In sports, when Team A looks shaky, it’s not often that the commentators point out that Team A looks shaky because Team B is just so damn good. Well, that’s what happened here. Harris was consistently sharp, and Trump was consistently confused. As Tim Walz put it on MSNBC after the debate, as the night went on, “Donald Trump got angrier and smaller and more irrelevant.”

It’s still true that he’s thrown a few good punches here and there. He’s thrown a few punches at the border. And now, just because he’s been president for four years, he knows things that he didn’t know in 2016. For example, it’s true that crime in Venezuela has gone down, although it’s not because all the bad guys from Venezuela are coming here. But it’s not true that he shut down the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. That’s still happening.

But overall, Trump was just, well, sad. He needs to find a world leader to vouch for him, and the wheel lands on … Viktor Orbán? He tries to argue that his comment about “very fine people” on both sides in Charlottesville was taken out of context and debunked; he points to … Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity and “Jesse” (Watters, I think — he didn’t finish the sentence, as was the case with so many of his sentences). And while “I have drafts of a plan” was the worst, dumbest sentence he ever uttered, a close second would have to be “Now she wants to perform transgender surgeries on illegal aliens in jail.” The only thing he leaves out of that sentence is that she plans to pass the catering contract on to Comet Ping Pong.