I couldn’t help but remember Chris Wallace interviewing Trump in July 2020, about his state of dementia.

“I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions.” Now he has revealed the most difficult of these questions.

“The last questions are much more difficult,” he said. “Like a memory question. It’s, uh, like you’ll go, ‘Person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ So they say, ‘Could you repeat that?’ So I said, ‘Yeah.’ So it’s ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ ‘Okay, that’s very good.’”

“The doctors said very few people can do that, very few people get that,” Trump elaborated, with evident pride.

Of course, Trump wasn’t re-elected as America chose Joe Biden instead. Like Trump, who’s back to salvage whatever dignity he can muster from the humiliation of both his failure and his pathetic inability to accept that he’s a loser, Biden, the old man elected to be the one term moderate president who return us to normality from the insanity of Trump, wants his second term. And while it wasn’t going swell, it wasn’t crashing and burning until he took to the debate stage to prove something against Trump. Prove something, he did.

I wonder what would have happened if Trump was challenged to repeat the five words during the debate, but I suspect the answer is he would have refused to respond to the question and devolved into some nonsensical other reality that only Trump supporters believe exists.

But it was Joe Biden who “beat medicaid,” which did not turn out to be a good thing. To quell the calls for his respite, Biden took a 22-minute interview with George Stephanopoulos during the day at a middle school in Wisconsin to be aired later that evening, in east coast prime time when it would appear he was still awake. How did that work out?

“Are you more frail?”

“Have there been more lapses?”

“Have you had a neurologist, a specialist, do an examination?”

And as Mr. Biden dismissed all those concerns one by one — flicking away the cascading worries about his health, his electability, his capacity to serve in his office for four additional years — Mr. Stephanopoulos zeroed in on the matters of pride, dignity and self-worth swirling beneath the surface.

“Are you sure,” the anchor asked, “you’re being honest with yourself?”

While Stephanopoulos was a friendly and respectful interviewer, he pressed and prodded as much as one can with a kindly, elderly gentleman without coming off as a bully. But make no mistake, Biden’s people workshopped this interview within an inch of his life, from his tieless, two-open-button shirt to his responses to the obvious questions. The best they could come up with was deny, deny, deny. Did Biden think that would work? Did Biden’s people think that would work?

To be fair, Biden had to come up with something to counter the revelation at the debate that he’s not the man he once was. There’s nothing surprising or wrong about an 81-year-old man suffering the normal cognitive decline of aging. You have times when you’re better than others, and times that you’re worse. You sundown after a long day of 10 to 4 presidenting.

But even if he “aced” the interview, assuming that there is such a thing as acing an interview, would it have dispelled the obvious? It’s not Biden’s fault that there was nothing that he could do in an interview that would make people forget that the man who would be president wasn’t all there anymore.

But don’t forget that the other old man bragged that he could remember “person, woman, man, camera, TV,” conclusively proving, according to no less an expert than Ronny Johnson Jackson that he wasn’t demented back then, despite four years of America seeing otherwise.

Biden never stood a chance of having this interview convince people he wasn’t 81 years old. If the other guy who swelled with pride at remembering five words is elected again at age 78, he will be 81 in the third year of his term, and still a vulgar, lying, narcissistic ignoramus.