The morning that President Joe Biden was quoted calling Donald Trump a “sick fuck,” I happened to be having breakfast with a friend who is an Oscar-nominated director and a screenwriter—a guy who cares about politics but who is even more attuned to emotional resonance. “This is good, what Biden said!” my friend exclaimed. “It shows that he’s got energy, that he’s vital!”

One week later, Biden was deliberately demonstrating that vitality at far greater length on national television, after being put on the defensive over a glaring political weakness: that he’s 81 years old. Special counsel Robert Hur, charged with investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents during the years after he’d served as Barack Obama’s vice president, had just delivered a blistering report. The good news was that Hur wasn’t indicting Biden—at least legally. The bad news was that Hur was judging and condemning Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” a phrase that read like a gold-plated gift from the special counsel to Trump.

Biden’s campaign team had been wrestling with how best to respond to the ongoing age issue for more than a year. They had largely settled on an oblique approach: The president would demonstrate his health and competence through his job performance, and he’d mix in occasional self-deprecating jokes about his longevity. Biden’s camp would gradually ramp up his public appearances through the spring and summer as the general-election rematch came into focus, but would pay obsessive attention to physical logistics to avoid another episode of Biden tripping onstage. Behind the scenes, Biden’s aides would continually remind reporters that Trump is 77 years old and that the expected Republican nominee makes plenty of his own verbal and factual blunders. “Aside from the president’s health, I think we can manage any surprises,” a former senior White House official told me recently, before Hur’s report.

For all that preparation, Biden’s advisers knew there would come a high-profile moment when the incumbent’s age would become the central, and perhaps pivotal, topic. Most likely, the thinking went, it would arrive during a debate, with Trump taunting Biden, possibly calling him “Sleepy Joe” or “Slow Joe.” The president could rehearse gracious responses to that kind of nastiness. But the moment arrived from an unexpected direction with likely greater impact than Biden’s camp anticipated. This was why hours after Hur’s report was released, the president was taking questions in front of the White House press corps.

Confronting the special counsel’s damning portrait quickly and head-on seemed to offer the best chance of containing the damage. While Hur may have overstepped his mandate to determine whether a crime had occurred, there was no avoiding the sense that his report read like an official diagnosis of Biden’s fitness, especially because he backed it up with vivid examples of the president’s forgetfulness. No doubt those quotes were selected to maximize Hur’s point of view. But they landed with the color of substance, if not objectivity. They also included one jab that gave Biden an opening to counterattack: a claim that the president was unable to remember the year of his son Beau’s death. “Whatever people, Republicans or Democrats, think of Biden politically, that subject always generates sympathy for him,” a Biden insider says. Indeed, a weekend fundraising email attributed to first lady Jill Biden, in which she wrote, “I can’t imagine someone would try to use our son’s death to score political points,” generated the most money of any single email since Biden’s campaign launch message.

The age issue clearly won’t be going away anytime soon. Jon Stewart, in his return to hosting The Daily Show, joked about the president confusing the leaders of Mexico and Egypt: “Joe Biden had a big press conference to dispel the notion that he may have lost a step and, politically speaking, lost three to four steps.” House Republicans, more cynically, are plotting a multipronged offensive to “probe” Biden’s geriatric state, according to Axios. Yet beyond last week’s combative press conference, the campaign’s game plan is unlikely to change much or at all. Biden’s political team—Anita Dunn, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, and Tom Donilon—are adaptable to circumstance but pride themselves on tuning out media and political frenzies and sticking to a calm, steady agenda. There is also a core belief among Biden’s advisers and allies that while voters dislike the president being an octogenarian, his age has already been deeply baked into opinions—and that the contrast between old and crazy ultimately favors Biden, particularly with Trump spouting fresh nuttiness all the time. “Is the report helpful? No, but it’s not like it’s a new hit,” says Cornell Belcher, a Democratic strategist who worked on both of Obama’s winning presidential runs. “That ship has already sailed with voters who are worried about it. But the Joe Biden who is a parent, who is angry about the death of his son being used this way? That’s a head-nodding moment in focus groups to the voters who actually count, who are on the fence, who find it relatable. Biden has suffered politically from being just a normal president, coming after Trump’s reality TV chaos. I’d rather have Angry Joe than this idea of Sleepy Joe.”