Sadly, it’s now impossible to deny that Joe Biden, the most powerful man in the world, is increasingly loopy – and getting worse, writes FREDDY GRAY

Unlike You-Know-Who, Joe Biden didn’t duck his D-Day duties last Thursday. But was he really all there? The videos suggest he wasn’t.

At one of the most important ceremonies, the 81-year-old commander-in-chief tried to sit down at the wrong time, but then changed his mind.

His wife, First Lady Jill, put her hand over her mouth to whisper something urgent to her ailing husband, but to no avail. The Leader of the Free World stood motionless for several excruciating seconds – locked in a semi-crouch.

It was just one of many serious senior moments throughout the day. As French President Emmanuel Macron waited to happily hand over the hero veterans, Jill led her husband by the hand off the stage. And when Joe got a chance to sit down, he seemed to fall asleep.

Donald Trump’s son, Donald Jr., wasted no time in calling Biden “a disgrace” — and while no decent person should make fun of the elderly, it’s hard to disagree.

On Monday, Biden suffered another painful senile episode. Celebrating “Juneteenth,” the ultra-woke federal holiday he signed into law to celebrate the end of slavery, he seemed to freeze again, his gaze a million miles away for a few terrible seconds as the people around him danced away.

It’s all so awkward. The president has endured these indignities on the world stage for three years — and it’s only getting worse. His campaign team often accuses their enemies of manipulating the images to make him seem more gaga than he is. But there’s no denying that Joe gives them plenty of humiliating material to work with.

Worse still, as November 5, presidential election day, approaches and his schedule inevitably becomes more demanding, the president’s decline appears to be accelerating rapidly, at exactly the wrong time.

As a result, his re-election campaign is becoming increasingly ugly to watch. He now experiences what Shakespeare called the “second childishness and mere forgetfulness” that attend a man’s last years.

According to White House doctors, Biden suffers from “significant arthritis of the spine,” which is increasingly limiting his movement. That’s why he wears black sneakers with thick soles to aid his mobility. It’s also why Biden’s handlers are desperately trying to minimize the amount of time the president moves alone.

His press conferences are tightly staged and the White House now has a PR protocol in which several of the president’s entourage walk as slowly as possible next to him as he shuffles icily across the lawn between the White House and Marine One, the presidential helicopter. The idea is to hold back more images of his blatant unreliability.

Of course, physical disabilities need not detract from great leadership. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was in charge when Allied forces stormed the French beaches eighty years ago, was stricken with polio and used a wheelchair, and today no one would doubt his ability to lead.

But Biden’s health problems also appear to be mental. He can’t appear in public without looking lost. His childhood stutter, which he managed to overcome as a younger man, seems to take revenge in his final years. The First Lady now appears to effectively function as the First Career, regularly guiding her befuddled husband through his public appearances.

Joe Biden responds to comedian and actor Roy Wood, Jr. during a Juneteenth concert on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington in June 2024

Even Biden’s allies have given up hiding their concerns. Last week, in a significant breach of omerta in Democratic circles on the issue of Biden’s health, senior sources close to the president revealed that Biden is indeed showing his age in meetings. This confirms what Republicans who have dealt with him in recent months have been saying. In January, during a congressional meeting on national security and Ukraine, it is alleged that Biden spoke so weakly that people struggled to hear him, paused absently in mid-sentence and closed his eyes for so long. Assistants feared he had fallen asleep.

Surveys show that only four in 10 Americans are confident that Biden can even remember his own age, while only one in three think he can fully digest national security briefings. This widespread perception of Biden’s weakness is considered one of the main reasons why Donald Trump will beat him in November election polls.

It’s not just Biden’s public appearances that have voters thinking he’s not up to the task. As his thoughts wander, it becomes clear that his government is increasingly led by his cabinet and senior members of his team.

It was often said that his first chief of staff, Ron Klain, was the real power broker in the White House – and many believe his replacement, Jeff Zients, now discreetly fills the same role. There are also rumors that as conflict rages from Gaza to Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan are the ones calling the shots.

Joe Biden is helped to his feet after a fall during the graduation ceremony at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado on June 1, 2023

It will be almost impossible for Team Biden to deny reality. In February, special counsel Robert Hur announced that Biden could not be held responsible for mishandling classified files — a crime for which Donald Trump has been indicted — because the current president was “an older man with a bad memory.”

Democrats responded by calling Hur a Republican factory: Vice President Kamala Harris said his report was “clearly politically motivated.” But the fact remains that because of his age, Biden was not prosecuted for committing the same crime as Donald Trump, the 78-year-old spring chicken in this year’s gerontocratic election.

It is a problem that has been going on for a long time.

In 1988, Biden suffered two brain aneurysms. His surgeon later said he showed no signs of cognitive decline as a result.

Still, some say Biden’s traumatic personal life has affected his health. The president’s first wife, Neilia Hunter, and 13-month-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident in 1972. His son Beau died in 2015 from a brain tumor called glioblastoma.

And yesterday it was announced that his surviving son, Hunter, faces a 25-year prison sentence — and another trial for tax crimes — after being convicted of lying about illegal drug use when he bought a gun in 2018.

Biden has always made unbearable statements in public — as a fit young senator he was known as “the gaffe machine” — but his many friends in Washington tended to dismiss his missteps and verbal blunders. However, rumors of his mental decline – and a conspiracy of silence to cover it up – have grown louder over the years.

During his successful bid to win the White House in 2020, his staff blasted loud music as he mingled with the crowd, seemingly to drown out the worrying conversations their candidate was having. The Covid pandemic has also helped Biden’s candidacy immensely, as lockdowns allowed him to run much of the campaign from his basement in Delaware.

Biden listens to speakers at the World Leaders’ Summit in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2021

Small-minded commentators like to suggest that Biden is “boosted” for special occasions – that is, his medical team provides him with a cocktail of drugs. That explains why he so often sounds angry on stage, it is said. On Monday, for example, the Republican attack machine began circulating images of him on social media drinking a peculiarly colored liquid from a plastic bottle — much like a tennis player doped between matches.

“This mysterious orange drink is the only thing keeping Crooked Joe Biden from falling into a deep sleep,” the Republican National Committee tweeted.

But if Biden drugged himself this week, it doesn’t seem to have helped. That same evening he slurred his speech incoherently from the teleprompter. “Since the founding of our ideals, we have not fully understood the American soil,” he said gnomically.

The truth is that Biden, like most people in their 80s, has good days and bad days. The worry for Democrats is that as the campaign heats up this summer, he will suffer more of the latter.

Some insiders still whisper that when the Democratic National Committee meets in Chicago in August, Biden will be so weak that the party will jettison him in favor of a younger, sharper alternative. One problem with that theory is that the natural replacement would be Kamala Harris, who has performed terribly as a veep and consistently scores even worse than him.

Biden rubs his eyes during the World Leaders’ Summit at COP26 in Glasgow

It is also unclear how Biden can be pressured to resign – since, for all his mistakes, he shows no inclination to do so. Insiders say that Jill Biden would be the only person who could convince the president that enough is enough, but for now she too seems convinced that the show must go on.

Without a certain stubbornness, you can’t succeed on the front lines of American politics for five decades — and Biden is known for his grit. During the Obama years, he was often annoyed that he was not treated with enough respect. “My masculinity is non-negotiable,” he reportedly said in 2008 when discussing how much power he should have in office.

That macho pride is still intact, and is perhaps the one characteristic he clings to most as his faculties melt away.

Many Americans say they are terrified of what “The Donald” might do in a second term. But if the alternative is four more years of an increasingly crazy Joe Biden, it’s no wonder Trump appears to be on course — barring divine intervention — to win again in 2024.

Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator.