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

It’s still true that he’s taken a few big hits here and there. He’s taken a hit or two at the border. And now, just because he’s been president for four years, he knows some things that he didn’t know in 2016. It’s true, for example, that crime in Venezuela has gone down, although that’s not because all of Venezuela’s bad guys 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 has to turn to 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 guess – he didn’t finish the sentence, as he did with so many of his sentences). And while “I have a plan” was the worst and dumbest sentence he uttered, a close second was “Now she wants to perform transgender surgeries on illegal immigrants who are in prison.” The only thing he left out in that sentence is that she plans to broker the catering contract to Comet Ping Pong.