Trump “won” this debate inasmuch as Joe Biden turned in a performance so appalling that Democrats are now determined to ditch him. Mumbly, muttering, off on tangents, convinced that America has 100 trillionaires, sleepy, feeble, angry and confused, Joe Biden’s frailty can no longer be denied. All those Democrats who days ago said he was raring to go and sharp as a tack and they cannot even keep up with him are all revealed as liars to even the dumbest, least-paying-attention Americans who saw this. They may not be able to find America on a globe, but they know Biden is worthless.

What’s funny is that this debate was rigged to Biden’s advantage:

• It’s on CNN, even though CNN can barely be considered a channel. It draws fewer viewers than Steven Crowder’s show. If Joe Rogan hosted it on his podcast it would reach a larger audience.
• It was hosted by two CNN flacks who are so pro-Biden that one of them is on the record calling Trump “Hitler” and yet he gets to anchor the debate.
• There was no audience. Clearly, they were worried that the cheering for Trump’s statements might startle President Biden awake. Trump didn’t play to an audience there, but he’s clearly able to connect with the viewers at home anyway. But the lack of an audience led to the odd sight at the end of the night where the debate just…is over. The two presidents stand there, staring forward, not being applauded by anyone while CNN plugs their analysis and doesn’t even give a cordial farewell or thank you to these two men. (I despise Biden and even so, I think you should thank him for gracing CNN with his attention.) Then Trump walks away with healthy gait to stage left, while Jill helps Joe down a tiny little set of stairs so that he doesn’t hurt himself. And it’s not unwarranted caution. He takes those steps gingerly.
• Mics are silenced when it’s not the person’s turn to speak. That was an interesting demand, and everyone gets why. Trump runs overtime, interrupts, continues saying what he wants to say. Advantage Biden, right? So I can’t tell you how fun it was watching Joe Biden angrily shouting yet not heard during Trump’s time.
• Very often, the hosts move on to their next question and neglect to give rebuttal time. On at least two occasions, Donald Trump spent his answer time for the next question going back to respond to something Biden had said…because it clearly deserved a response. There should have been some sort of system for requesting a rebuttal. (Yes, I realize rebuttals can be endless, but there should at least be some.)

Biden came loaded for bear with insults, embarrassments and hot needles to jab Trump with. He wanted to get Trump mad so that Trump would go off, red-faced and flustered. All of it predictable, though, and a lot of it clearly wrong to anyone who has gone through these fact-checks before.

Biden still peddles the “good people on both sides” canard which is up there with “hands up don’t shoot” as a lie that just cannot be shaken from the American Left. Trump was talking about the people on both sides of the General Lee statue debate. And just in case you didn’t get that, he says that he’s not talking about the Nazis and other extremists there, whom he condemns. It has been so concretely refuted that anyone still selling that lie is doing it knowingly…and I almost expected the CNN hosts to say something right there. (Even Candy Crowly might have spoken up at that point!)

Biden continues to just slam abuse on Trump, much of it wrong. Trump did NOT get convicted of molesting a woman; he was innocent of that but convicted of slander for pointing out that she was so unattractive it was not believable that he would molest her. (I don’t really know how that isn’t a legitimate point of defense for him. He attracts supermodels.) But the left has been confusing the two ever since on CNN and MSNBC, so Joe may be misled by them.

Similarly, Biden says that all of Trump’s court cases failed in 2020 when he tried to contest the election. This is inaccurate. Not a single case ever reached the point of discussing the evidence; they were thrown out for technicalities before it ever got to the merits of the case. Just as the Supreme Court yesterday rejected considering the case of the government colluding with big tech to silence conservatives, it was an issue of standing that never got to the nitty gritty of the accusations. You would never discuss that case as “The Supreme Court said the government didn’t do that” because that is not what happened yesterday. BUT there will be people weak on legalities who think that’s what happened.

NOTE: Donald Trump really needs to find a way to say what I just said in a paragraph of one or two concise sentences. He needs a snappy retort when someone says that. As the Democrats flail, they are going to keep going back to the contested election of 2020, and Trump needs to hit back hard and short, not blather endlessly about it. Tonight, Donald said something unclear about putting together a special event like the debate tonight where they would just talk about the election. That’s about as bad as saying, “The details are on my website.” (Not that you can’t HAVE details on your website, but you need a better statement.)

Trump needed to be ready tonight with hard attacks about election chicanery, registered voters at Nevada addresses that don’t exist, thousands of voters in Wisconsin all having the same phone number, women on video in the dark of night wearing surgical gloves as they put wads of ballots into drop boxes, people notified that their dead mothers voted, senile elderly who don’t know their own children but managed to vote in 2020 with the nurse’s “help”, the reams of ballot signatures that are nothing like the signature of the voter on file but were let through anyway. Etc. etc. etc.

Mind you, the 2020 election was lost before election night. As soon as all those Democrat states put through the loosy-goosiest rules, often side-stepping the legislatures, blaming it on COVID, it was over. The chicanery was through the roof, but once questionable ballots have been thrown into the bin, it’s done. Someone peed in the soup and you can’t get the pee out. You have to drink the pee-filled soup, or throw it out and cook it again. The Republicans had every right to be furious, but the correct way to deal with the stolen election was unclear.

What is the proper way to handle election chicanery without our side always going the gentlemanly Nixon route and conceding for the good of the country? Because four years into the term of a man who should not have ever been President, having caused a horrendous disaster in Afghanistan and from that the Ukrainian War and the slaughter in Israel… after causing the bankruptcy of small businesses and now the shuttering of fast-food and retail giants… after taking the record low black poverty rate and black and Hispanic unemployment rates and putting them all back where they were before Trump was President… after flooding us with tens of millions of illegal immigrants… after record inflation to every factor of our cost of living… was Trump’s conceding his loss really “for the good of the country”?

Trump handled it badly. But I think the irritating part for me is that four years later we STILL don’t know the RIGHT way to handle this the next time the Democrats do it. Did we learn how to mount those court cases so that they don’t get thrown out? Forget partisanship. Shouldn’t we as a country know what the right way is to handle a contested election?

As I say: this is going to keep coming up, and Trump’s being so unprepared with a good answer for this first debate is telling. He wings it too much. And I’m on his side! He won the 2020 election. All but one of the counties that indicate to election-watchers who is winning the election went to Trump. There was monumental fraud committed. You will never convince me that Joe Biden, who can’t draw five people to a street corner to wave to his motorcade, was more popular than Barack Obama. I could accept that it was not a vote for Joe Biden but against Donald Trump…except that Donald Trump gained votes, which doesn’t happen to unpopular presidents. You make everyone vote on Election Day 2020 (except for servicemen and the like) and they have to show their photo ID to vote, Donald Trump wins. You let people mail in votes, with ballots mailed willy-nilly and collected by who knows and then supposedly someone’s checking the signatures but it’s all good man, and you get the 2020 that we got.

But Trump’s got to get a sharp, short, rehearsed, practiced way to respond to that, and to January 6, and to every point of attack they have.

Trump also has a tendency to get personally boastful where he could be relentlessly on-message. To wit:

• Asked about his own health, he starts well, about his willingness to take a mental acuity test and share the results and how Biden won’t. A palpable hit. He then goes on and on about playing golf and Biden’s golf game. He SHOULD be saying that if elected he will continue to be transparent with his fitness examinations. And one more thing: unlike Joe Biden, he will have a Vice President who will make an excellent replacement should he indeed have a sudden change in his mental or physical health, and not one who is a word salad-spinning cackle monster.
• Asked twice about Fentanyl, he somehow neglects the obvious point that he would militarize our border and stop crossings until a wall is built and the border secured. This would quickly squelch the most obvious point of entry for the fentanyl trade. Trump should then address any other plans/ideas he has on the subject of Fentanyl. And is it wrong of me to think that Trump should perhaps get a bit personal? He is, famously, a tee-totaler. He is also a man of great accomplishment. It wouldn’t hurt to occasionally put across the point that a life of sobriety can be a key to success. If your life is going badly, turning to drugs is not going to solve anything and it can lead to addiction or death. But even if you avoid those, when you sober up your life isn’t one bit better because you put your time and what little cash you have into getting stoned instead of fixing your problems. Donald Trump would actually be an effective man to be getting out this kind of message. He didn’t become a successful builder by wasting his evenings in an altered state.
• Asked about child care, Trump spent the entire time rebutting a previous statement by Biden. (See above about rebuttals.) Now, I know the CNN hosts are kind of pandering here. They want some big government solution to childcare costs. But Trump could have addressed this two ways:
  1. This seems like a perfect opportunity for the market to do its thing. People need childcare, and that’s a job that cannot be taken away by Artificial Intelligence. It’s an obvious need that the market should fill. Encourage people out of work to enter that field. Government cannot do anything about childcare but mess up the market.
  2. It’s also a perfect opportunity to just hammer home how bad the economy is under Joe Biden, which was not nearly tackled enough. Childcare costs are just one of the MANY costs that are skyrocketing. Trump could take the childcare question and just hit Biden’s inflation again and again. How much of these soaring costs are due to the devaluation of our currency, the restoration of regulations that Trump had curtailed (Did you even know that the butcher shortage is due to regulations?), and the continuation of Obamacare. Make no mistake, a LOT of these failing businesses are struggling because of having to cover medical insurance under Obamacare. Thus, the election of Donald Trump will begin the healing.

So, as I said, this was a huge Biden loss, and definitely a Trump win. But Trump could have lost this if he’d been up against a semi-competent candidate. He needs to be better prepared.

I was not a Trump fan in 2016. I feared he wasn’t even a Republican; he had been a Democrat. For some reason, nobody seemed to remember that in 2012 he had attacked MITT ROMNEY for being too hard on illegal immigration. I don’t recall Mitt even mentioning the issue, but Trump thought it hurt the Republican with Hispanics. And now Trump’s coming down the escalator sounding like a fifth-grader who was assigned a book report on Ann Coulter’s “Adios America” and he skimmed it the night before. “They’re not sending us their best! They’re sending us very bad people.” I wasn’t sure he believed any of that, he was just saying what he thought we wanted to hear.

I would have gone for any of the 15 candidates who weren’t Trump or the isolationist Rand Paul. I thought we had the best slate of candidates in years. Perhaps that was the problem. If given a hard choice of, say, Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, Cruz would have won. (Remember, Trump often had the biggest minority of the split vote, but he never had a majority until the very end.) But the non-Trump vote was split between four or five front-runners, with no clear favorite emerging. There was the alt-right crowd plastering frogs everywhere, shouting “Cuckservative!” and “JEB!” at anyone who questioned why they liked Trump. So no, I never wore a MAGA hat. I wanted a principled person who could put together good arguments for conservatism, not just a guy who talks about how great he is in a fourth grade reading level vocabulary.

I would have liked Ted Cruz. I think Ted Cruz would have smoked Hillary in the debates and it wouldn’t be close. But then, there are people on the right who detest Ted Cruz and call him “slimy”. I don’t see it, but you can’t argue with a person’s feelings. I don’t know if Ted missed his chance to be President someday or if he’ll throw his hat in in 2028. What I do know is that I would very much like to see Ted Cruz appointed Attorney General next year. (I know, we need him in the Senate. That’s always the problem with good senators.)

Still, I voted Donald Trump in 2016. I wasn’t going to ever vote Hillary in a million years, and I have nothing to say to any “conservative” who would. I was an election judge that year. The number of conservatives who threw their votes away on write-ins was astonishing. If Trump could have found a way to reconcile with the “Never-Trump” right he would have won much more soundly in 2016, and perhaps won in 2020.

In 2020, I voted proudly for Donald Trump. I still don’t think he’s a conservative at heart, but he governed as one…and I could indeed be wrong in my assessment. I’d say he had some good conservative advisors, clearly. But he’s the most effective Republican president since Reagan. Perhaps better than Reagan, but even I find that blasphemous.

I’d still prefer a president like Ted Cruz who can formulate great arguments, but that’s not who’s on the ballot this year. If Trump had chosen retirement, I’d have been fine with that, too. Unlike the Democrats who can’t come up with one semi-plausible contender for the Oval Office, we have a huge selection of wonderful people and sadly not enough presidential elections for them all to hold office. I’m hopeful that we can retake the White House and keep it beyond Trump.

This year, I bought a MAGA hat. A black one that I bought after his trial concluded, along with throwing a sizeable donation his way. I’m very happy with how the debate went tonight, but I hope Trump gets some constructive feedback from someone like me. Trump can lose in November and go lie by the pool in Florida with his supermodel and his grandchildren. But we don’t have the option of losing in November. I can’t bear to think how destructive four more years of this would be. So…study up, Donald!