Ben Lowry: I was a nervous wreck watching Joe Biden in the debate against Trump - his mental decline was clear on his Belfast visit last year

A man in Arizona in a cowboy hat watches the debate between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump on TV. Ben Lowry was watching in Belfast, terrified that Mr Biden was so mentally fragile he would make some humiliating blunder (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

The current president, Mr Biden, was every bit as bad as I feared. His mental decline and physical frailty was on display for 90 agonising minutes. I was a nervous wreck, in case humiliating would happen and be flashed around the world, such as him trip face-first or walk backwards into the set or his trousers fall down or him suddenly start singing a song, or some other horror.

For more than a year I had said that I could not envisage the current president, Mr Biden, getting through such a debate. I thought this all the more after seeing him up close at Ulster University at Easter last year for the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement. While President Biden appeared to hold things together in his speech that day, there was something clearly wrong about his delivery. He was almost slurring his speech and he seemed unable to stray beyond his script at all, yet Mr Biden is a supremely confident public performer who when younger would have been able to make charming off the cuff remarks and engage with the audience.

Advisors to Mr Biden insisted that he was sharp in private and in command of complex matters. I did wonder if those of us who thought he had some form of senility were wrong. Indeed I hoped so – for humane reasons.

Like people everywhere I have seen the onset of dementia in others: that slow process of dread in which you fear that a loved one might be losing their memory but hope not, then gradually – perhaps over years – your fear is confirmed.

This perhaps is one reason that I was hypervigilant for signs of President Biden’s slowness in the 2020 presidential campaign. The onset of covid meant that it was easier to keep him out of the spotlight then than in a normal presidential campaign, where he would be campaigning with voters. After he was elected there was a huge delay before he did a press conference. And I thought: crikey, if he is bad at the start of a first four-year term, what will he be like after eight, at the end of a second term?

We have all shuddered at scenes of President Biden freezing in public, wandering out of ceremonies or becoming otherwise confused.

Mr Biden couldn't even get through his closing statement yesterday without losing his train of thought.

In a head-to-head contest against Trump he will lose.

It is unforgivable that Democratic Party leaders have let things get to this stage, when they had a duty to put up a moderate politician, who is physically and mentally healthy, to stand against a man, Trump, who has been such a monumentally vain and despicable politician and who has done such harm to the pillars of American democracy and the western alliance. Instead, these dogmatic liberals have allowed Donald Trump to make himself look like a far more alert, coherent and stable candidate for the White House than the now tragically hapless Mr Biden.