A growing body of misleading online videos isn’t helping President Joe Biden and Democratic Party campaign. In one clip, Biden stands very still during a Juneteenth musical performance at the White House, leading to talk he had “frozen.”

But Philonise Floyd, George Floyd’s brother, was standing next to the president for the performance and disputed the tenor of the clip. “Joe was just standing there having fun,” he said. Floyd put his arm around the president during the performance and said the two chatted a bit before the music started and had a great conversation.

One clip, from France, made it seem like he tried to sit down when there wasn’t a chair, but there was. In another widely circulated clip, Biden appears to wander off on a hilltop golf course outside Bari, Italy, during the Group of Seven summit earlier this month, his back turned to leaders who had begun to gather for a group photo.

In reality, he’d turned around to talk to skydivers who had landed behind the leaders, giving them a thumbs up and praising their feats. The entire scene was chaotic, with skydivers landing all around the leaders and hundreds of staff members standing on the other side of a rope.

Those foreign trips can be gruelling, even for the youngest and healthiest of leaders. And Biden did back-to-back trips in quick succession, first to France and then the G7 visit to Italy. French officials involved in organising the first trip said his schedule appeared lighter compared with most world leaders’ state visits to the country.

After the G7, where Biden appeared pale and his movements slow, he flew across nine time zones to Los Angeles for a glitzy Hollywood fundraiser. One person who spoke with Biden at the event was struck by how tired the president had seemed during backstage conversations, and grew more concerned when Biden seemed unable to turn it on for his 30-minute onstage conversation with late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel and former President Barack Obama.

The same person said that during a fundraiser in March, the president came off as vibrant and engaging and displayed the kind of charm that the person was accustomed to seeing over years of interactions.

During his debate prep sessions at Camp David, Biden seemed to be doing well – ready to take on Republican candidate Donald Trump. So his actual performance came as a shock even to those who were working with him, two of the people said. At a fundraiser this week, Biden offered up that he had still been recovering from the gruelling travel 12 days earlier.

“I wasn’t very smart. I decided to travel around the world a couple of times,” Biden said. The president added that he “didn’t listen to my staff” about travel and joked that he “fell asleep on stage” during the debate.

Many in the White House say the president is in command across both domestic issues and critical foreign policy problems, like the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas conflict.

“I have been with the president a number of times over the last three-and-a-half years on some of the most consequential kind of life, death or peace-type decisions, and also very high-stakes engagements with senior leaders,” said Brett McGurk, a senior National Security Council official who coordinates the Middle East and North Africa. McGurk has worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“And what I have seen time and again – repeatedly and consistently – from the first week of the administration until now is a president who prepares for those engagements, who has very detailed and comprehensive briefs for those engagements, and then does the engagement, and then has very active follow-up.”

One senior administration official described tense moments with Biden inside the Situation Room, including one on April 13, where over four intense hours Biden and others worked through reports of an imminent attack by Iran on Israel. Biden gamed out how to respond, and led complicated discussions with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other G7 leaders, working to ensure there was no broader regional conflict.

Domestic policy adviser Neera Tanden said in recent weeks she has been in private meetings with Biden and in larger group settings on major policy issues, including potential citizenship for more migrants, new healthcare data and the FBI’s crime statistics. She said the president was engaged, thorough and fully in command of the policies.

“I take him very complicated issues, and he handles them,” she said. “He understands how programmes are complicated and interconnected, and he can connect things to experiences he’s had a long time ago, or experiences they’ve had a few months ago.”

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy described a weekend fundraiser that raised millions for Biden. It included a sit-down meal where the president, first lady and governor chatted with supporters and took a round of unscripted questions.

“He weighed in on all of the above, substantively – I’ll give you a smattering, universal pre-K, free community college, the Ukraine war, Middle East war, Federal Reserve, general economy, wage growth, job growth.”

Democrats, so far, have been largely unsatisfied with the explanations for Biden’s debate performance from White House staff, his campaign and the president himself. And there is a deeper frustration among some who feel like the president should have handled this much sooner, and he has put them in a difficult position by staying in the race.

Biden could decide to drop out of the race, but he can’t be removed. So far only two active members of Congress have called for him to step aside, but there is growing anxiety on Capitol Hill about his ability to do the job and many are anxiously awaiting post-debate polling and waiting to see how he handles his Friday interview on ABC.

Another problem for Democrats: With the focus so squarely on Biden, there has been less attention paid to Trump, whose debate performance was riddled with falsehoods about the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, Democrats’ views on abortion rights and his own revisionist comments about his response on a 2017 neo-Nazi rally.

One Democratically expressed frustration that Biden’s family members have not called on him to step aside for the sake of the top priority: Keeping Trump out of the White House. Instead, they’re encouraging him to stay in the race.

Really, only Biden’s personal physician can answer questions about the president’s cognitive fitness – and given the level of public concern, he should do so, said well-known aging researcher S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

One bad appearance on TV isn’t enough to assess anyone’s cognitive ability, Olshansky stressed, “even for those of us that study aging for a living.” Without more insight, there’s no way to know if the jet lag Biden has cited or other factors, explain the performance, he said.

I certainly know how it looks, and it did not look good. But can we attribute it to cognitive decline? Look, an hour after he was participating in that debate, and the day after, he looked back to his old self,” Olshansky said. “But the fact that we don’t know for sure is the problem.”

“The only person that’s ever examined the president from a medical perspective is his personal physician,” he added. “The important message is that we don’t know and we haven’t heard from his physician. And until those issues are resolved it just seems to be a festering wound.”

Biden’s physician, Dr Kevin O’Connor, deemed the president fit for duty after a February checkup that included a neurologic assessment. White House officials at the time said Biden wasn’t given a specific cognitive test because O’Connor and the neurologist decided he didn’t need one.

“His doctor’s a very good one and he doesn’t do unnecessary tests,” Olshansky said. “So when he made the decision not to do it, that told us a compelling story about what he saw and what he didn’t see, which is no evidence of cognitive decline” at that time.

• An AP report