Well at least now we know. No waiting in agonizing suspense till November. Donald Trump will win the presidential election.

We know this because most of America watched Joe Biden debate Trump last night, and we all know what we saw: two old men, one of whom has aged much more profoundly and rapidly than the other, trading insults and garbled sentences. But Trump looked vigorous and focused in his awfulness, whereas Biden looked feeble and confused in his.  Colds and sore throats notwithstanding, whatever traits the word “presidential” was invented to describe, Biden displayed none of them.

At one point in the debate, the candidates were asked to address concerns about their age. Trump prattled on about how he’d taken a cognitive assessment test administered by his sycophant doctor, but a more devastating response would have been to state the obvious fact that was playing out before the eyes of the nation: that people age at different rates, that a person’s chronological age is only partly correlated with their physical and mental age, and that he, Trump, was obviously less aged than Biden in every way that mattered. For all his lying, no one watching could have disputed him on that score.

And no one, not even the most partisan Democrat, let alone a waffling independent, will feel comfortable voting for Joe Biden now. It can even be said that they’d be reckless to do so, because, no matter what tenuous faith one may have in Kamala Harris, until Biden dies or is removed from office during his second term, our country will demonstrably lack a fully cogent, capable leader.

Trump is likewise neither cogent nor capable, but that doesn’t matter to his base. He speaks their binary language, they like his thuggish style, and they will vote. Too many Democrats and waffling independents will simply stay away, unable to vote for either man. And Trump wins in a landslide of electoral votes.

No one should be asked to make such a choice. And yet that’s what the two major political parties have forced upon the American public. Shame on both of them, and shame on all of us for letting it happen. The strongest evidence of the American decline that Trump kept harping on last night is the fact that he and Biden are our choices for president.

Is there a way out? There’s a narrow chance that someone will get to Biden and convince him to step aside. There’s a chance for open revolt at the Democratic National Convention, though Biden won in the primaries and the candidacy is his to renounce. Major political parties, and most men, don’t willingly acknowledge that they’ve made as colossal a mistake as this one. So in all likelihood, he stays, and Trump wins in November.

Conveniently for him, the Supreme Court just overturned the Chevron case, gutting the administrative authority of the federal government that he despises so much and plans to dismantle even further. But even that seems like small potatoes when one of the coldest winters in American politics has fallen on a sunny day in June.