Aloha and goedenavond from Gotham City, where the sight of my beloved Dodgers taking two of three this weekend from the Bronx Blockheads at Yankee Stadium was almost—almost—enough to allay the sense of alarm, apprehension, and abhorrence swelling in my soul over the increasingly likely prospect of the Celtics hanging an 18th NBA championship banner from the rafters at Boston’s TD Garden. (Why do I hate the Lame-Ass Leprechauns so much? I can’t state my reasons as pithily as LeBron has summarized his, but trust me, they are plentiful and unimpeachable.)

In tonight’s edition of The Best & The Brightest: Impolitic, we shift focus away from that infinitely expanding attention sponge, Donald Trump, and turn to President Biden, whose first post-verdict week of big-stage presidential events and brass-tacks politicking seemed destined for derailment by a much-discussed and even more-debated Wall Street Journal magnum opus on his advanced age and allegedly escalating infirmity—until, quelle surprise, it wasn’t.

But first…

🎙️We have liftoff: Last week, with just the right amount of fanfare (i.e., the bare minimum) we rolled out the new twice-weekly podcast I’ve been promising since I took up residence here in Greater Puckistan: Impolitic With John Heilemann (which, for all the O.G.s out there, is really a retooled, rebranded, bigger, better version of my previous pod, Hell & High Water). Thanks a ton to the audio maestros at Audacy, Puck’s podcast partner on this venture and others, for their invaluable assistance in lighting the candle and launching the show into low-Earth orbit.

If you haven’t already, check out the inaugural episode, with former federal prosecutor and Robert Mueller lieutenant Andrew Weissmann, in which Andrew declares that, if he were clad in Judge Juan Merchan’s robes, he’d toss Trump in the hoosegow without hesitation (though he wouldn’t say for how long, which struck me as kinda chickenshit… c’mon counselor). Then immediately download the second episode, with The New York Times’s top-grade Trumpologist, Maggie Haberman, who argues convincingly that what we’re now hearing from 45 and his allies about weaponizing the justice system to punish Trump’s political foes—a strategy the MAGA crowd has taken to calling “lawfare” when they accuse Biden and his fellow Democrats of doing it—is way more serious and way more disturbing than the all-talk, no-action bluster he’s spewed on this topic in the past.

⚖️Way down in the hole: Speaking of lawfare, you may have seen the news last week that a federal judge ordered Steve Bannon to surrender himself to authorities on July 1 to begin his four-month prison sentence following his conviction on contempt of Congress charges. Outside the courtroom, Bannon was characteristically defiant bordering on delusional, thundering, “There’s not a prison built that will ever shut me up.”

Predictably, the wailing and gnashing from the MAGA-sphere was deafening, starting with a Truth Social post from the wailer-in-chief himself: “A Total and Complete American Tragedy,” wrote Trump, who went on to say that “The unAmerican Weaponization of our Law Enforcement has reached levels of Illegality never thought possible before.” On X, Matt Gaetz rued “the death of the judicial system in America,” while Marjorie Taylor Greene howled that Biden’s “D.O.J. is completely corrupt.”

🤷One small problem, though: U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who ordered Bannon to set off on his pilgrimage to the pokey, was appointed to the federal bench in 2018 by none other than President Donald J. Trump.

Now, as promised, it’s Biden Time…

This, I would say, was (and is) the operating thesis of Joe Biden’s reelection team in Wilmington and his political gurus inside the White House. And it was the basis for a certain rush of hopefulness in Bidenworld a week ago, as they entered the brave new world of post-verdict politics: that with the Trump trial no longer blotting out the sun, the press might finally shine a bit of light on Biden again if they called some smart plays and he ran them well, in turn enabling them to push the ball upfield in the time-tested style of Woody Hayes—“three yards and a cloud of dust.”

Biden’s schedule for the week was a jam-packed mix of hardball domestic politics (issuing a hawkish executive order to shut the U.S.-Mexico border to nearly all asylum seekers at least through Election Day); high-minded diplomacy (meeting in France with Volodymyr Zelensky, Emmanuel Macron, and other European leaders to talk about NATO’s solidarity with Ukraine); hallowed-ground strutting (singing hosannas to democracy in a postcard-perfect setting at Pointe du Hoc in Normandy to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day); and some tasty Trump trolling. (He visited a cemetery in Belleau for American soldiers killed in World War I that Trump blew off in 2018, creating an international stink even more ripe than the emanations from a brick of Vieux-Boulogne).

It was the kind of schedule, in other words, that could illustrate the advantages of incumbency. And yet, Biden had barely started down this path strewn with rose petals before The Wall Street Journal dropped a steaming cow patty at his feet: a 3,000-word story, hyped by Journal publicists the night before as “explosive,” bearing a headline as sensational as, though far less amusing than, something you’d see in the New York Post: “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.”

Few stories tend to set Team Biden’s collective hair on fire more instantaneously than those about the president’s age and allegedly increasing infirmities. And if you want to ignite a full-blown Three Mile Island-level meltdown, be sure to include observations related to his slow or labored gait, the insufficiently booming volume or tenor of his voice, and/or his sometimes halting verbal manner. And indeed, when the Journal story popped on Wednesday morning, I am all but certain that, ensconced in my bunker in Lower Manhattan, I could hear White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates’s head exploding 230 miles away at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. So when I started reaching out to Bidenworld denizens on Friday and Saturday to see how they thought the week had gone, all things considered, I expected to find them still seething over the Journal piece and ready to rip my head off for so much as dignifying it with a question. What I heard instead was that the week had been boffo, top to bottom.

The reaction to that quote—and Bidenworld’s striking overall sanguinity—among inside-the-Beltway types, the consultantariat, and a decent-sized swath of the punditocracy will surely be that Wilmington is in the grips of either extreme delusion or an excess of benzos. But I’m not so sure. The first thing worth noting here is that, on the merits, the WSJ story was a genuinely flabby, insubstantial, meandering, unconvincing piece of work—and that’s before you get to the graver problem of relying for the two most damaging accounts in the article on two named sources—Mike Johnson and Kevin McCarthy—both partisan opponents of Biden and the latter a proven and widely recognized serial liar. More remarkable, the piece’s blind quotes, which is usually where you find the richest juice, are instead the weakest beer. (The source who demanded anonymity for “You couldn’t be there and not feel uncomfortable” really needs to grow a pair.)

The shoddiness of the story was so egregious that it prompted widespread criticism by others in our business. And that, in turn, suggests one reason why the Biden people could be right to see it as beneficial rather than detrimental to their cause: It could serve as a cautionary tale/useful corrective to others writing about the issue of Biden’s age and fitness for office (a wholly legitimate issue, in my view).

Unlike at various time in the past when Biden has been subject to this type of story, Democrats—from senators Patty Murray and Jack Reed to former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper—rose immediately not just to defend Biden but slam the piece for not including their own on-the-record assessments of the president’s bearing and faculties, which didn’t fit its thesis. Equally notable, surprising, and encouraging to Team Biden, given the reflexive tendencies of Democrats toward a) wetting the bed, b) forming circular firing squads, or c) doing both at the same time: Not a single member of Biden’s party is quoted in the piece saying he’s no longer up to the job.

Not that many Democrats aren’t worried about Biden’s age. They are, a lot, and more or less constantly. But what worries most of them isn’t that the president’s geezerhood renders him unable to do the job; his record of substantive accomplishments, most fair-minded analysts agree, exceeds that of Barack Obama or any Democratic president, really, stretching back at least to L.B.J.

No, what concerns most Democrats about Biden’s geriatric status is the pervasive doubt it has seeded in the electorate and the undeniable and punishing toll that has taken on him politically. As James Carville put it the other day in a podcast interview with Bill Kristol, “Every conversation that everyone has in every focus group about President Biden begins with age, in the middle it’s age, and at the end it’s age. And that’s a real fact that they have to live with, and they’ve just got to plow through it. And getting mad at The New York Times for talking about his age is not going to work.”

The question, however, is whether Biden’s age and its attendant political implications—like Trump’s tawdriness, duplicity, mendacity, and now legally established criminality—are fully priced into the stock. That is, whether anyone and everyone for whom this issue could ever be decisive in the voting booth has already made up their minds. In reality, for the vanishingly slender slice of the electorate in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who remain persuadable, Biden’s age isn’t going to be the thing that persuades them one way or the other.

There are important people in Biden’s orbit who profess to believe this is the case. And maybe they really do. But not one of them won’t be holding his or her breath when Biden faces off against Trump on the debate stage late next month—and praying their boss won’t do anything to revivify an issue that, for the moment, may have done all the damage it can do.