Version 2.172

We are happy to report that the second presidential debate is over. If after the first one people were surprised at what had just happened to the rules of civility, after this people will be surprised at how well Donald Trump performed. Age weighed heavily on Biden, who stumbled on his words and lost his train of thought on multiple occasions. But no harm, no foul: the Biden supporters were happy and equally happy were the Trump supporters. I was mostly disgusted for having to vote in Biden because he is clearly not surrounded by people who can train him properly.

The most jarring moment for me was when Donald Trump listed everything that had been going wrong in America: opioid addiction, suicides, etc. Trump even said that it had never been this bad. Biden did not have the clarity of thought to attack the President, to state the obvious fact that it had gotten worse under his watch and, if he did not prevent it or try to fix it in his first term, then one could hardly give him a vote of confidence to elect him for a second term.

On the Biden side, the stupidest thing of the evening was when he brought up Hitler to the debate. Godwin's law states that as an online discussion progresses, it is inevitable that someone/something will be compared to Hitler or the nazis, at which point the discussion ends. That pretty much did it for me. If he cannot weave a convincing argument without invoking Hitler, then he must have not done his homework.

For example, at some point Donald Trump was talking about how he rescued manufacturing. Manufacturing jobs are lower now than when Trump took office, even though the administration spent a pretty penny trying to subsidize companies to hire more American workers and also staring a trade dispute with China. The tariffs that were imposed on China were passed on to American consumers as higher prices, which Biden failed to state clearly.

You have to assume that most citizens don't know the intricacies of how trade and the U.S. work. They need the background information in a simple form that can be understood. That is one thing that Trump does well: he dumbs stuff down. His supporters think that it's for their benefit, but it has to be dumbed down for Trump and even then he may not fully get it. After all, he does not even know that a full time preganancy is 9 months and men don't have uterus.

According to Trump, the U.S. economy could not support the cost of $100 trillion in environmental regulation over a period of 100 years even if it had the best years of growth. In 2019, the U.S. economy grew $21.4 trillion dollars (American trillion or 10 raised to the 12th power). Trump clearly does not even comprehend how big the U.S. economy is and neither does Biden.

I don't understand how we got here. I honestly don't. It's like we're in a race to the bottom.