Before the debate, major media outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal would intermittently report on the question of Biden’s age and health, collecting accounts of what the president is like behind closed doors from aides and others who met with him in private.

Often, such reports turned up a mixed picture, finding that Biden sometimes had mix-ups and verbal flubs and sometimes appeared fully up to the job. Always, Democrats responded to these reports with intense criticism.

Since the debate, though, coverage of this issue has risen to a new level of intensity — and leaks have been coming fast and furious.

A brutal New York Times story released Tuesday dug into what the paper called Biden’s “lapses” — which their sources claimed have recently grown “more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome.”

In such lapses, the Times reporters’ sources claim, Biden would sometimes appear “listless,” “lose the thread of conversations,” or react with “blank-stared confusion.” At other points, they say, Biden would appear “perfectly on top of his game.”

Axios’s Alex Thompson reported that aides believed Biden was “dependably engaged” between the hours of 10 am and 4 pm — but that outside those hours, Biden was “more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued.” (Thompson added that aides “usually” see Biden “engaged,” and have brushed off “flashes” of absent-mindedness as “ordinary brain farts.”)

Legendary reporter Carl Bernstein said on CNN that, over the past year and a half, “there have been 15 to 20 occasions” on which Biden has appeared as unfocused as he was during the debate. He characterized such instances as Biden losing his train of thought and being unable to “pick it up again.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that some senior European diplomats have said “they had tracked a noticeable deterioration in the president’s faculties in meetings since last summer.” And the Financial Times reported that, during a meeting between Biden and an EU leader earlier this year, the president began and ended the meeting by telling the same anecdote.

This is a fucking nightmare. The entire Democratic Party must, THEY MUST, go to Joe Biden and force him to stand down.