It’s pretty obvious that one of the campaign strategies Team Trump is going to be pushing in this election cycle is the diminished capacity of Joe Biden and how badly he’s slipping from a cognitive perspective.

That’s a no-brainer of a campaign strategy, because assuming it’s true, and it certainly seems to be, and there’s no doubt a lot of voters think it is, once you’ve planted that seed it will grow and grow with every bit of evidence Biden himself generates.

So here’s an ad which is well done simply because of what it shows more than what it tells…

As of this writing, the ad has 9.4 million views on YouTube, and if the reactions are reflective of the country – and for all we know they could well be – it’s a winner and perhaps so is Trump. There are 59,000 thumbs-up reactions, and 44,000 thumbs-down.

The Democrats tried to do this in 1984. They opened up a line of attack on Ronald Reagan by saying he was too old and he’d lost a step. And Reagan had an uncharacteristic poor performance in the first presidential debate against Walter Mondale in that cycle, which fueled the perception maybe that messaging wasn’t just partisan hackery.

But Reagan cut the head off that snake in the second debate with this…

Even Mondale couldn’t help but laugh at that answer, and Reagan’s expression in the pause after that answer, while the crowd erupted in hilarious laughter and even the questioner caught a case of the giggles, was priceless. It was akin to the slugger pausing to watch the home-run ball in flight before flipping his bat and trotting down to first base.

The election was over at that point and the Democrats’ attacks on Reagan had resulted in disaster.

But Reagan, who did ultimately lose more than a step though it was generally after he had finished his second term when he took that turn, was far sharper and more in control of his faculties in 1984 than Biden is now. And further, Reagan was a lot brighter and a far more disciplined thinker than Biden ever was. Even when he’d started declining Reagan was still a lot sharper than Biden was. Here was Reagan at the 1992 Republican convention in Houston, essentially his last televised appearance before withdrawing from public life, unleashing a joke at Bill Clinton’s expense and trolling 1988 Democrat vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen, a Texas senator, who had trashed vice president Dan Quayle for comparing himself to John F. Kennedy in terms of age…

All this history is presented in order to ask a question: how is Joe Biden going to answer Trump’s attacks on his cognitive function? How does Joe Biden give that bat-flip moment?

Remember, this is what happened the last time somebody brought up Biden’s mental decline to his face…

Team Trump is going to hammer away on the notion that Biden has lost his marbles and isn’t all there, and perhaps take it a step further and insinuate if not outright claim that Biden is a puppet for some other shadowy individual or cabal who the American voters will find out is truly running the country through him if he were to be elected.

And that’s quite a good device, though obviously it isn’t the only thing Trump should be running on. Because Joe Biden has shown very little evidence that he can refute those attacks under pressure in the way Reagan did in that second debate in 1984. Until he can, the mental decline issue is a gold mine with persuadable voters.