Nearly 30 years ago, in 1998, I watched the US President Bill Clinton working the crowd on a visit to Northern Ireland in the aftermath of the Belfast Agreement. He was in serious trouble at home over the Monica Lewinsky affair, and certainly in bad odour with his wife Hillary, who maintained a notably cool distance from him during their walkabouts. But he nonetheless retained an unusual ability to draw energy, almost visibly, from the excitement of the assembled public, and to cast it back liberally in their direction: as he approached the steps to the stage at Belfast’s Waterfront Hall, he gave a gratuitous little shoulder shimmy that suggested a boundless appetite for whatever was about to unfold. The photographer next to me whispered, accurately: ‘He’s Elvis, and Tony Blair’s Cliff Richard.’

America, perhaps more than most nations, values displays of energy in its presidents. It’s part of the essential vitality of a superpower, the choreographed theatre of importance that rolls into town with an entourage of secret service agents in sunglasses and sharp suits muttering into walkie-talkies. Unlike the quasi-mummified, enigmatic leaders that were historically thrown up by the arcane selection processes of Communist countries, the US president had been directly chosen by the people, touched by the glamour of the American dream. The US sold itself as the land of the free, and the president needed to look as if he was enjoying its freedoms. One of the problems that so many voters had with Joe Biden, particularly towards the end of his presidency, was that he no longer generated the reassurance of presidential energy, but instead a form of contagious anxiety. Onlookers found themselves on tenterhooks, willing him on against the odds: they were never entirely sure whether he was going to make it to the side of the stage, or the end of a sentence, without some variety of collapse.

When Joe and Jill Biden planned his recent ‘redemption tour’ in which a frail but determined Biden doggedly defended his political legacy – not least his fateful decision to run against Trump in 2024, abandoning the race only 107 days before the election – they may not have envisaged it turning out quite like this. A round of fresh media interviews, in which Biden was often closely flanked by his wife, simply reignited the original argument over his capabilities: he continued to stoke it by doggedly maintaining that he could have beaten Trump. Democrat strategists have reportedly been infuriated by the resurrection of this discussion, at a point when a fragmented party is struggling to reinvent itself in the eyes of the electorate.

Their frustration wasn’t helped by an explosive account of pre-election Democrat machinations in a new book, Original Sin, which blasted a hole in a large chunk of Biden’s defensive narrative. The book, by Alex Thomson, a US political reporter, and Jake Tapper, a CNN anchor, forensically detailed the extreme measures which Biden’s family and close aides had contrived to hide his intensifying physical and cognitive deterioration from the press and public. What uninformed observers had suspected from Biden’s public appearances – that he was increasingly unsteady and forgetful, culminating in an undeniably catastrophic public debate with Trump – was amply confirmed by a series of insider interviews with Democrat staffers now willing to spill the beans. In interviews Tapper said that the balance between the ‘functioning’ and ‘non-functioning’ versions of Biden had begun to tip until by 2023 ‘non-functioning’ Biden was predominant: under pressure, crucial data, information, and names were all floating away from him.

Alongside his acute political instinct, there has long been something blurred about Biden’s style of communication, syncopated by a suppressed stutter and rich in folksy anecdotes that frequently wandered nearer fictional narrative than precise truth. But the blurring had begun to shift into intermittent confusion: at one event he reportedly failed to recognise George Clooney, a major party fundraiser whom he had known for 15 years. He referred publicly to President Zelensky as President Putin, and to Kamala Harris as ‘Vice-President Trump’. The political cost to the Democrats of his delay in abandoning the campaign was high. David Plouffe, a former Obama campaign manager who was drafted in to assist the late-launching Harris campaign, put it bluntly to the authors: ‘He totally fucked us.’ Such an analysis may neglect to take account of wider reasons behind the Democrat defeat, including the party’s increasing emphasis on identity politics over those of class and economics, but it sums up much of the party mood nonetheless.

The news that Joe Biden is suffering from an aggressive form of prostate cancer prompted a briefly decorous lull in the overheating debate. Democrats and Republicans alike dispatched best wishes for his treatment and recovery, including Donald Trump, who said he and Melania were ‘saddened’ and hoped for Joe’s ‘fast and successful recovery’. The Trump family sensitivity didn’t last long: Donald Trump Jr, never slow to punch a wound, quickly asked on X how ‘Dr Jill Biden’ had failed to spot metastatic cancer ‘or is this yet another coverup???’. The wider MAGA narrative – now endorsed by Trump himself – has since become that a ‘treasonous’ cabal of Democrats had been cynically concealing Biden’s health issues for years while signing off policies with the ‘autopen’, something Democrats strongly deny.

Even so, little in the recent flurry of revelations reinforces Biden’s apparently unshakeable belief that he could have won against Trump and served a second term as president. That is not what the polls indicated at the time – and if Biden had indeed been re-elected, he would now be in the midst of a serious health crisis only five months into office. As others have observed, there is something Shakespearean in his story, that of a stubborn Lear unwilling to leave the stage, flattered by an inner circle, dubbed the ‘politburo’ by party insiders. They were keenly aware that their influence was yoked to his continuing status: his closest aide, Mike Donilon, reportedly demanded $4 million to advise on the 2024 campaign. The thick strand of tragedy in Biden’s family history – the 1972 car crash that killed his first wife and young daughter; the untimely death from cancer of his son Beau in 2015; the flagrant addictions of his errant son Hunter – had become knitted into a political journey defined by never giving up. It was a virtue that became a flaw.

In Biden and Trump, the US electorate were presented with two men who, in different ways, were unfit to be president. With Biden, the problem was physical and cognitive; with Trump, it was primarily moral and behavioural. Yet for all Biden’s flashes of ruthlessness – such as the icy display of US self-interest in its culpably reckless departure from Afghanistan – both he and his ‘politburo’ broadly subscribed to a more traditional view of both the presidency and America, one marked by diplomatic courtesy, measurable policy achievements and solid backing for Nato. The irony is that Trump, at 78, has also generated public concern at times about his physical fitness for office, and his appearances are regularly marked by a fusillade of demonstrable untruths which far exceeds Biden’s mix-ups. But the US electorate saw energy in him, and rewarded it. It may have been the questionable energy of the carnival barker, the pugilistic business tycoon, or the vengeful mafia boss, but it was energy nonetheless, with its own recognisable antecedents in the US cultural landscape.

Thus far in his second term, Trump’s energy – liberated from the restraining advisors of his first term – has indeed been remarkable. It has included the slashing of US aid programmes; selective abandonment of due process; international games of ‘chicken’ over tariffs; attacks on federal workers and the judiciary; open pursuit of profit from presidential office, and chaotic personal interventions in conflicts such as Ukraine and the Middle East. When the bill comes in, as inevitably it will, US voters may well find themselves marvelling at how the cost of energy rose so high.