oof.

Biden was as close to a "Weekend at Bernies" situation last night as a president can get without literally being dead.

If you missed the debate last night, consider yourself fortunate. I had to leave a bachelorette party early to cover it, which I knew this was going to be a catastrophic vibe shift before even watching a second of Biden’s performance. (I joked to my friends I was pivoting from literally drinking out of dick straws to metaphorically doing so, though the joke feels less funny now.) I got stuck in traffic on the way home and missed the first 10 minutes or so—which meant that by the time I turned on the TV, the very first words I heard come out of Biden’s mouth happened to be the worst moment of the entire 90 minute train wreck.

The question was about Republican efforts to ban medication abortion, which the Supreme Court recently punted on. Any question about abortion should be a layup for Biden, as it’s one the few issues that the vast majority of the country actually agrees with him on. But for reasons that I will never fully understand, after incoherently rambling a bit about abortion, Biden suddenly pivoted to talking about an undocumented immigrant raping and murdering a woman. You can watch the clip for yourself here, as it pretty much tells you all you need to know about how the debate went for him. My mouth fell open in that moment and remained so for another hour.

My full analysis of the debate, written at 1 am, is over in The Cut. Trump lied through the thing as he always does, and the moderators failed to check him at all; Biden sounded raspy and incoherent and about as close to a Weekend at Bernies situation as a president could get without literally being dead. Even so, the sheer number of headlines from legacy publications calling for Biden to step down is pretty stunning.

Ideally, Biden should have bowed out of this race after his first term, knowing that running for president at 81 years old is a reckless, insane thing to do—especially when the country’s only other option is Donald Trump. But now we are in a situation where the Democratic Party, which is deeply dysfunctional and generally incompetent by all accounts, either has to try to prop up this decaying corpse for another few months and hope that simply being “not as bad as the other guy” is a compelling enough reason for people to turn out and vote for him, or try and get their shit together to replace him and rally around an entirely new candidate with just four months to go until the election. I hope as much as anyone that they take a chance on the latter route at this point—Whitmer, perhaps?—but I just don’t think the party has the courage or the wherewithal to pull it off.

Your thoughts?