California’s far-left governor spent the hour before Thursday night’s debate in the media spin room ostensibly cheerleading for a president he knows he is about to replace, either in four years or four months.

“This is it,” Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters ahead of the primetime event, going after former President Donald Trump more than promoting President Joe Biden. “This is liberalism versus illiberalism.”

“This is very sobering for me and I hope for the American people,” Newsom added.

What was more sobering, however, was when the 81-year-old incumbent took the stage and put his senility on display. Here are some of the headlines Americans woke up to Friday morning:

The Trump campaign was quick to capitalize on Biden’s poor performance with an ad highlighting some of the president’s worst moments.

Immediately after the debate ended, CNN’s John King noted “a deep, a wide and a very aggressive panic” engulfing the Democratic Party.

“It started minutes into the debate and it continues right now,” King said. “It involves party strategists. It involves elected officials. It involves fundraisers. And they are having conversations about the president’s performance which they think was dismal.”

“Some of those conversations,” King added, “include ‘should we go to the White House and ask the president to step aside?’ Other conversations are about ‘should prominent Democrats go public with that call?’”

CNN’s John King reflects on #CNNDebate: “This was a game-changing debate…there is a deep a wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic

It was a little pathetic to watch Joe Biden on stage last night mumble so incoherently that nobody could doubt he’s simply a figurehead for leader of the free world. It raises the thought: While he’s been presented as president for three and a half years, who has really been executing the powers and duties of the office?

While Donald Trump’s performance showed him in full command of his will and voice, his own four years in office also pointed in a similar direction. It wasn’t because he was merely a prop for president, like Joe Biden. It was because Trump’s insistence that he energetically carry out the mandate voters gave him conflicted very visibly with the belief among many in the federal government that, at this point, all presidents are props — even the ones who have full command of their faculties.

Montana radio host Aaron Flint pointed out that replacing Biden with another Democrat will still leave in power the people currently using him like a presidential skin suit. That’s also true, to a large extent, of replacing Biden with Trump.

Now, there is indeed a serious difference between a president with dementia and a president without. Certainly nobody could use Trump like a skin suit. Even staff, pollsters, and advisers can’t micromanage him like they micromanage many politicians. However, because we’ve already had the benefit of a Trump presidency, we can see that even a president as vigorous and defiant as he struggled to truly exercise authority

Just before Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton faced off in their second presidential debate, then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper met in the White House with a small group of advisers to President Obama to hatch a plan to put out a first-of-its-kind intelligence report warning the voting public that “the Russian government” was interfering in the election by allegedly breaching the Clinton campaign’s email system.

On Oct. 7, 2016 — just two days before the presidential debate between Trump and Clinton — Clapper issued the unprecedented intelligence advisory with Obama’s personal blessing. It seemed to lend credence to what the Clinton camp was telling the media — that Trump was working with Russian President Vladimir Putin through a secret back channel to steal the election. Sure enough, the Democratic nominee pounced on it to smear Trump at the debate.

And that wouldn’t be the only historically consequential maneuver for Clapper, whose role in skewing presidential campaigns might deserve a special place in the annals of nefarious election meddling — by, in this case, a domestic, not foreign, intelligence service.

In 2020, he was the lead signatory on the “intelligence” statement that discredited the New York Post’s October bombshell exposing emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which documented how Hunter’s corrupt Burisma paymasters had met with Joe Biden when he was vice president. It was released Oct. 19, just three days before Trump and Biden debated each other in Nashville. Fifty other U.S. “intelligence community” officials and experts signed the seven-page document, which claimed “the