My Take | Age discrimination has its place when it comes to US president

Ronald Reagan was notoriously uninterested in policy details. But say what you like about the Gipper; like any good actor, the man remembered his lines and usually delivered them well. You can’t say the same about Joe Biden. Even with the most choreographed stage instructions and the best teleprompters for the half-blind to read, the octogenarian president is still liable to go off script.

Just as the Washington press corps once went out of their way to hide John F. Kennedy’s peccadilloes with the ladies, so they have avoided reporting on their president’s obvious signs of mental decline. Contrast that with the lengths to which they went about his predecessor Donald Trump’s mental (un)fitness.

The problem with having a commander-in-chief who is not all there is that the courtiers around him inevitably jockey for positions to amass influence and fence off serfdom for themselves. Two recent stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post, perhaps inadvertently, have exposed how the national security adviser and CIA director have done exactly that.

Though highly favourable in its portrait, the Times piece is nevertheless titled, “William Burns, a CIA Spymaster with Unusual Powers”.

“Mr Burns, a key figure in the Biden administration’s support of Ukraine, has amassed influence beyond most if not all previous CIA directors,” it said.

That’s saying something, considering that anyone who managed successfully to take over the spy agency must, by definition, be good at bureaucratic turf war. Robert Kennedy Jnr, JFK’s nephew and a Democratic presidential primary candidate, has just resurrected an old conspiracy theory and blamed the powerful agency for his uncle’s assassination.