Joe Biden has come out fighting. But he’ll need more than grit to defeat Trump now | Jonathan Freedland

With Trump surging, democracy is in peril: that's the message Biden needs to couple with the spirit he showed in Congress

The president of the United States delivered his annual address to Congress on Thursday night - except what Americans and an increasingly nervous world wanted to assess was less the state of the union than the state of Joe Biden. I don't mean politically, I mean physically.

In the week that confirmed the November election will be a rematch of the 2020 contest - the current president against the former one - Biden needed to prove he was not the doddering, even senile figure of Donald Trump's rhetoric and a thousand social media memes. In 68 combative minutes, he cleared that bar. He ad-libbed, he took on Republican hecklers and, often at high volume, jabbed at his opponent. The result: a performance that pundits described as feisty" and scrappy", free of senior moments, and which prompted even Fox News to muse that Biden seemed jacked-up" - which, from the network that likes to depict the president as a walking corpse, was a compliment.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.