Yes, Joe Biden’s age is a concern. But Donald Trump’s threat to democracy is a bigger one.

Proving yet again that virtually all Republicans will abandon ethics in favor of partisanship, Special Prosecutor Robert Hur cleared President Joe Biden of wrongdoing involving top-secret documents, only to go out of his way to convict Biden politically of being virtually senile.

It wasn’t that Biden didn’t do anything wrong, Hur wrote in his report. It’s just that he’s so mentally feeble juries would want to take care of him instead of convicting him.

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It’s a bizarre – and humiliating – story.

“At trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur said in the report.

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By normal prosecutorial standards, Hur committed malpractice. He is only supposed to say whether there is enough evidence to merit charges. The kind of editorializing about Biden’s mental status, based on just five hours of testimony, was entirely gratuitous.

In short, it was entirely Republican.

A two-time Trump appointee, Hur seems to have gone out of his way to give Donald Trump an in-kind campaign contribution, much the way another Republican, former FBI director James Comey, did in 2016. In clearing then-candidate Hillary Clinton of mishandling classified information, Comey described her as “extremely careless,” which allowed the media to focus endlessly on Clinton’s emails.

Hur came up through the GOP judicial ranks, clerking for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. It was during his time serving Rehnquist that the Court struck down Texas’ sodomy law in a case involving two men having consensual sex. Rehnquist was one of three justices who dissented in the ruling.

Now that Hur has done his best to make Biden’s mental status a campaign issue, it won’t go away. It crystallizes an issue that many voters have about the president. He’s already the oldest president ever to serve, and he’ll be even older – a remarkable 86 – if he is re-elected and serves out his term.

The problem for the Democrats is that Biden seems old in a way that Trump does not. He moves slowly, and he has never been the most forceful speaker. He has always been a gaffe machine, but now every verbal slip-up will be attributed to cognitive impairment.

However, if anything, Trump’s public appearances are far more reason for concern. It’s not just the occasional name confusion that both men demonstrate. (Biden got the name of the former German chancellor wrong, while Trump confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi.)

More worrisome are the multiple instances of Trump slurring his words during campaign appearances. In the past few weeks that happened while he was talking about drug penalties and immigration, Just last week at a rally Friday night in Pennsylvania, Trump talked about how it was a “nice Saturday afternoon.”

Trump gets away with it because he is held to the Trump standard, which is a far lower bar. The media are used to his speeches being rambling, digressive affairs, so they just write it off as Trump being Trump. In fact, to people who aren’t following Trump closely, seeing clips of Trump trying to find words is a painful and frightening experience.

We are likely in for an extended battle of “no, you’re more impaired” ads once the campaign season gets going. (As a reminder, Republicans depicted Hillary Clinton as being at death’s door in 2016.) The media will continue to treat this as a both-sides issue – if we’re lucky. Or they will focus on Biden’s age to the exclusion of Trump’s, even though Trump is just three years younger.

The real issue is that the election is about policies, which the horse-race focus of most political coverage can’t be bothered with. The kind of policies that Trump would put in place if he regained power would not just be a replay of the horrors he visited on the LGBTQ+ community the first time around. They will be far worse this time because he’s going to surround himself with people who will make sure to carry them out no matter what.

Even worse will be the erosion of basic democratic principles. Trump has already made it perfectly clear he will use the Justice Department to seek revenge on his enemies. He will round up hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, intern them in detention camps, and deport them by force if necessary. He will cozy up to dictators.

Given the stakes involved, worry about Biden’s age seems overblown. If he does fail and needs to be removed from office, his policies will continue, as will democracy. We already know what happens when you try to remove Trump from office by the will of the people.

He staged an insurrection.