What was your takeaway from the Sept. 10 debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris?

Was it Donald Trump’s bleak and frightfully accurate conclusion that the Biden-Harris administration employed “the worst president, the worst vice president in the history of our country” and “everyone knows” Harris is Marxist?

Was it the outrage that ABC News, which only commands a fraction of the audience it once wielded, had been entrusted with the only confrontation between these two candidates?

Was it the disgust with which the moderators, especially David Muir, played favorites in this debate and constantly “fact checked” Trump but not Harris?

Or was it the chronic pain of having to watch Harris constantly giggle, grimace, smile and vigorously shake her head after virtually every Trump comment and look like a teenager on her first date? 

Harris performed better than many expected. After all, she is noted for being a public speaker who treats her audience like children while relating obvious facts like Russia is a larger country than Ukraine or delivering meandering aphorisms that aren’t worth the air they momentarily inhabit. At least she didn’t affect one of her phony accents – French or Southern – but just decided to be the consummate phony instead. 

But ultimately, Harris was a woman stuffed from head to toe with Democratic talking points. It was as if she had memorized her lines and wanted to deliver them before her memory failed her and the entire script would emerge mangled and jumbled. “If I can just get all this B.S. out in time,” she seemed to be thinking. 

And there were times when she did appear to be listening to something. Did she have a microphone in an earpiece? I’m not at all convinced that she was subject to any kind of inspection before mounting that stage and we all know that the Democrats play dirty to win because they honestly believe that they are the only defenders of democracy in America, democracy meaning the rule by elites who know what is best for the masses. 

How else can you keep suggesting that you represent the future, that it’s time to “turn the page” and not think you’re the page that needs to be turned. Harris attempted to say that she was part of the Biden-Harris administration but only that part that she imagined to be good. Trump represented the past and she, well, to take a page out of the John F. Kennedy lexicon, she represented “a new generation of leadership.” That was enough to bring on waves of nausea in my gut. The only time she really appeared to be emotionally involved in the debate was during the segment on abortion, where she talked about America in 1924, not 2024, where abortion was not even spoken about in a presidential debate. 

But how, in good conscience, can you claim to represent anything but calamity, chaos and disrepute when you had the tie-breaking vote to pass something called the Inflation Reduction Act, that perversely misnomered piece of legislation that actually fueled inflation and paid for countless Democratic projects across the land. How can you even show up for a debate when your administration is responsible for allowing tens of millions of illegal immigrants to cross the southern border into the US and then flying them to their destination of choice? How dare you run for office when your administration has admitted to “losing” 300,000 children, losing being a polite way of saying they’ve been sexually trafficked? By the way, that is a freaking scandal that is even more repugnant than welcoming 25 million illegals at your border. It is a national sin of such consequence that it invites the judgment of God. But there was not a single question about it from these Democratic pawn debate moderators.

Trump talked about the immigration mess, noting how America has “millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums, and they're coming in, and they're taking jobs that are occupied right now by African Americans and Hispanics and also unions. Unions are going to be affected very soon. And you see what's happening. You see what's happening with towns throughout the United States. You look at Springfield, Ohio. You look at Aurora in Colorado, they are taking over the towns. They're taking over buildings. They're going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country, and they're destroying our country. They're dangerous. They're at the highest level of criminality. And we have to get them out.”

And there was Harris all the time, looking outraged that Trump would be demanding action on this. When he reminded viewers how Harris had actually participated in raising bail money for the rioters in Minnesota, Harris grimaced and vigorously shook her head. She did the same when Trump reminded viewers that Harris was also a vocal advocate of defunding the police. Harris even suggested it was Trump who wanted fewer police officers on the street.  

And although Harris pretended to, she doesn’t want to go door to door and confiscate your assault rifles – “We’re not taking anybody’s guns away” – she sure as hell did in 2020, when she was debating Biden during her feeble and febrile run for presidency, Harris wanted to use an executive order to do so. And it was none other than David Muir who was moderating that debate and was pushing the point with Biden and Harris.

“When he says he can do it by executive order. Does the Vice President have a point?” Muir asked as Biden interjected, “There some things you can, many things you can't.” Muir waves him down and said, “Let's let the senator answer.” Harris responds, “I mean, I would just say, Hey Joe, instead of saying that we can't, let's say yes, we can,” says, cackling loudly. “Yes, we can.”

Harris must have repeated the phrase “turn the page” about 10 times during the debate, most likely because she was told to do so by her handlers. The objective, of course, was to suggest she had nothing to do with the disaster of the last four years, but was merely waiting in the wings to herald a new age of government that will fulfill your every need. 

Trump finally addressed that glaring discrepancy in logic in his closing remarks when he stated. “She just started by saying she's going to do this, she's going to do that. She's going to do all these wonderful things. Why hasn't she done it? She's been there for three-and-a-half years. They've had three-and-a-half years to fix the border. They've had three-and-a-half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why hasn't she done it?” Trump asked.

He suggested that she should “leave right now. Go down to that beautiful White House, go to the Capitol, get everyone together and do the things you want to do, but you haven't done it and you won't do it because you believe in things that the American people don't believe in … We can't sacrifice our country for the sake of bad vision. But I just ask one simple question, why didn't she do it? We're a failing nation. We're a nation that's in serious decline. We're being laughed at all over the world.”

That was a tough admission for a proud American like Trump to make but he saved the best for last. The mainstream media, as represented by these two tendentious moderators, are not only rabidly supporting a war between the US and Russia, they are blithely ignoring the obvious fact that any such war would be nuclear conflict that would leave the world as lifeless and unlivable as it would have in 1954, 1962 or 1984 – at the height of the Cold War. Trump identified the elephant in the room that the mainstream media has been hiding behind the shower curtain. 

“We have wars going on in the Middle East. We have wars going on with Russia and Ukraine. We're going to end up in a third world war, and it will be a war like no other. Because of nuclear weapons, the power of weaponry.”

This debate could prove to be as seminal as that in 1960 between Sen. John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon or the 1980 confrontation between President JImmy Carter and former Gov. Ronald Reagan. God help us if Kamala Harris is rewarded for successfully regurgitating her lines when those lines all add up to a massive pack of lies.