Was this the week Biden lost the next election?

This is not the beginning of the end for the Biden presidency. It might be the end of the beginning, though. For nearly four years, Biden’s ride has been as smooth as the vintage Corvette convertible he keeps in his Delaware garage, next to his boxes of classified documents. That changed this week.

On Wednesday, The New York Times looked into influence-peddling by the president’s son, Hunter Biden. Later on the same day, the House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee, which is now under Republican control, launched its investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings, and whether social media companies colluded to suppress stories about him on behalf of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.

On Thursday, Biden’s attorney general Merrick Garland announced that the Department of Justice has appointed a special counsel to investigate the contents of Biden’s garage, and the discovery of more confidential papers. His lawyers found them in a cupboard at Biden’s think tank at the University of Pennsylvania. They happened to be clearing his office less than a week before the November midterm elections, which the Democrats expected to lose.

From the last day of February 2019, when Biden’s win in the South Carolina primary made him a serio-comic contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, to the middle of last week, when the Department of Justice and The New York Times turned against him, Biden had the support of America’s institutions. The man in the mirror shades was the sheriff who would run the Trump gang out of town. Desperate times, and all that.

Two years into the Biden presidency, times have changed. The Democrats lost the House of Representatives in November’s midterms. Biden is ­now a lame duck president, unable to advance major legislation, and exposed to Congressional committees of enquiry. His poll numbers are low, and the cost of living is high.

Candidate Biden promised that he would restore normality to US politics. There is no normality to return to, only the familiarity of contempt and the slow decay of competence. The president is almost certainly telling the truth when he says he had no idea he was sitting on classified documents. His foot-in-mouth embarrassments are an accurate expression of a political system that cannot manage the affairs of a nation that has lost its sense of purpose.

Like Bill Clinton, Biden is now a sitting president under investigation by a special counsel appointed by his own Department of Justice. Like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, he is accused of improperly handling government papers and denies all knowledge. You know the bad old days are back when The New York Times is asking if a president’s family members have sold access to the White House.

It doesn’t matter that The Times’ piece was less an investigation than a pre-emptive dismissal. For nearly four years, the obvious was unsayable – at least in polite and powerful company. The Trump emergency made it impossible to acknowledge that Joe Biden, a dinosaur who has spent his life in the Swamp, is a living symptom of the popular frustration that generated the Trump presidency. The spectre of a second Trump presidency is also still a vote-winner for the Democrats. The polls suggest that Biden can beat Trump in 2024, but not DeSantis.

Biden has not ruled out running again in 2024. He will be 82 years old then, and 86 if he wins and survives a second term. No farce is too surreal for American politics, but the scripts are always written by the hard reality of self-interest. Biden needs Trump, but do the Democrats still need Biden?