Five simple nouns: Is that all it takes to lead the free world?

President Joe Biden delivers remarks during the NATO 75th anniversary celebration.

The Democrats are rallying around Joe Biden while the rest of the country wonders out loud about the extent of his degeneration and decline. Biden’s mental health has become the talking point in the US, if not the whole the world. That other “d” word, dementia, is trotted out routinely. In political terms, it’s worth remembering dread and doom also start with “d”.

It’s an almost perfect mix of denial and derision. The DNC has tried to rally the troops. Big and powerful Democrats have come out, hand on heart, declaring Biden a man untroubled by the ravages of age, while other senior colleagues who urge Biden to withdraw his candidacy receive calls politely and then not so politely telling them to please stop talking about Biden’s neurological shortcomings.

It’s not working.

Questions were asked directly of Biden as to his state of cognitive function on Sunday in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on America’s ABC network.

Had the President undergone “specific cognitive tests and have you had a neurologist, a specialist, do an examination?”

“No one said I had to,” Biden replied. “No one said … No. I’m good.”

Donald Trump

It wasn’t reassuring. Biden’s descent into geriatrics could not have been more marked if Joe and Jill were seen patiently waiting outside Arby’s for the early bird specials to kick in.

When directly asked if he would undertake cognitive testing and release the results publicly, Biden baulked and claimed that, as President, he does a neurology test everyday. No, Joe. That’s the lunch menu.

South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham went a step further in calling for mandatory presidential cognitive testing of a type he probably does not know exists but is a standard, quick diagnosis tool in gerontological medicine around the world, known as the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test (MoCA).

“All nominees for president going into future should have neurological exams as part of an overall physical exam … Let’s test Trump. Let’s test Biden. Let’s test the line of succession”, the 68-year-old Graham told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, local time.

“This is a wake-up call for the country,” he added. “We need to make sure that the people who are going to be in the line of succession are capable of being commander-in-chief under dire circumstances.”

Graham believed Biden was in denial and posed all manner of perils for the smooth functioning of the executive branch, saying: “This is a dangerous time for the American people to have somebody … leading the ship of state who seems to be compromised.”

Asked if Trump, 78, should have the test, too, Graham said: “Yes, yes, I think both.”

But Trump did have a version or a form of the MoCA in 2018 and we know this because in the Donald’s own words, he “aced” it.

The precise results? We don’t know if the 30-minute MoCA test ran from go to whoa or was truncated in some way. What we can safely conclude from Trump’s test is that the baseline for determining a POTUS’s neurological health or otherwise is now set at him or her remembering five unrelated nouns in a passage of speech read out for a minute containing around 60 nouns. If you can remember five of the 60, congratulations, you can be president of the United States.

Lindsey Graham

Trump proudly repeated his noun mantra for the camera four times to a startled Fox News journalist: “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”

“It’s actually not that easy,” Trump said. “But for me it was easy.”

Telling the story later, Trump got the doctor’s name wrong. But at least he did it. Biden is refusing.

One wonders how Biden would handle a MoCA. I don’t want to be unkind but if the leader of the free world can’t perform the same basic memory functions I’d expect of your average adult Labrador, then it might be time for a long lie down. But that’s where we are now. Pass the Adderall and the Penny Pads.

Biden’s speech celebrating the 75th anniversary of NATO in DC on Tuesday was said to be a great opportunity for him to recover after the debate. The general view after the speech was that Biden had been “strong” and “confident”. The talk earlier from some Democrat sources had been that Biden’s NATO speech was his last chance at a recovery from the disaster of the first presidential debate. That race has been run. Shutting the gate now after the horse has not only bolted but fled, galloping wildly, only to appear as a dot on the horizon briefly before vanishing altogether three weeks ago is a fool’s errand.

It does raise the delicious though unlikely event that the presidential debate could be scrapped in favour of televised cognitive testing where Presidents Biden and Trump line up and work through a series of exhaustive word association tests, mnemonic exercises and building things with blocks before a live television audience.

Joseph Heller

Then it’s onto the physical trials. Jenga at 20 paces. Hungry, Hungry Hippos moderated by Sean Hannity. And as the two men quibbled over Biden’s golf handicap at the first debate, Bingo Bango Bongo over 18 gruelling holes at the local pitch and putt. Winner takes the White House.

It could lead to the resurrection of free-to-air television if handled properly. Or it could end up in a fully blown civil war in the US. Either way, circling the wagons around Biden, with or without cognitive testing, should be shouting, if not screaming, to all senior Democrats, including Joe and his wife Jill, that when questions of the President’s mental decline are being asked directly during a softball interview, it is a sign time is up. Or to quote a line from Joseph Heller’s parody of US government and academia, Good As Gold: “Don’t force anything mechanical, never kick anything inanimate, and don’t fart around with the inevitable.”