The debate was a mess because of Donald Trump. Period.

 

1939. The Nazis invade Poland.

2020 media: "POLAND, GERMANY BEHAVE BADLY TOWARD EACH OTHER!"

Look. Last night's debacle wasn't the fault of two crabby old men. It was the fault of an ill-tempered, dishonest bully named Donald Trump who lied shamelessly, ignored the rules, defied the moderator, overtalked both Joe Biden AND Chris Wallace, and richly earned every name Joe Biden called him- in fact, rendered it humanly impossible for Biden or  Wallace or anybody else in the position of either to have reacted any differently than they did.

Donald Trump is a clown, a bully, and an ass with a crippling personality disorder and the empathy of a Russell's Viper. What we saw last night was who Donald Trump is- and that is what ruined last night's debate.

He refuses to discuss reality and insists that everybody else must live in his personal fantasy world. You can't hold a substantive conversation with the man because he has no substance. You can't debate issues with him because he is clueless about issues but has a dogmatic position on every one of them. He is all about yelling and making crazy assertions based on nothing but his own imagination.

He is an overgrown spoiled brat who Fred Trump didn't spank nearly enough.  That is the dominating fact of the contemporary political scene. That has been the dominating fact of the last four years of world history. Everything else has to either be seen through that lens or reveal itself to be nonsense blathered to defend the indefensible.

Trump doesn't play by the rules. He has no shame and no sense of decency- and you can't take him out in public without him embarrassing himself and you. Except he can't be embarrassed. That is what ruined the debate last night, and it's as pathologically dishonest as Trump himself is to pretend otherwise.

Reading the attempt of the media to be self-consciously neutral about Mr. Trump's pathological disruption of last night's debate is like reading a historical account of genocide which claims that "there was blame on both sides." I grant that before last night it would have been unthinkable to call the President of the United States a "fool" or a "clown" or telling him to "shut up" to his face. But we've never had a President who so obviously and unashamedly a fool and a clown before. You would think that anyone would have a hard time picking up on something so obvious, but some don't.

When people don't hear you speak in your indoor voice, you raise it. If necessary, you shout. People may not hear you anyway. But it's human nature. Consider: I heard someone today sensibly remark that if somebody acted the way Donald Trump did last night to most of us, we would have slugged him!

MAGAworld would have thought that Trump's performance was perfect no matter what he did or said. It always does. It's no surprise that they think that now. That's who they are, too. It's no surprise that they resolve the evening-long conflict between Donald Trump and both the moderator and the rules his own campaign had agreed to by siding with Trump. Whether anybody who does that should ever be taken seriously ever again is another matter.

Last night's debate was ruined by the fact that Donald Trump was part of it and simply was Donald Trump. The unhinged fanatic we all saw last night is who Mr. Trump is- and he is the most powerful man in the world.

That is the most critical issue of this campaign. A close second is that so even people struggling to be objective could take that salutary obsession so far as to try to divide the blame between both candidates last night. That Mr. Trump's supporters are as divorced from reality as the President himself is simply a given. If they were otherwise, they wouldn't be his supporters. Not at this late date.

News flash: unless Mr. Trump fails to show up, exactly the same thing is going to happen in the next two debates. I'm halfway persuaded by the false even-handedness with which last night's 90-minute tantrum by the overgrown infant who visits the West Wing every couple of days when his golfing schedule permits should move Joe Biden to underscore the truth about the man by refusing to debate him again unless the moderator either has a switch with which to turn off the microphones of either or both of the candidates, or the mics are automatically shut off once the candidate's two minutes are up and doing come on again until it's their turn to speak.