RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: The leader of the free world is away with the fairies. Biden is toast.

Last night’s U.S Presidential debate in Atlanta, Georgia, made a bar-room brawl in the Bronx beween two incontinent old age pensioners look decorous.

Biden and Trump reminded me of Statler and Waldorf, the quarrelsome geriatrics from the front row of the balcony on the Muppets.

This political horror-show had me pining for the dignity of the previous evening’s depressing Sunak-Starmer slanging match in Nottingham. Unedifying doesn’t begin to do it justice.

From the moment Biden wandered onstage and waved to a non-existent studio audience, it was frighteningly apparent that the leader of the free world is away with the fairies.

If the President had been a race horse at Ascot last week, the stewards would have put him out of his misery with a single shot to the temple.

The game’s up, Joe.

I’ve long since believed that Biden won’t contest the next election. From what I saw of the the post-match analysis, the Democrats have concluded that, too.

He was like Tony Soprano’s Uncle Junior, stumbling around in a dressing gown, dribbling, not just pretending to be ga-ga, but clinically certifiable.

Biden couldn’t string a coherent sentence together, coughing from the off like Theresa May during her disastrous Tory conference keynote speech which marked the beginning of the end for her undistinguished Premiership.

Risibly, the Democrat spin machine tried to pretend that the reason Biden hadn’t been seen in public for over a week was because he was suffering from a heavy cold.

Previously, we’d been told that he was prepping for the debate at Camp David, the Presidential retreat. You had to wonder why the President would have to go into purdah to prepare for a few softball questions from sympathetic CNN hosts – one of whom had previously described Donald Trump as literally Hitler.

But Biden couldn’t rise to the occasion, or even work out where he was. His rambling answers on everything from the shameful scuttle from Afghanistan to the illegal migration crisis on America’s souther border were as incomprehensible as they were insulting.

Before the debate, the Trump camp had put it about that Biden was being pumped full of performance-enhancing drugs to help him make it through the night.

If you were thinking Viagra, or even just a couple of pints of Lemsip, think again. My guess is Imodium, to make sure he got through the 90 minutes on CNN without another unfortunate bathroom incident.

This debate wasn’t so much a car crash as the multiple vehicular pile-up at the climax of the original Blues Brothers movie.

Biden’s toast. Dead Man barely walking. But the Democrats’ problem is how to get rid of him. They can’t risk replacing him with his Veep, the gormless, grinning Kamala Harris. Houston, we have a problem.

Maybe the fact that toothy California governor Gavin Newson was making himself busy in the spin room after the debate points to Plan B.

Creepy Uncle Joe will get a highwayman’s farewell at the party convention and Kamala will be taken into a side room and made an offer she can’t refuse.

The fact is, as this column has argued for the past couple of years, that NOT ONLY America deserves better that the current clown show. Newsom should be the Dem’s candidate for President up against Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a new generation offering a clear choice between big state, high tax , woke govenment and low tax, freebooting libertarianism.

What has stood in the way of that showdown is the sheer vanity of Biden and Trump, who still thinks he woz robbed last time out.

Yes, Trump makes a lot of the right noises on tax, on the border, on law and order, on Iran, etc. But he’s had his turn.

The post-match quarterbacks on Republican-friendly Fox News were enthusiastically describing last night as a victory for Trump. Which because of Biden’s cringe-making meltdown, it probably was.

But, honestly? Trump was kicking a cripple. It was excruiciating to watch. If Basket Case Biden is Uncle Junior, then Trump came across as Phil Leotardo, Tony’s resentful New York rival over the river.

Trump’s run is about getting even, admittedly with some justification. Biden has weaponised the state to declare warfare on Trump. Not that it’s done him much good.

Bad Orange Man is ahead in the polls, where it matters. My sister, who lives in key swing state Michigan and works in finance, tells me the deal-makers in her office are all backing Trump again after switching to Biden last time.

Much of America is pining for Trump’s booming pre-Covid economy. The Democrats’ obsession with Net Zero has repelled blue collar union members in ‘working states’ like Pennsylvania and Michigan. Trump’s support is through the roof among traditional auto workers in Detroit.

He's also trending strongly with black and Hispanic voters, which puts him in pole position in November.

And yet. The story last night was Biden’s complete and utter implosion. But Trump played his part in turning what was supposed to be a serious exercise in representitive democracy into little more than a mud-wrestling shouting match.

Two men who should have long since retired to Cocoon Central were reduced to haggling over who had the lowest golf handicap, not aspiring to lead the free world.

Sorry, but as someone who loves the U.S, I came away from last night’s debate thinking that America deserves better than this. The free world deserves better than this. The only winners last night were Putin, China and the ayatollahs.

What, who, struck me as missing, in the absence of a CNN studio audience, was the bold British grandfather Robert Blackstock, the standout performer from the Sunak/Starmer show on Wednesday night, who asked the contenders:

‘Are you two the really the best we’ve got?’

It’s the same question Middle America must be asking itself today.