PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN’S performance in his presidential debate against Donald Trump on June 27th called his continued candidacy into question. In the days since, however, the campaign has tried to save Mr Biden, and has succeeded for now. Privately, Mr Biden’s surrogates worked to quell the anxieties of donors worried about throwing good money after bad, and down-ballot candidates worried about their own political survival. Publicly, they came up with a remarkable number of explanations for the president’s display: it was just a cold, a sore throat, a single bad night, a senior moment—well, 90 senior minutes, sure, but don’t you realise that Mr Trump is an existential threat to democracy?

June 28th, the day after, was the most vulnerable of Mr Biden’s campaign—the one that the history writers will examine in detail. Within hours the mainstays of the centre-left American media issued calls for Mr Biden to renounce his re-election bid. They were some of the president’s favourites: Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC host whose programme the president watches closely; the Atlantic, where Mr Biden wrote an article announcing his reasons for his candidacy in 2020, published at least a half-dozen arguments from its columnists beseeching the president to step down; Tom Friedman, a foreign-policy columnist whom Mr Biden meets wrote that the debate “made me weep” because he could not “remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics”; the editorial board of the New York Times followed that evening.