Well, I’d say Kamala won the Tuesday night debate. To me, it seemed the longer she remained composed, the worse he melted down. By the end he was ranting about entire cities being taken over by undocumented immigrant gangs (they’re not) and people eating other people’s pets. He got fact-checked a little bit, in real time, and was told the City Manager of the city in question has no reports of immigrants eating people’s pets. Donald knows it’s true, anyway. He doesn’t need no stinking confirmation from people who know. He has rumors.

At one point, he even kind of acknowledged he was simply repeating scary rumors from the internet. I mean, he didn’t say it in those words, and, sadly, I’ve forgotten the exact moment. I just remember the impression: he just confessed to using internet rumors as his “source.” (It’s things like this that keep me an opinion-writer and not a “journalist.”)

I can’t believe how long it has taken me to understand that when Donald says “some people are saying,” he means, “I read on the internet.” The guy is actually trying to craft world policy from information he’s picking up from some slaphead on the web? (DO I recognize the implications of that sentence to my own writing? Do me a favor, do NOT craft policy from my opinions alone, k?) He doesn’t believe the FBI or actual officials but is dedicated to the insane musings of the incel “Whiteisright69?”

He insisted that countries around the world are emptying their prisons and sending all of their prisoners to the US. (They’re not.) When he couldn’t even respond to something with a decent internet rumor, he just made stuff up. No, the economy was not flat-lined as he left office, according to him. It was thriving. Don’t you remember? (No.)

I heard talking heads wondering aloud why they didn’t hear more “policy” from Kamala. I did NOT hear the same questions about Trump. I assume that’s because we ALL expect Trump to just rant and rave and there won’t be one word of policy because that’s just who he is. So, what, they just don’t expect it from him anyway? By the way, I heard plenty of policy ideas from Kamala, just not in-the-weeds details. And how boring would THAT have been?

What I heard from Donald was the plot of the teen horror film ‘Invasion From The South.’ He tried to blame Biden/Harris but she STILL has his late night phone call killing the immigration bill in her back pocket. He did that. HE owns the border problem now until she gets inaugurated and can try the bill again. But facts don’t faze the Donald and he’s not going to start using them now so he just plodded on, trying to scare as many people as he possible could.

In fact, he didn’t answer a single question. He acknowledged the question, then returned to his fear-mongering about immigrants. “That question about the economy is important but… Aah! They’re coming! They’re getting closer! They’re EVERYWHERE! She’s letting it happen! They’re almost at your door! Be afraid! She wants this to happen! Be VERY afraid! If she wins, you’ll have to let foreigners eat your dog! You’ll have to. They’ll make it a law. AAH!”

That was his response, essentially, to every question. He was a one-trick pony and it was a boring trick. We’ve heard it all before. To hear MAGA tell it, we live in a dystopian wasteland and all you have to do is look outside and you’ll see that it’s…well, you can’t see it now but surely it’s just around the corner and threatening…threatening. Oh God, it’s so scary.

He DID go on a deranged rant about babies being “aborted” AFTER delivery and how much Dems just love, love, love that. He was fact-checked, real-time on that one, too. Nope. There’s not a single state in the union where such a practice is legal. Although every sane person knows it’s not happening, someone had to tell him it’s not happening. (He DID, after all, read it on the internet.) He’s impervious to truth, though, so he didn’t believe the fact-check. He has internet rumors that say otherwise.

He kept making that face. It reminds me of nothing so much as an Orangutan. It’s a pulled up “smile” he likes to throw out, a kind of a smirk. I think he feels like it throws shade. I think it made him look like he might be filling his diaper in the moment, the way infants sometimes smile when they’re filling their diapers.

She acknowledged, early on, that Trump was going to lie and fear-monger. It’s really all he has. It’s his whole shtick. Then, she was able to just point back to that prediction over and over as he lied and fear-mongered. I thought she handled him easily. She looked cool, calm, and collected. She looked smart and professional. She had control of her information and just breezed past his misinformation and never took any of his bait. He took hers, though. It left him looking confused and frankly, rather stupid. I mean, internet rumors? Really?!?

It left her looking very Presidential…