The system is functioning as intended.

For all the rancorous and panicky clamor following the revealing debate a week or so ago, in some ways this could be looked on as a normal process.

Dementia is a progressive condition.  Sometimes it is a steady decline, sometimes it moves in fits and starts.  Most critically, it is a continuum with a lot of grey areas.  For most people, there are a series of questions basically assessing the degree to which they are able to care for themselves.  Can they feed themselves?  Can they dress themselves?  Are they safe running errands?  

For someone like the President, those questions can only be answered in proxy because their existence is circumscribed and scripted.  Decades ago, this was encapsulated by an instance when George Bush Sr. was surprised on the campaign trail when he came across a scanner at a grocery store.  They were indeed a relatively new technology but also a relatively familiar to anyone who routinely shops in grocery stores.

But Presidents don't do their own grocery shopping.  Nor do they drive their own cars.  Nor do they manage their schedule.  Nor do they plan and choreograph executive meetings.  Staff, Staff, Staff.

My point being that it is hard enough to pinpoint where an ordinary person is on the dementia scale, just imagine how much more difficult it would be for someone who necessarily does not perform any of the standard actions which are normally used to assess dementia.

There is a preference cascade going on now with the floodgates opened by the debate.  Everyone saw what they saw and people are coming forwards.   From Wikipedia:

When private opinion and public opinion are far apart, a shock of the right kind can make a critical number of disgruntled individuals reach their thresholds for expressing themselves truthfully to put in motion a public-preference cascade (also known as a public-preference bandwagon, or, when the form of preference is clear from the context, a preference cascade). Until the critical mass is reached, changes in individual dispositions are invisible to outsiders, even to one another.[34] Once it is reached, switches in public preferences impel people with thresholds a bit higher than those of the people within the critical mass add their own voices to the chorus for reform. And support for reform then keeps feeding on itself through growing pro-reform pressure and diminishing pressure favoring the status quo. Each addition to the reformist camp induces further additions until a much larger share of society stands for change. This preference cascade ends when no one is left whose threshold is sufficiently low to be tipped into the reformist camp by one more other individual’s prior switch.[35][36]

This explosive growth in public support for reform amounts to a political revolution. The revolution will not have been anticipated, because preference falsification had concealed political currents flowing under the visible political landscape. Despite the lack of foresight, the revolution will easily be explained with the benefit of hindsight. Its occurrence lowers the personal risk of publicizing preference falsification in the past. Tales of expressive repression expose the vulnerability of the prerevolutionary social order. 

Examples of the emerging cascade.  From The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden by Olivia Nuzzi .  The subheading is The president’s mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters.

In January, I began hearing similar stories from Democratic officials, activists, and donors. All people who supported the president and were working to help reelect him to a second term in office. Following encounters with the president, they had arrived at the same concern: Could he really do this for another four years? Could he even make it to Election Day?

Uniformly, these people were of a similar social strata. They lived and socialized in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. They did not wish to come forward with their stories. They did not want to blow a whistle. They wished that they could whistle past what they knew and emerge in November victorious and relieved, having helped avoid another four years of Trump. What would happen after that? They couldn’t think that far ahead. Their worries were more immediate.

When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that.

From "He's toast": Biden's ABC interview flops with Hill Democrats by Andrew Solender.

President Biden's interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos did little to tamp down mounting concerns from Democratic members of Congress about his ability to defeat former President Trump.

Why it matters: Four House Democrats have publicly called for Biden to step down from the ticket, with lawmakers saying they expect more to follow soon.

"The drip drip is about to be more than that," said one.

Another told Axios: "We'll certainly amp up the public pressure as needed."

An interview with George Stephanopoulos of all people.  It doesn't get more softball than that.

Nate Silver notes:

You could debate the exact order, but right now we're about half way up this ladder. pic.twitter.com/k4wo9rDIB7

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 6, 2024

And then there are some of the dyed-in-the-wool legacy mainstream media supporters and their disappointment.

At some point I'll write longer on this, but I think part of the reason the Biden-must-go story has been so huge is that a lot of commentators / voters / even members of the press feel angry and betrayed. Many of us largely trusted Biden's team when they insisted he was fine. The…

— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) July 4, 2024

 Has President Biden suffered material cognitive decline?  Pretty certainly.  Has he passed the point where he can routinely exercise autonomous leadership?  Pretty certainly.  Did the debate trigger a preference cascade?  Certainly.  Will it likely lead to a change in the political race?  Almost certainly.  Might it lead to a change in the current presidency?  Quite possibly.

All this can be viewed as a conspiracy by a secret cabal, and to some extent there might be lements of that theory which are true.  But it is also likely true that a tipping point on the dementia continuum was reached and that the resulting preference cascade was a wholly natural process.  

Indeed a healthy process.  We had uncertainty and we are gaining common confidence in a new clarity that is likely true and, if true, which needs addressing.  

It looks dreadful but in some ways it is a stress test that the system is so far meeting.  The system is functioning as intended.