TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Joe Biden’s Soviet town hall:

Is it more worrying that President Biden might not be in charge, or that he actually is in charge? Nobody has the power to force a president to undergo the indignities that Biden went through on Thursday night’s CNN town hall. As with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, either someone convinced him to do it or he insisted on doing it. Either way, you could not watch him, clenching his fists as though holding a Zimmer frame while Anderson Cooper spoon-fed him a prompt, without feeling that we are heading nowhere good.

On the same day that Donald Trump evoked the ghosts of Soviet propaganda by launching a social-media app called Truth — the Russian translation is Pravda — Joe Biden attempted a Brezhnev-era theatrical of his own. In the Eighties, we laughed at the Soviet leaders’ transparently crude bumbling before the cameras. Their low-grade production values and rambling, slurred speeches exposed them as a decayed and senile regime. This was the opposite of the intended effect, but the US set the global standard in political imagery, so the Soviets felt they had to keep up. They beat themselves at our game.

To be fair, we’re not quite at the Soviet Union phase just yet: CNN’s Townhall Crowd Audibly Giggles As Biden Becomes Confused Mid Sentence.