Bidens stark decline shocked leaders at G7 summit with prez seeming out of it

So much for “cheap fakes.”European leaders were “shocked” by the stark decline in President Biden’s physical and mental fitness when he attended the G7 summit in Italy last month, the New York Times reported late Tuesday — the latest in a series of belated disclosures about the 81-year-old president’s diminished condition.Since Biden shocked the watching world with his disastrous performance at last week’s first presidential debate against Donald Trump in Atlanta, nearly half a dozen reporters and media outlets have rushed out scoops detailing the extent of the president’s deterioration over recent weeks, months and years as calls grow for Biden to drop his re-election bid.Monday evening, Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein said on CNN that he knew of “15, 20 occasions in the last year-and-a-half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did” during the debate.On Tuesday, Politico reported that Biden had been kept to a “carefully managed” schedule meant to limit the number of early morning and evening events — and that first lady Jill Biden had complained in March 2021 that her husband’s first solo news conference as president had run too long — while Axios revealed over the weekend that the president is only at his most “dependably engaged” between 10 a.m.and 4 p.m.The Times report quoted a senior European official as saying Biden seemed “out of it” at points during the gathering in southern Italy and that the president appeared less robust physically than the last time the official had seen him the previous fall.

The same European official found that it was challenging to start a conversation with the commander in chief as he moved about the conference.Meanwhile, European leaders, including host Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, discussed Biden’s condition “privately among themselves” and made a point to slow their pace when walking together to avoid embarrassing the oldest president in American history. When Biden s...