Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and now the Joe Biden presidency.

We will be looking at how a 78-year-old president will change America and will be asking if normalcy, which is what

he promised to bring, has returned to American politics. The answer, of course, is no.

I'm joined today by Amber Athe, who is our Washington editor, and we're going to be asking, is Joe Biden okay? Now, Amber,

you can get into a bit of trouble, I've noticed particularly in this country, probably more than

America, in fact, if you start talking about Joe Biden's mental health because it's considered

rude and a sort of mean right-wing thing to say, and it's come from Trump world, this idea that Biden isn't right.

But the problem is as his presidency goes on, as you point out in an excellent piece this week called We Need to Talk about Joe Biden,

it's becoming increasingly obvious that his mental factors really aren't all there.

How worried are you as an American about the state of your

president? Very worried. And, you know, during the campaign, it was kind of a joke. People found it

quite funny, these various gaffs that Joe Biden would make. And, you know, President Donald Trump

would put out these memes, sort of mocking Joe Biden.

Now that he's actually in the Oval Office and particularly this week,

negotiating with foreign leaders at the United Nations,

it is pretty terrifying to see that this man who's clearly not in control of all of his mental faculties is in charge of

foreign policy, warmaking, trade negotiations, all of the things that come along with that

that affect national security for Americans, it is quite disturbing to know that the person who is

making those decisions, if he is even making those decisions, to be fair, is not all there.

So we had this event with Presser with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and I think

Boris Johnson sort of sprung questions on, and that's what the impression we get, the understanding

that we have, that it wasn't planned, and Boris just sort of threw some questions to journalists

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