How a good day became a day to forget for US President Joe Biden

As Joe Biden trips over his words and his feet, voters wonder if he is too old to be the President. A scathing new assessment of his memory certainly won’t help.

Analysis: What should have been a good day for Joe Biden quickly became one to forget. At least that won’t be hard for the oldest president in history.

Special counsel Robert Hur announced on Thursday (local time) that he was not recommending criminal charges over the classified materials Biden had stored at his home.

Minutes after his report was published, however, all anyone could talk about was Hur’s description of the President as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

Hur decided not to pursue charges, he said, because it would be too difficult to convince a jury that Biden was guilty “of a serious felony that requires a mental state of wilfulness”.

President Joe Biden trips as he boards Air Force One in 2021. Picture: AFP

It is a scathing assessment that goes to the heart of the most perilous question facing Biden’s re-election campaign: can he convince Americans he is acting deliberately and intentionally as the nation’s commander-in-chief?

Biden’s age – he is 81 and would be 86 by the end of a second term – is by far and away the biggest doubt that voters have about him. To be fair, it was also a problem for him at the 2020 election, when he defeated a similarly ageing Donald Trump. But time has not been kind to Biden, as he increasingly trips over his words as well as his feet.

Twice in the days before Hur’s report was released, he mistakenly referred to European leaders who had been dead for years when he recalled discussions with global counterparts.

Special counsel Robert Hur concluded a jury may think that Mr Biden forgot the classified files in his garage. Picture: Department of Justice

With the issue front of mind for voters, Hur then revealed how Biden’s memory was “significantly limited” in their interviews. He struggled to recall when his vice presidential term started and ended (“In 2009, am I still vice president?”) and even when his son Beau died.

Some of the files were found in a damaged box between a dog bed, a broken lamp and potting soil, which Hur suggested jurors would take to mean Biden had forgotten about them.

Biden’s team is furious about the special counsel’s assessments. In his defence, they point out the interviews took place in the two days after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel – when the President’s mind would rightly have been elsewhere – and that the memory lapses of the other witnesses who were interviewed were treated far less harshly in Hur’s report.

Both fair points. But they shouldn’t expect voters to remember to let him off because of them.

Originally published as How a good day became a day to forget for US President Joe Biden