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Even if we choose to believe Biden is an empty vessel to be filled by the “radical left”, that he takes drugs and is in cognitive decline, we inevitably confront the question: what’s the incumbent’s excuse?

Trump “aced” the dementia test, which rules out an organic explanation for ... everything. I’d leave it at that, but a girl has to get her kicks from something. Trump is at his most stupid when he’s coherent, as his comments to Bob Woodward about deliberately “playing down” the pandemic threat show. He said he didn’t want people to “panic”.

How would a massive death toll, the inevitable result of his playing down the coronavirus threat, keep things calm? And as even Trump booster Tucker Carlson from Fox News pointed out, agreeing to an interview with the famed Watergate reporter wasn’t smart to begin with.

But returning to my earlier point, in the US version of meritocracy dimness is almost a prerequisite for the presidency. I was young at Ronald Reagan’s election but I remember the convulsions about his age (at 69 he was then the oldest US president to be inaugurated), about his quivering voice, his dopey (if amiable) countenance and what journalist Lou Cannon described in his 1991 book on the Reagan presidency as the former B-grade actor’s tendency to talk about scenes from movies “as if they were historical events".

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In his first presidential debate with Walter Mondale in 1984, he was lost for words – arguably still better than Jimmy Carter’s clanger in his 1976 debate with Gerald Ford: “There is no Soviet domination of eastern Europe.” (While Carter was considered one of the brainier US presidents, a high IQ doesn’t always equate with common sense.)

Reagan nodded off in policy briefings. He said a year’s waste from a nuclear power plant “can be stored under a desk". Sought guidance, with wife Nancy, from astrologists, which is arguably still not as bad as promoting a doctor who endorses treating COVID with hydroxychloroquine. A doctor who also believes in astral sex and alien DNA. Five years after leaving the White House, Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

George W. Bush, we assumed, was the ultimate cretin-in-chief. “The illiteracy level of our children are appalling,” Dubya said. Biden’s education gaffe was at least grammatically sound. Have we already forgotten the Bushisms, such as “subliminable”?

His not knowing the difference between the US Medicare and Medicaid, Sunni and Shiite? His choking on a pretzel at home and walking into a locked door in Beijing? His eyes “so close together, he could use a monocle”, as Christopher Hitchens memorably put it?

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Reagan could at least say “nuclear". Like Reagan, Dubya found policy detail boring. He worked to rule, even retreating to his Texas ranch for five weeks at the height of the disastrous Iraq war.

American pop culture has extolled stupidity as virtue. The 1990s film Forrest Gump, a classic of the genre, implied that even the mentally impaired can get rich on effort, wholesome values and just a pinch of luck.

Still, in US politics, dumbness operates on a double standard. In recent times, it is the privilege of not only the white male president, but the white male Republican president.

There’s sinister logic at work here: superior brainpower is redundant when a president’s professed ambition is shrinking the remit of the government he leads. Not so for the Democratic president who wants to build rather than dismantle.

The right’s worship of imbecility also dovetails with its populist attacks on intellectual elites, as in Trump’s “I love the poorly educated”.

The playing field is not level. To win, Biden must outsmart an opponent whose weapon is bone-headedness.

Julie Szego is a regular columnist.