President Trump was right about Joe Biden. Something is definitely “off” about the former vice president. On the debate stage Thursday night, he seemed confused, defensive, and just generally out of it.

Consider his response to the inevitable attack regarding his boasts about working with notorious segregationists and his own remarks during the 1970s supporting school segregation. Biden and his entire campaign knew that he was going to have to answer for that at some point. Yet when the criticism came, he didn’t even seem to comprehend what the fuss was about.

In one particularly memorable exchange with Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Biden tried to claim that he wasn’t actually against desegregation, just federally mandated desegregation, forcing Harris to explain to him that—at the very time he was making his pro-segregation comments in the 1970s—the federal government was compelled to intervene because states and cities were refusing to implement civil rights laws.

Biden never quite managed to shake the bewildered expression from his face throughout the debate, but perhaps the lowest point came when he replied to a question with, “I’m sorry. I beg your pardon. I didn’t hear.”

Even after he and the moderator had straightened out that he did, in fact, raise his hand to indicate that he supported giving free healthcare to illegal immigrants, Biden’s response bordered on the incoherent. It’s all here if you have the stomach to read the transcript.

“All Democrats just raised their hands for giving millions of illegal aliens unlimited healthcare,” President Trump pointed out on Twitter shortly after Biden’s awkward effort to jump on that bandwagon. “How about taking care of American Citizens first!? That’s the end of that race!”

Biden can learn the language and say what he needs to say, like an old rock-n-roller trying to stay hip with the latest trends in music, but he can’t change what he is: a 76-year-old white guy in a party that’s abandoned most serious policy and coherent ideology in favor of the intersectionalist dogma that old white men are responsible for all the world’s problems.

It doesn’t help that Biden has, at various times, held the kinds of positions these evil straight white male oppressors are supposed to have used to oppress one victim group after another.

For instance, the modern Democratic Party stands in complete opposition to President Trump’s immigration policies, and is flirting with abolishing ICE and open borders. Yet, in the past, Joe Biden voted to build 700 miles of border wall and punish “sanctuary cities.”

It’s also a party that considers on-demand abortion up to the day a baby is born to be a mother’s human right, but Biden is a Roman Catholic who entered the U.S. Senate determined to overturn Roe v. Wade and even voted to remove exceptions for rape and incest from restrictions on federal abortion funding into the 1980s.

Today’s Democrats also take immense “pride” in their sycophantic support for the LGBT community. But in the 1990s, Biden voted in favor of banning homosexuals from marrying or serving in the military. He did not come out in favor of gay marriage until the Supreme Court was on the verge of allowing it.

Biden is also a guy who spent the 1970s arguing in favor of school segregation while getting along “civilly” with the old segregationist Dixiecrats—and his opponents raked him over the coals about that during the debate in Miami.

Joe Biden has always been a consummate politician. He has recanted, apologized, caved, and adopted the intersectional party line on each and every one of these issues, and plenty of others, too. For years, he has conspicuously self-flagellated in public appearances, extolling, for example, how great it is that America is becoming minority-white. He’s clearly aware that his “unbearable whiteness” requires him to atone for his membership in the oppressor’s club.

That instinct for ideological malleability wasn’t evident during Biden’s first debate performance of the 2020 campaign, however. His halting, fumbling responses to entirely predictable criticisms is surely forcing many Democrat primary voters to reconsider their support for the party’s supposed frontrunner.

President Trump was the first to notice that Biden has “lost a step,” but everyone who witnessed the former vice president’s performance in Miami is now painfully aware of just how accurate the president’s observation really was.

Photo credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images