Well, right on the heels of President Joe Biden referring twice to 2021 interactions with world leaders who were deceased at the time, the Justice Department special prosecutor in charge of investigating Biden’s handling of classified materials went and wrote a report explaining that he is not recommending an indictment of the president because, among other things, Biden would come across to jurors as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” rather than someone who knowingly violated the law.

The prosecutor, Robert Hur, explained this statement by writing in his report that Biden struggled during an interview to remember which years certain events occurred, and whether he was vice president at the time; he also wrote that Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.” (It was 2015.) On the heels of thatˆ—a lot of things are happening on the heels of things right now, a real widening-gyre situation—Biden held a Thursday night press conference to address the question of his mental faculties, among other topics. And then he referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the president of Mexico.

Spiritually, this is the first major news cycle of the 2024 general election, in that it is the first time that Democrats have engaged in the kind of mass spiraling about being doomed because of this or that news event that characterized the 2020 race.

To wit: The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman........

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