Biden was set up to fail at the debate. He should not be allowed to fail in November.

Thursday night’s debate was always going to be disappointing.

In one corner, you had an incumbent president with a 38% favorable rating. In the other, an ex-president challenger with an only slightly better 42% approval. Millions of people have already considered voting for an anti-vaccine environmentalist with a brain worm instead of the two front-runners. So even before the debate, many of us were saying “it can’t get any worse.”

Then, it got worse.

From the first statements, Joe Biden seemed hoarse and mumbly, stopping midsentence, losing his train of thought, saying things that couldn’t possibly be what he meant — “we finally beat Medicare,” for example, was particularly baffling.

It was not an isolated incident. That would be understandable; anyone can trip over a word or two. But no. Despite a few flashes of coherence, the president looked for the most part like a man who had no business on the debate stage.

It was truly hard to watch.

We should feel sad for Biden, but we should also be angry at those who put him in this impossible position.

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The whole performance made me think of my grandfather, who was about the age Biden is now when his once strong and intelligent mind started to become unable to function as it once did. Anyone who has dealt with an older relative in such a state knows that feeling of dread.

When his children had to make the tough decisions to take away his car keys and, eventually, move him into a nursing home, it was hard on everyone. But that is what adults must do: make the hard choices.

Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans had been saying for months — years — that Biden was in steep cognitive decline. Videos of him have been circulating for some time now that show him appearing bewildered and confused at various events. It was similar to a couple of incidents when Mitch McConnell froze up while speaking to the press last year. After those incidents, the Kentucky Senator announced he would step down from the job of majority leader. It was the right decision, though I’m sure it couldn’t have been an easy one.

But when Biden had similar issues, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the videos were being spread “in bad faith,” and even that they were “cheap fake” images, somehow. We were told not to believe our eyes. Thanks to the ideological bifurcation of national media, this was believable, for a time. If all you watched and read was news media from outlets that were favorable to the president, the campaign’s spin may have seemed like the truth.

But there was no way to spin the events of Thursday night. NBC News’s Chuck Todd said Biden “looks like the caricature that conservative media has been painting.” The scales dropped from the eyes of a lot of left-wing media personalities that night. But the spin is still powerful — Todd calling it a caricature, for example. If it’s happening before your eyes, it’s not an exaggeration: it’s real.

No one but Biden and his doctors know exactly what’s going on in his head. But on Thursday night, he looked a lot like my grandfather did after his dementia began. When that happens to the leader of the free world, it is cause for alarm.

Now, the collective silence is broken, and talk of replacing Biden on the November ballot is echoing through the mainstream press. “The movement to convince Biden to not run is real,” one House Democrat told Jonathan Martin at Politico. Peter Baker at the New York Times reports that Biden’s performance “prompted a wave of panic among Democrats and reopened discussion of whether he should be the nominee at all.”

There was a good time for this discussion. It was 2022.

Now, we’re in June 2024, and the primaries are over. There are 3,894 delegates pledged to Joe Biden and scheduled to arrive in Chicago in August to renominate him. Since he took office — even before he took office — Biden and his team have characterized their effort as a mission to “save democracy” from Donald Trump. And all the while, they’ve been doing so by working to nominate and then renominate a man they knew was not up to the job.

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If they were serious about that supposed mission — and if they cared about the president at a personal level — the people who knew Biden best, the people who worked with him every day, would have recognized this problem and implored him to step aside in favor of a more capable candidate.

But they didn’t. They clung to power and lied to the American people about the president’s health. They lied and lied until it became impossible to sustain the falsehood, and then they panicked.

Swapping out a presidential candidate at the last minute — especially one who doesn’t want to leave — is nearly impossible. And the only plausible substitute is Vice President Kamala Harris, who polls even worse against Trump and has an approval rating similar to the president’s at 39%. But to replace both Harris and Biden is politically impossible — Harris would see it (quite correctly!) as a massive betrayal and the voters would, too.

No, this is the bed the Democratic establishment has made for themselves. For all their pious proclamations of saving democracy, what they’ve been doing the whole time is saving their own jobs and influence.

Biden should step aside for the good of his country, that much is clear now. But it is also clear that no one close to him has the courage to tell the man that it’s time to take away the keys.