We now know that Biden aides have painted over every scene with a Panglossian brush, creating a picture at odds with what the rest of the world was seeing.

They burbled with praise for the president’s back-to-back-to-back performances in Normandy, the splashy Los Angeles fundraiser and the Group of Seven summit in Italy. Odd moments of vagueness with the president, when people grabbed his arm to orient him, were dismissed as misinterpretations.

But I was in Paris that week of the Normandy anniversary, and some advisers of French President Emmanuel Macron and European officials were alarmed at Biden’s foggy mien, at his moments of not seeming to know where he was.

I feel like a hostage to Joe’s ego – and the chip on his shoulder. I can have a president fighting for women to control their own bodies as long as I don’t care that Biden isn’t sharp enough to serve until he is 86.

He can handle an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot. But he has to stall for two weeks before having a live White House news conference to reassure those freaked out by his brain freezes at the debate – and his acknowledgment afterward to donors that he “almost fell asleep” at the lectern.

Loading

As Reid Epstein and Maggie Haberman reported in The New York Times, the president told the Democratic governors last Wednesday night that he needs to sleep more and work less.

Alex Thompson of Axios, who has been breaking news of top aides’ stage-managing minutiae – Biden’s sleep schedule, his orthopedic shoes, his shift to a lower door with a shorter staircase to board Air Force One – revealed that the president was “dependably engaged” only from 10am to 4pm.

Yet, on Friday, the Biden campaign outlined an “aggressive travel schedule”, trying to prove he could still handle the job. Biden is in denial and few are willing to tell him, with his every syllable being parsed, that he is sliding to even more humiliation.

The Democrats should give the public what it wants. Voters have said they’d like fresh, exciting voices and a broader choice than Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Loading

Senator Mark Warner is trying to corral other Democratic senators to tell Biden to be the bridge he promised to be. Let’s open the convention and check out all the Democratic stars.

As for those who say the nomination should belong to Harris by right, former Democrat strategist James Carville thinks competition would give her a chance to gain the cred that has eluded her as vice president. Even her booster, James Clyburn, said that if Biden passed the baton, there should be a mini-primary before the convention. And in this election, many think that it would help to have a candidate who can’t be cast as part of the coastal elite.

For decades, Biden was loquacious. But his voice has receded. His staff told him to curb his logorrhea. Later, the inner circle let him do very few interviews and no challenging ones. Biden began sometimes falling into a soft mumble in meetings, or trailing off. The crimped word count is a sign that it’s time to stop charging forward.

Biden told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News on Friday that he would get out of the election race only if the Lord Almighty told him to. When asked how he would feel if his defiance threw the race to Trump, Biden said: “As long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”

But it’s not, not when Biden says that Trump is “a one-man crime wave” and “the biggest threat to our democracy in American history”. It’s time for the president to “see better”.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Get a note direct from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.