Ben Shapiro critiques the first Trump-Biden debate as historically unproductive, arguing Chris Wallace abandoned neutrality to shield Biden while allowing Trump's interruptions to obscure policy advantages. Shapiro highlights Biden's falsehoods regarding systemic racism and Antifa versus Trump's aggressive style, blaming media toxicity for the chaos. The episode concludes by asserting the election remains a referendum on Trump's personality rather than substantive policy shifts, while briefly noting the cultural focus of Matt Walsh's show over pure politics. [Automatically generated summary]
I've seen more productive conversations between homeless people screaming about the aliens that live in their hair than I saw last night.
That was the least productive presidential debate in the history of the world.
I mean, it was truly an awful presidential debate.
So what's the net effect?
Pretty much zero.
Because nothing matters, man.
Nothing matters whatsoever.
Now, here is a basic truth.
Joe Biden performed very poorly last night.
He did.
Joe Biden said many, many things last night that are morally objectionable, that are outright false.
He said things that were literally not true over and over and over.
And Chris Wallace did not fact check Joe Biden.
He was there to badger Donald Trump.
He was there to interrupt Trump.
But Trump himself was so busy interrupting Biden that basically it was the Justice Kavanaugh Devil's Triangle of interruption and crazy towns.
So nobody could get a word in edgewise.
Nobody knew what the hell was going on.
It was the worst episode of Jerry Springer in history because nobody hit each other with the chair.
That's all it was.
And we didn't know who the father was when it was all over.
We had no clue.
All we knew is that we had just been witness to a bleep show, the likes of which I have not seen.
Now, you're gonna get a lot of sugarcoating from a lot of people today on all sides of the aisle.
On the left, they're gonna be like, oh, Joe Biden was a statesman last night.
No, he wasn't.
He was garbage.
On the right, you're going to get, Donald Trump really took it to him.
Donald Trump was like a rabid badger last night, which means that he scored a couple of points, but he was so busy being the rabid badger that all of the attention was on the rabid badger.
Now, here is the deal, guys.
In this election cycle, where you believe the race is, is where it was two days ago, is where it currently is today.
So if you think that Donald Trump has some troubles, And if you look at the national polling, he does.
If you look at the national polling where Donald Trump is down anywhere from 7 to 10 points nationally, and he is down in literally every swing state, or at the very least running even in about half of them and down in the other half, then last night was a blown opportunity.
If you want to see Trump win, he needed to come out, and he needed to allow Joe Biden to say dumb things, and then he needed to pick it apart.
I know a lot of people who debate.
I myself debate a lot.
And when you debate people, one of the things you need to do is let them make their argument specifically so you can debunk it.
There were times when Joe Biden would say things that were eminently false, just blatantly untrue, immoral.
There were a couple of times he said things that I thought were morally evil, actually.
I mean, not condemning Antifa, suggesting that all of America is racist, as we'll get to.
And those would have been great times for Trump to jump in and say something.
But the problem was Trump was so busy jumping up and down that none of it distinguished itself from anything else.
It was just one continuous Phil Spector wall of sound ending with a shotgun blast.
I mean, that's that it was like.
I can't describe to you how useless I thought last night was for everybody involved.
And guess what?
That's kind of what the polls showed.
So a CBS News Instant Poll showed that 48% of viewers thought Biden won, 41% thought Trump won, another 10% thought the debate was a tie.
Okay, what do those numbers look an awful lot like?
Oh, they look exactly like the national polling.
Exactly like the national polling.
In other words, everybody who liked Trump going in liked Trump coming out.
Everybody who liked Biden going in liked Biden coming out.
And everybody in the middle who was like, these both people, they're just terrible, All those people came out thinking both people were terrible.
Frank Luntz did one of these focus groups.
I don't tend to put a lot of stock in the focus group.
The one thing in the Luntz focus group that I did put some stock in is that one third of the people who were in the focus group said they were less likely to vote altogether after watching it.
Now, maybe that benefits Trump, right?
If you think that the goal of Trump is to sort of lower the turnout for Biden, that it's a turnout election.
If you can get people not to show up, then it'll be a low turnout election like last time.
And then presumably Trump wins.
Then maybe that's part of the strategy.
Or maybe the strategy last night was for Trump to go so hot out of the gate that he sort of intimidated Biden into silence.
He was hoping that Biden would sort of collapse under the barrage of blows.
I mean, I literally compared Trump yesterday to the guy he didn't want to fight in high school because he was going to pull any weapon at his disposal.
Bricks from the side of the building, a lead pipe from underneath the plumbing supply, a knife out of his back pocket.
He just didn't know what Trump was going to pull out.
And that's exactly right.
I mean, Trump hit Biden with the kitchen sink last night and Biden didn't look good under the barrage.
The problem is that there was no way for us to even gauge the blows.
It was like watching A boxing match between professionals?
Except that the blows are so fast you actually can't tally the blows?
You can't see which ones are hitting and which ones actually are not?
Except these are not professionals, it was a clown car and everybody was just slapping each other with rubber hammers.
Okay, so with all of that said...
Let's get into it.
So, let's begin with the performance of Joe Biden.
And the reason I want to start with the performance of Biden is because Biden's the frontrunner.
Right now, according to the media, according to the polls, Biden is the frontrunner.
And his performance will be utterly ignored.
And the reason that Biden's performance will be utterly ignored is because everybody wants to focus on Trump.
Which brings us to a larger point about this election again.
Okay, that larger point is pretty simple.
The fact remains that if this election is a referendum on Trump's personality, he will lose.
If this election is a referendum on Biden's policy, Trump will win.
Because Biden is radical.
Biden is no bulwark against the radical left.
Biden is not all there.
He was not all there last night.
I know people were saying that he stood up to the attacks in a real serious way.
Yes, he didn't physically collapse.
He didn't break down crying on stage.
But he was not exactly with it.
He was all over the place.
He was saying things that were patently untrue.
He won't get fact-checked by Daniel Dale over at CNN, who's almost an overt employee of the DNC and has been for a long time.
But Biden said many, many things last night that were very, very bad.
And Chris Wallace routinely bailed him out.
And Trump kind of bailed him out by interrupting him so often.
So let's focus in on what Joe Biden actually said about policy and what he actually did last night.
Because the media will not focus in on that.
They'll focus in instead on the stuff that hurts Trump, namely the personality stuff.
And this was, again, the error of Trump's strategy.
It brought to the fore all the personality quibbles that people have with Trump.
They're not quibbles.
I mean, they're concerns.
It brought to the fore everybody's real issues with Trump personally, as opposed to the policies.
Because if this were just on policy, law and order, versus I won't bash Antifa, if this were about The COVID response, namely, try to keep as much open as possible, keep American life going while protecting people versus lockdown everything.
That's a debate Trump wins.
On the issues, these are all debates Trump wins.
But I'm not sure that anybody even saw an issue last night.
So let's start with with Joe Biden's performance in just one second.
It was really lackluster.
It was really bad.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Okay, so.
A lot of the debate for Joe Biden was taken up by him just insulting Trump.
People are focusing in on the fact that Trump insulted Biden a lot.
Yeah, Biden insulted Trump right back.
It was basically grumpy old men with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and Walter Matthau here trying to stab Jack Lemmon with a frozen fish.
And this is about 15 minutes in, and Trump had not shut up at that point.
So I get it.
I will say, however, that what Biden was attempting to avoid in that particular exchange, again, so much of these debates comes down to the clips that happen afterward.
What Trump was trying to get across in that exchange is that Joe Biden literally refused to answer whether he would pack the court.
He refused it over and over and over again.
In fact, here is the lead up to Biden saying to Trump that he should shut up, right?
Okay, and that ended with Chris Wallace bailing out Biden, bailing him out.
We've reached the end of this question.
Chris Wallace's behavior last night, as we will see, was not exactly wonderful.
I think he started off with good intentions, and by about 20 minutes in, he decided that his chief goal was to get Trump to stop interrupting, and so it became just, Wallace became one of the debaters.
He jumped into the debate himself.
Okay, more of Joe Biden going after Trump on a personal level, saying he can't get a word in with this clown.
There was a lot of this from Joe Biden last night.
And this was the, again, for people on the left, this was thrilling that he got testy with Trump.
Yeah, I'm not sure that that's particularly thrilling.
I'm not sure it showed a great side of Biden.
He did this over and over and over.
And it's one point where after one of these, again, talkovers, if you're the transcriptionist for this particular debate, you had the worst job in America last night.
But here was Joe Biden, you know, kind of ironically saying this was a productive segment and Chris Wallace chuckling along with him.
That platform he approved of was co-written by Bernie Sanders.
Sanders has bragged about this.
And as we'll see, he ain't no bulwark of moderation here.
This I thought was the worst moments of the night, and everybody ignored this.
Because I know that this has become part of our traditional rhetoric now, but it is the worst part of America's political discourse right now.
This accusation that America is systemically racist.
Which again, for those who missed it, I've been discussing this for months.
The term systemically racist springs originally from Stokely Carmichael, who used the term institutional racism to describe any institution that results in inequality between racial groups.
In other words, the only way that you can tell if an institution is racist is the inequality of the result.
And any inequality of result renders the institution racist.
That means that all institutions have to be burned to the ground because they are racist, right?
All of them have to be fundamentally remolded because they are racist.
Here is Joe Biden, an institutionalist to the core, supposedly, a man who's been in the United States Senate or in the vice presidency for 47 long years, a servant of the system, so to speak, declaring that the entire American system is two-tiered.
First of all, it is a lie about America, a vicious lie about America.
Second, it is a vicious lie about Americans.
And third, it is a damning calumny against the prospects of black Americans.
When you tell black Americans they cannot rise under any circumstances because the system is so rigged against them, you're telling them a lie.
To tell a child that is a form of child abuse in a free country.
And yet Joe Biden engages in this myth-making, this Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo bullcrap.
He does it every single day and he gets away with it.
And we'll get to Chris Wallace in a second because Chris Wallace not only let him get away with it, he helped promulgate this nonsense last night.
But here is Joe Biden saying what I thought was the worst thing of the night that apparently nobody picks up on because it is just so such a part of our rote politics.
Every system in this country, every system in this country is laced through with racial injustice.
Every system.
How is that not the chief issue?
I don't understand.
I mean, this would have been the opportunity for Trump to jump in, would it not?
And say, every system in America is racist.
Every one.
We abolished legalized racism in the 1960s.
That doesn't mean that we've abolished all racism from the human heart, because that exists literally everywhere at every time throughout human history.
But the very basic idea that America's institutions are rooted in racism That the justice system today is systemically racist.
It's designed to keep down black people.
The economic system is designed to keep down black people.
These are talking points from the neo-Marxist left.
How exactly was Joe Biden allowed to get away with that?
Where was the follow-up question there?
Why wouldn't Chris Wallace say, okay, and your plans to fix these systemically racist systems are to?
Because he doesn't have a plan.
It's just to use this as a baton.
That's only one of the bad things that Joe Biden said last night.
There were many bad things he said last night.
And that he got away with because everybody was so distracted by the fact that Trump was like a woodpecker over here against the tree nearby.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so, more nonsense spouted by Joe Biden last night, and there was a lot of it.
So, here was an amazing flip-flop on the Green New Deal.
Inside of 30 seconds, he said he is for the Green New Deal and that it is actually going to save us money.
This would be the Green New Deal that cost him $90 trillion.
He's proposed some bizarre sort of scaled down version of the Green New Deal, but AOC is part of his campaign and is helping to head up his panel on climate change.
He specifically says in his own platform that he's in favor of the Green New Deal.
His vice presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, was a co-sponsor in the Senate of the Green New Deal.
So you don't get to just separate yourself off.
How, again, where was Chris Wallace on this?
Where the F was Chris Wallace?
Chris Wallace last night, He was not only there to fact-check what Trump was saying and badger Trump.
He was also there to shield Joe Biden from any serious question.
And Trump was not really able to prosecute the case against Joe Biden because he was too busy focusing in on sort of the inanities surrounding Joe Biden as opposed to his policies.
Here is Joe Biden flip-flopping on the Green New Deal inside of 35 seconds.
So the Green New Deal is going to save money, but also he doesn't support the Green New Deal.
And then Chris Wallace says, OK, What do you mean?
OK, hold up.
You just said it's going to save money, but you don't support it.
Why not?
Why don't you support the Green New Deal?
Wouldn't that be the normal follow up question?
Never comes.
OK, other moments from Joe Biden last night.
So there's going to be a lot of focus and there has been a lot of focus on Trump's words on white supremacy, which we'll get to in just one second again.
Irredeemably stupid error by Trump last night on the stage.
But Joe Biden also said a thing that was not only irredeemably stupid, but also morally benighted.
And everybody is just pretending it doesn't mean anything.
In fact, Megyn Kelly is trending for pointing out that it does mean something.
So Joe Biden was asked specifically about Antifa.
And he says, oh, well, you know, Antifa, they're really not an organization.
They're more of just like an idea.
OK, no, they are called by the FBI an ideology or a movement.
An idea is something that has no practical real world ramifications unless it is taken down and made into an ideology or a movement.
But here is Biden just pretending that Antifa doesn't exist.
And what was amazing about the framing of a lot of the law and order discussion last night, it was all about the right-wing violence that's happening in our major cities.
Weird, because it seems like the violence in our major cities, as Trump himself pointed out, we'll see this, is coming from the left wing.
But here was Joe Biden refusing to condemn Antifa last night.
Okay, and then Wallace jumped in to protect, right?
I mean, again, Wallace was really bad last night.
He was really bad.
Trump said he was debating Wallace and Biden last night.
At the beginning, that wasn't true.
By the end of the debate, that was absolutely true.
Okay, Biden defending Antifa there is a low point.
It is a bad move.
It is a bad political move, and it is a bad moral move.
Antifa is a violent group of thugs.
They've been going around, many of them have criminal records.
They've been burning things.
They've been hijacking peaceful protests.
And even members of BLM will tell you this.
They've been going around and setting things on fire, occupying swaths of city areas, attacking cops, and Joe Biden won't condemn them because they're just an idea, not an organization.
Okay, final clip of Joe Biden last night.
So, Biden also blamed Trump for the riots in Portland.
He somehow came around to the bizarre position that it was Donald Trump's fault that there were riots in Portland, even though, again, Donald Trump sent the Federals in, and then he withdrew the Federals, and the riots are still ongoing in Portland.
It's not about Trump pouring gasoline on the fire in Portland.
That is a left wing city being run by left wing radicals.
And the fact is that the violence that has been breaking out every night in Portland culminated in an Antifa member shooting somebody who is a member of Patriot Prayer.
You don't get to hide behind the Donald Trump is a bad orange mean man argument to avoid condemning an actual violent terror group in Antifa, which is what they are.
Again, in just a second we'll get to President Trump's performance, which likewise was not very good last night.
Because this is what America deserves.
HL Mencken said that democracy is the idea that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
We're getting it good and hard, gang.
That was a A mess last night.
What a mess.
Okay, we're gonna get to more of that mess last night in just one second.
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Okay, so now to President Trump's performance.
It was not good.
Okay, not gonna pretend otherwise.
Not gonna talk about how it was a genius performance.
It was not a world-beating performance.
It was a bad performance.
Trump came in, as Chris Christie said, very, very hot, and he never let up.
It was two hours of continuous sound.
It was nearly unwatchable.
Now, if Trump were in the lead, this might make sense.
It might make sense because it neutralizes the ability of Joe Biden to lie at length, which would be not a bad idea.
In 2012, when Paul Ryan was debating Joe Biden, Joe Biden lied fluently, and Paul Ryan didn't fact-check him.
He assumed that the moderator was gonna do that.
The moderator did not, in fact, do that in that case, and ended badly for Paul Ryan.
So being aggressive with Biden is not a bad strategy, but there's a difference between being aggressive and forcing questions and prosecuting and just being irritating.
And the problem is this.
There is a theory of this election.
It goes something like this.
The American people are exhausted.
This has been an exhausting four years.
We were willing to take the exhaustion and the craziness and the tweets and the constant chatter.
We were willing to take that.
The American people were.
Up until things went bad.
Then the American people got in a bad mood.
And now they're just exhausted.
And whoever exhausts them less ends up becoming president.
Now that's a war with the more general notion that the more charismatic candidate tends to become president.
Trump is obviously more charismatic than Biden.
Biden is charisma free.
He's a speed bump of a human.
But If the question is whether you are exhausted.
Last night was exhausting.
15 minutes in, people were reaching for the whiskey.
30 minutes in, they were reaching for the Xanax.
45 minutes in, they were reaching for the shotgun.
Okay, it was an exhausting evening.
I wonder how many Americans actually made it through the first half hour.
Seriously, because it was just people yelling over each other.
It was LOUD NOISES!
That was not a good strategy.
Because here's the thing about Joe Biden.
He is doddering.
He does not know what he is talking about.
He makes errors on a routine basis.
In fact, Trump was perfectly capable of spotting about half of those errors.
There were times when Joe Biden would say things like, you're gonna throw 100 million people off their healthcare.
And Trump was like, what the hell are you talking about?
There aren't 100 million people with preexisting conditions who are gonna be thrown off their healthcare.
What in the world are you saying?
Trump actually fact-checked him from time to time.
The problem is, because it was, in fact, just this drone, this drone of sound, If you are somebody in the middle, and those are the people that we care about, right?
I mean, if you are on the right, you're going to vote for Trump anyway.
If you're on the left, you're voting for Biden anyway.
If you're in the middle, how do those people think of it?
I cannot imagine anything other than if you were in the middle watching this thing, all you wanted to do was switch over to Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon and watch anything else, literally anything else.
You're going to watch that man having sex with the octopus movie, like anything, but watch this thing.
So, Trump came out extremely aggressive.
And again, partisans will cheer, in the same way that partisans on the left cheer when Joe Biden tells Trump to shut up.
Do any of these things score any points?
I don't think so.
So here's Trump being really aggressive, saying that Biden should never use the word smart with him.
Because again, Trump's job here is to make himself seem more palatable to the American people, not to seem more Trumpy to the American people.
Okay, then Trump berated Biden about Hunter Biden.
Now, again, Hunter Biden is a legit campaign issue.
And frankly, Chris Wallace should have asked Joe Biden about Hunter Biden, considering that there are now reports that Hunter Biden was receiving money, he was in fact receiving money, from the wife of the mayor of Moscow, and it was in the millions of dollars apparently, or at least firms he was connected to.
Trump goes after Hunter, and Biden gets mad about Hunter.
Do people think this is going to make a big difference in the actual presidential debate, or does it just look like Trump is getting so aggressive that it's aggression for aggression's sake?
China ate your lunch, Joe, and no wonder your son goes in and he takes out, he takes out billions of dollars, takes out billions of dollars to manage, he makes millions of dollars.
And also, while we're at it, why is it, just out of curiosity, The mayor of Moscow's wife gave your son $3.5 million.
We'll get to Trump being right and Biden being wrong on the issues in a second.
And then we'll get, of course, to the comment that everybody is talking about today, and that is Trump's comments on white supremacy.
Again, I don't know how many times we have to go through this routine, where Trump is asked specifically about white supremacy, and then he shows himself willing to condemn white supremacy, and then he says something dumb.
And then he proceeds to sort of futz around with it.
We'll get to that in a second.
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You get that special complete concealed carry and family defense guide for free and your answer to win a thousand bucks to put toward a gun of your Choice that you can use to protect your family and your rights Okay, we'll get to more of the debate last night in just one second including the big headline that the media are running with today Which is Trump quote-unquote refusing to condemn white supremacy If you actually listen to the exchange, you'll see that's not actually what's happening, but we'll get to that in a second.
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Okay, so Trump's rough tactics last night obscured the fact that on the issues he was So, for example, he had a great line last night, and it just, it didn't land because there were so many punches being thrown.
Now, the area that people are focusing in on is this one exchange.
So Chris Wallace, again, we'll get to Wallace in a second, because I think that his moderation last night was abysmal, abysmal.
But Chris Wallace decides to ask Trump about white supremacists.
He doesn't ask Biden to condemn Black Lives Matter violence in the cities, which is what has been going on.
They shut down the entire county of Los Angeles for a week so that Black Lives Matter-associated rioters and looters could go and hit up Melrose Avenue for new parachutes.
So let's not pretend that what's been going on in the major cities is not caused by Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
It is.
Nonetheless, Chris Wallace decides to pick up the Democratic talking point that actually it's a bunch of white supremacists in the cities who are actually causing all of this, which again is a lie.
It is not true.
White supremacists are evil.
Again, there is no one in America who, I think on a personal level, may have been targeted more than I have been or who hates white supremacists more than I do.
I've been perfectly clear about this.
They are garbage human beings.
White supremacists are not the cause of the violence that's been happening in America's major cities.
It is BLM and Antifa.
The fact that Chris Wallace thought that this was the key thing to bring up in a debate is in and of itself idiotic.
But that doesn't mean that Trump handles this right.
So we're going to play the clip and then I'm going to actually read you the transcript of the clip.
And what you will see is that the media are just lying about what actually happened in this exchange.
So the media's line here is that Trump is defending white supremacy.
Are you willing, tonight, to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we've seen in Portland?
White supremacist and white supremacist Okay, Joe Biden today tweeted out, there's no other way to put it, the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night.
By the way, Joe Biden then put up a picture of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old from Kenosha who shot three people, probably in self-defense by all available evidence.
There's zero evidence that Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist.
Not some, zero.
Like, as in none.
Zero, zip, zilch.
Joe Biden is calling Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist.
When Joe Biden jumps in and he says, you know, the Proud Boys.
Okay, the Proud Boys are probably what you would call alt-right.
They're not overtly white supremacists, the Proud Boys.
The Proud Boys can get violent.
They are not a group that anybody should be associated with.
I got a lot of problems with the Proud Boys.
They are not overtly white supremacists.
They're not.
In fact, the founders of the Proud Boys disassociated from the Proud Boys, like Gavin McInnes.
He tried, I believe, to disassociate from the Proud Boys when he thought that they were associating too closely with white supremacists.
In any case, you don't have to defend the Proud Boys.
Bottom line here, Is that, I think the Proud Boys are a bad group.
Okay, bottom line here is that if you actually read the exchange that happened right there, if you read the exchange, what you will see is that Trump repeatedly says, sure, I'm willing to condemn white supremacists.
Here's the actual exchange again.
Wallace, are you willing to condemn white supremacists and militia groups?
Sure.
And to say they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we've seen in Portland.
Okay, so first of all, in Kenosha, that was not a white supremacist group.
In Portland, Patriot Prayer is not a white supremacist group.
So the basis of the question is in and of itself false.
It is not a true statement.
And Trump correctly says, I'm prepared to do it, but I'd say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing.
And I'm willing to do anything, I want to see peace.
And then Wallace being a pro, again, we'll get to Wallace in just one second.
Wallace was garbage last night, really bad.
He started off okay, and then he just went wild.
He says, then do it, sir.
And then Biden jumps in and says, yeah, do it, do it.
And Trump says, what do you want to call them?
Give me a name.
And Wallace says, white supremacists and right wing militias.
And Biden says, proud boys.
And then Trump says, proud boys, stand back and stand by.
Now, it is the and stand by that's killing him, right?
Because he says stand by, which makes it sound like I want you guys to like stand by in case there's violence and then go back in the cities.
So people are focusing in on the standby.
And then he says somebody's got to do something about Antifa and the left.
He didn't mean the Proud Boys have to do something about Antifa and the left.
You can tell that from his inflection.
He means that nobody in government is doing anything about Antifa and the left.
And Joe Biden explicitly refused to condemn Antifa on the stage.
On the stage.
That is not a clip of Donald Trump defending white supremacy.
You know who's actually being rational about this, of course?
So Senator Tim Scott, the black senator from South Carolina, He said, quote, I think he misspoke in response to Chris Wallace's comment.
He was asking Chris what he wanted to say.
I think he misspoke.
I think he should correct it.
If he doesn't correct it, I guess he didn't misspeak.
That is the rational response.
But this notion that Trump won't condemn white supremacy, even in the Charlottesville situation, the problem there was not that he wouldn't condemn white supremacy.
The problem is that he was equating the various groups at play there.
But he said, I'm explicitly not talking about the white supremacists, when he said that there were good people on both sides.
He was talking about people who he supposedly were marching with the white supremacists, but in favor of the Confederate statue.
And I said, well, who are those people?
Those people don't exist.
That's ridiculous.
He shouldn't be saying that sort of thing.
But did he condemn white supremacy?
He did repeatedly that weekend, over and over and over.
So again, this is part of a narrative that they've been driving for a long time.
And Trump is bad at this.
He is awkward with language.
That is not Donald Trump defending white supremacy.
That is a media lie.
Again, I can play the clip again.
That is not Donald Trump.
When he says, will you condemn white supremacists?
He says, sure.
Does that sound like no to you?
When Joe Biden was asked, would he condemn Antifa?
His answer was, Antifa is an idea.
It is not an organization.
That is an explicit refusal to condemn Antifa.
Yet only one of those is a headline.
Now again, if you go back to the chaos theory of this election, which is that people are going to vote for whomever is less chaotic, I'll say that the final note on the evening, which was Donald Trump talking about widespread voter fraud, it is true that universal mail-in balloting is a bad idea.
He made a distinction between you requesting a ballot and ballots being sent to your house.
He is right about all of that.
But him attempting to sort of lengthen the length of this election is a bad move for him.
Here was Trump concluding last night on voter fraud.
And this is such a problem is Trump plays directly into the myths that Democrats want to push. We know that Joe Biden is going to contest the election. He already has hundreds of lawyers on standby.
There have been full articles written about his various plans with MoveOn.org and all of these various other groups to take to the streets should he lose the election.
All Donald Trump has to say here is, if any election is independently certified as fair and free, I will, of course, respect the results of the election.
We should be deeply concerned about the possibility of fraud, and we will use all law enforcement mechanisms to ensure that it does not occur.
I'm encouraging people to go in person because the possibility that you botched your ballot or that your ballot is sent in by somebody else, mail-in, that possibility exists.
So please vote in person, right?
I mean, there's a way to do this.
The, again, feeling of chaos last night does not benefit Trump.
It makes this thing a referendum on Trump's personality.
Okay, now, Chris Wallace last night was terrible.
I mean, truly awful.
Chris Wallace began and I think that he was so taken aback by Trump's very, very aggressive tactics, by Trump's crowd Biden strategy, right?
Got him up in the corner and then he was throwing jabs all night long.
I think he was so put off by that and so upset and miffed, frankly, I think he was so offended by Trump's tactic that he decided he was going to jump in and become a debater.
There are multiple times when Trump asked Biden a question and he would jump in and say, we're moving on to the next topic and just save Joe Biden.
There are multiple times when Joe Biden would get stuck and Wallace would kind of feed him at the next line.
There were multiple questions that he asked that were just bad questions.
And those ones are more inexcusable even because those questions were prepared in advance, right?
So Donald Trump very early on felt that Wallace was coming after him.
I thought early on that this was not quite fair because Donald Trump was in fact talking directly over Biden for about the first 15 minutes of the debate.
But Trump turned to Wallace and he said, I guess I'm debating you.
And pretty much it did turn into that.
By the end of the debate, Trump was not wrong about this.
You, in the course of these four years, have never come up with a comprehensive plan to replace Obamacare, and just this last Thursday, you signed a largely symbolic executive order to protect people with pre-existing conditions five days before this debate.
So my question, sir, is what is the Trump health care plan?
OK, the reason you said that is because Wallace had jumped in to save Biden in one of these exchanges.
Wallace's questions last night were terrible.
So here are some examples.
Here was Chris Wallace asking Donald Trump about banning critical race theory in the government.
Now, critical race theory, as we have discussed, is a racist ideology.
Critical race theory says that every institution in the United States is undergirded by racial supremacy.
Critical race theory suggests that just by dint of your skin, you're a beneficiary of white supremacy, and if you are not anti-racist, in other words, you don't want to tear down the entire system, you are racist.
Critical race theory training involves people literally telling white people, in rooms, sponsored by the government, that they are racist simply because they are white.
That's what this diversity training bullcrap from Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo is.
Chris Wallace just says something blatantly untrue in this question.
He says, why are you banning racial sensitivity training, Mr. President?
He's not banning quote-unquote racial sensitivity training.
He's banning critical race theory, which is a neo-Marxist garbage ideology that should not be taught on any college campus, any high school campus, any government agency, or any contracting agency with the federal government.
Here is Chris Wallace completely blowing the question here.
Okay, now you've just turned into a debate participant and an ally of Joe Biden.
So to sum up, Chris Wallace's performance was terrible for a moderator.
I mean, really, really bad.
Two, Donald Trump's overaggressive performance distracted from anything relevant that he wanted to say.
So he didn't end up doing severe damage to Joe Biden.
And his sort of botchery on that white supremacy question ended up damaging him maybe a little bit, but I don't think it'll have any real effect, because again, this has been the longtime Democratic narrative that's a lie, that he won't condemn white supremacy.
He's literally called it evil from the rostrum many, many times.
And Joe Biden didn't perform exactly well either.
So where do we end up?
Status quo ante.
We end up exactly where we started, which is nobody gains, nobody loses.
The problem is for Donald Trump, the clock is running.
If he is ahead, great.
If he's behind, time is running out.
If you are going to clock Joe Biden and make a difference here, you need to let him hang himself with his own words.
And Trump wouldn't allow him to do that.
He just kept stepping in and crowding him.
You gotta let him breathe enough to fall over.
Okay, so the predictable reaction from the media was exactly what you would expect.
After spending years hyperventilating over every single thing Trump says, after turning our media culture into a series of low-level stupid debates, after hosting some of the most radical guests saying the most radical things, they were astonished and stunned, our members of the media, at how bad this was.
After going after Mitt Romney with the alacrity of a rabid monkey, They decided that they were going to get very offended by what happened here.
I saw a bunch of tweets last night.
People were like, remember that time that we all went after Mitt Romney for the binders full of women?
Ah ha ha, wasn't that a nicer time?
Wasn't that a richer time?
And the answer to that is, it was a better time, but it is your fault that this happened, media.
You did this.
You decided that Mitt Romney was to be treated like the plague in 2012.
Mitt Romney, the mildest, most milquetoast human being who has ever walked planet Earth.
He is the definition of a milquetoast human being, Mitt Romney.
Mitt Romney was clean as the driven snow as anybody gets in politics, and you decided to muddy him by suggesting that he strapped dogs to the tops of cars, forcibly cut the hair of gay kids in 1950, and was a racist who would put y'all back in chains in the words of Joe Biden.
So, you don't get to do this.
I'm so offended by the tactic.
How offensive?
As I've said before, Donald Trump is the coroner of American politics.
He is not the killer.
If you didn't like what Trump did last night, then you might want to take a gander at your own behavior, media.
But the media won't take a gander at it.
Instead, they just lament, how could this have ever happened?
How could George Stephanopoulos not say, worst debate ever, George Stephanopoulos.
I've said, I think it was the worst debate I've ever seen.
Also, how is George Stephanopoulos in a newsmaker's position, in a newsman's position, after positioning himself at the head of the Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton campaign in 1992?
How?
How does that happen?
You wonder how Donald Trump became president?
You didn't like what you saw up there?
Maybe it's because you created this monster.
As Jay Cost, Formerly of the Weekly Standard put it.
Dr. Frankenstein standing here going, look at this monster rampaging through the cities and, you know, like killing people.
As somebody who's watched presidential debates for 40 years, as somebody who's moderated presidential debates, as someone who's prepared candidates for presidential debates, as someone who's covered presidential debates, that was the worst presidential debate I have ever seen.
Meanwhile, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, again, agreeing this is the worst debate ever after, you know, extraordinarily, extraordinarily high-pitched coverage of how Trump was a Russian cat's paw for four years.
It turns out that now everybody's upset with the tenor of American politics.
Well, I wonder how we got here, gang.
It's as though...
I'm highly irritated with this notion that is very central to American politics right now, that every bad thing began and ended with Donald Trump.
Donald Trump didn't appear and then speak words, and politics came into being.
Donald Trump is a result of the system.
A system built by the people on cable news.
Anyway, here are our cable news hosts being very upset last night.
Okay, and it was, but I'm just not willing to hear it from the members of the media who have been pursuing the bleep show for years and years and years.
I mean, Jeff Zucker was having phone calls with members of the Trump campaign in 2016 advising them.
Spare me the outrage.
Again, I'm not saying this about, you know, any one of these individual reports except for maybe Stephanopoulos, maybe Dana Bash a little bit.
The media's shock and awe at this debate.
You created this.
This was all you.
Okay, so now the media have a new narrative.
And the new narrative is, maybe this is the last debate, gang.
Maybe this will never happen again.
Now, the Biden campaign has already said that they want more of this.
They've already said, no, no, no, we're going to do more debates.
I, you know, maybe it's because they think that their their guy did okay last night.
And in essence, he didn't lose last night because nobody won last night.
But here is Wolf Blitzer trying to put it out there.
I would not be completely shocked if Biden simply pulls out of the rest of the debates.
I would be shocked if he says that behavior was so egregious and the media cover for him.
This was the most chaotic presidential debate I've ever seen, and I suspect most of you, if not all of you, have ever seen the most chaotic presidential debate.
And it will certainly raise a lot of questions, raising a lot of questions about the future of the presidential debate between these two candidates.
I wouldn't be surprised, by the way, if this is the last presidential debate I mean, how badly do the media want Joe Biden to win?
They were making this argument a while ago, right?
Nancy Pelosi was saying maybe there won't be any debates because they figured that Biden was winning.
So hide Biden in the basement.
That's their strategy.
And they hope to continue that going forward because they still don't want to answer any serious questions.
Remember, in this debate, Joe Biden refused to condemn Antifa, called all of America's systems racist, and then refused to answer whether he would stack the Supreme Court.
And that's the debate he supposedly won.
That's not a good showing by Joe Biden.
It's just that, again, Donald Trump's tactics were so distracting that it was very difficult for people to actually fully grasp what the hell was going on.
Okay, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content, more recap, an insane story.
Apparently, there is now a... We're doing full-on malice struggle sessions.
By professors at Ohio State University who have suggested they like sports.
Apparently, you're not allowed to say that you like sports anymore.
That's racist.
We'll get to that a little bit later on in the day.