CONFUSED AND incoherent, Joe Biden’s performance in the first presidential debate on June 27th was excruciating for his supporters. But the ordeal did not end when the debate did. Minutes later Jill Biden, who had helped her shuffling husband off the stage, tried to make things better and made them worse. “You did such a great job!” she yelled at the dazed 81-year-old, before a crowd and TV cameras. “You answered every question!”

The sight of the leader of the free world being patronised and cajoled as if by a nurse in an old-people’s home prompted some (mostly conservative) commentators to speculate that Mrs Biden, who is 73, was exerting a malign influence on him. Did she, they wondered, like being first First Lady so much that she was failing to see that he should quit the race? “Cruel Jill clings to power,” proclaimed the Drudge Report, a conservative website. Others accused her of “elder abuse”.