There’s been a lot of debate about what Biden’s mental condition is. And his debate performance provided some clarity for that debate.

Biden can memorize volumes of information. And then spit it back out. He did that during the State of the Union. And he did it again at the debate.

The problem is that debates aren’t speeches.

Biden opened with a rambling infodump while Trump opened the way he usually does, speaking impromptu while tossing in anecdotes and attacks that make key points. Trump’s style is better suited to a debate than Biden’s is. Trump gets sidetracked and detours back to key points. Biden however gets sidetracked and starts spitting out insane gibberish.

Believe it or not this isn’t a new problem for him. There’s videos of him doing the same thing for 50 years.

But never this bad.

There have been lots of bad debate moments for politicians, but Biden may have racked up the single worst collection of them ever. Take this question about abortion, which he starts fine with and then somehow turns into an insane discourse about illegal aliens and people raping everyone.

Biden goes on absolute unhinged rant about women being raped by their in laws, spouses, brothers, and sisters to justify illegal immigrants raping and killing American citizens. pic.twitter.com/6dykTTlfpJ

— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) June 28, 2024

A disaster isn’t the word for this one.

What’s going on is that Biden can’t speak impromptu and his handlers prepped him with infodumps. And those infodumps were delivered in the rambling fashion of a man reading or reciting them too quickly. I don’t usually go with conspiracy theories, but Biden was constantly looking down and appeared to be trying to process something while Trump was speaking. Whether he had notes, some sort of earpiece or was just remembering his lines, he appeared out of it on the split screen.

When Biden lost his place in a prepared speech, he tried to keep talking and somehow an abortion question got mixed up with a response to illegal aliens raping Americans.

That’s not a mistake a human being makes, it’s a mistake a robot makes.

And that’s what Biden really was here. A human teleprompter. But people don’t make very good teleprompters in a debate. Biden did better when he spoke normally and made simple points and attacks then when he tried to deliver prepared remarks and infodumps. He never did well, but at least his head was above water.

So what really happened is a politician with diminished capacity was over-prepared by an overly controlling staff trying to hide his weaknesses only to expose them instead.

Presidents, as Democrats pointed out, do have worse debate performances initially. Reagan, Obama and Trump did. They tend to be overprepared and defensive. But Reagan, Obama and Trump bounced back.

Can Biden bounce back? That’s the problem. There’s nothing to bounce back to.

At best his people can stop the infodumps and keep it simple, but it won’t fix the underlying problem.

You can’t debate if you can’t think. The inability to make sense in real time is at least partly in Biden’s case a form of mental disability. Biden can memorize speeches, but he can’t discuss an issue in a coherent fashion.

Biden can talk, but he can’t think. Which means he also can’t run the country.