Where does Biden’s latest gaffe rate among the biggest political slips?

If only he’d walked out the open door and retreated to the safety of the Oval Office. If only he hadn’t returned to the presidential podium to field a question about the Gaza War, a crisis he seemed almost relieved to address after being pummelled by the White House press corps over his fading memory and advancing age.

On another day, Joe Biden’s answer that Israel’s military conduct in Gaza has been “over the top” – his sharpest rebuke to date – might have produced the main headline. But then, in a near whisper, he confused the president of Mexico with the president of Egypt, a mix-up which instantly became a meme. A gaffe heard around the world.

The worst slips of the political tongue always draw attention to a pre-existing condition. Cognitive decline has long been this 81-year-old president’s Achilles heel. The very reason Biden stood in front of a microphone in the first place was to address the nation about a startling report released by special prosecutor Robert Hur, who decided not to prosecute the president for mishandling classified documents partly because “Mr Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

In an assessment that was arguably more wounding than an indictment, Biden could not remember key dates from his years as vice president, according to Hur, or even when his beloved son, Beau, had died from cancer – an accusation which Biden angrily denied.

On the Richter scale of gaffes, then, Biden’s Mexican muddle registered as a mighty quake. His remarks were delivered in primetime, with millions watching. The White House had choreographed the event to counter a problem that Biden ended up exacerbating. It capped off a week in which Biden had already mixed up the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, with a predecessor from the last century, François Mitterrand, and former German chancellor Helmut Kohl with his protégé, Angela Merkel. It instantly gave wavering voters, worried about Biden’s age but anxious about Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, permission not to vote for him. In short, it underscored the insuperability of Biden’s age problem, and how addressing it inexorably makes it worse.

In this era of listicle journalism, the Mexico slip instantly joined the inventory of infamous gaffes. Up there, though not quite on a par, with Hillary Clinton describing Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables”, vice president Dan Quayle misspelling of the word “potato” in front of a class of schoolchildren who knew it didn’t end with “e”, and Michael Dukakis, the Democrats’ 1988 presidential nominee, being driven around in a tank wearing an oversized helmet that made him look like one of Hogan’s heroes.

Trump, though more energetic, has memory problems, too. In what some have called a game of senility snap, the 77-year-old has confused the leaders of Turkey and Hungary, and recently mistook his Republican rival, Nikki Haley, for his Democratic nemesis Nancy Pelosi. The hashtag #DementiaDon has been trending on social media.

But the cumulative effect of Biden’s gaffes has been to produce an electoral maths in which his 81 years are becoming more salient than Trump’s numerous lapses or even his 91 felony charges. In a poll conducted for The New York Times, 70 per cent of voters in key battleground states agreed with the statement that Biden is “just too old to be an effective president”.

During a weekend in which Trump stated, astonishingly and forebodingly, that he would encourage Vladimir Putin’s Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member state that didn’t meet the alliance’s defence spending targets, it was still Biden’s age that was the main talking point.

Though the parallel would be lost on most Americans, the question is whether Biden’s latest slip will produce the equivalent of a Beazley moment. Mixing up the Australian television presenter, Rove McManus, with the American senior Bush administration official, Karl Rove, prompted Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard to successfully pursue Kim Beazley’s ouster, a generational change of leadership that set up Labor’s 2007 victory over John Howard.

There’s a long list of politicians who’ve said things they regret. Credit: Stephen Kiprillis

In the Australian pantheon of slip-ups, Tony Abbott’s famed gaffe, delivered during the 2013 election campaign, that no one was “the suppository of all wisdom”, didn’t prevent him from becoming prime minister, despite all the inevitable “bum note” jokes. That said, his decision to munch into a raw onion early in 2015 didn’t do much for his prime ministerial standing in the year Malcolm Turnbull ousted him because it reinforced a reputation for being accident-prone.

Will Democrats now make the case, privately if not publicly, for a leadership change in favour of a younger candidate, such as Governor Gavin Newsom of California or Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan? Few think Biden’s Vice President, Kamala Harris, can win.

Harry S. Truman announced he would not seek re-election on March 29, 1952. Lyndon Johnson announced he was stepping aside on March 31, 1968. So late withdrawals are not without precedent. But nor are they without maximum risk. The Democrats went on to lose both the 1952 and 1968 elections.

Over the weekend, Democrats rallied around Biden, accusing the special prosecutor Hur, a Republican and one-time Trump appointee, of cynically producing a partisan report. However, for even the staunchest Biden loyalist, it is becoming harder and harder to shout “four more years” with any certainty or enthusiasm.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present.

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