These interventionist moderators are a terrible idea. Wallace was clearly Team Biden, repeatedly saving Biden from hard punches without ever calling Biden on his false statements or the debunked hoaxes he repeated, but the format makes it hard to avoid charges of bias.

It should be just throwing the questions out, letting the candidates mix it up, try to maintain a little clock control - which is much easier when the moderator is not also a participant in the debate. Trump wasn't wrong to claim extra time to debate both Wallace and Biden.

Biden definitely passed the very low bar set for him, although he did ramble a bit, and his approach of throwing out empty platitudes while shouting "that's not true" to every criticism is classic Beltway empty suit blather. He sure didn't come off as some kind of policy wonk.

Voters of both parties got some red meat and a bit of a show. Biden flubbed his big attack by once again failing to articulate a coherent alternative on the coronavirus, other than rhapsodizing about magic masks. Masks very clearly are not the silver bullet he pretends.

Biden isn't going to convince anyone except bitter-end partisan Democrats that Trump's economy before the pandemic wasn't great, and nobody who isn't a climate cult True Believer is going to think his Green New Deal junk is the way to rebuild American industry.

Trump scored knockout punches on law and order and the riots - Biden's "Antifa is just an idea" line was pure out-of-touch bonkers insanity that will remind Americans concerned about security that Dems are enabling and protecting political violence.

Most of what Biden said was more like a play to the hardcore Dem base, not an effort to convince swing voters that Biden is a better choice to bring the country back to normal. Trump threw lots of red meat too, but he talked to the middle a bit more, albeit in his very Trump way.

Biden flip-flopping between chest-thumping claims of absolute mastery over the Democrat Party and piteous whines that he's not in office and can't influence anybody will earn him considerable mockery, and he still doesn't know what to say about Hunter's dodgy millions.

Trump was able to plant a few land mines between Biden and the hard Left that could blow up in the coming days. The question is whether the hard Left is willing to pipe down, lay low, and let Joe pretend to be a moderate until Election Day.

It's going to be very difficult for Biden boosters to claim he's a moderate unifying candidate who will bring dignity to the office after this debate performance. Of course they'll say he's less overbearing than Trump, but that's a far cry from the Biden they were trying to sell.

Trump's problem was going overboard, even beyond what he needed to handle Biden plus Wallace. His base loves it, some others like seeing a passionate and assertive president, but it turns other people off. There were times he'd have been better served to let Biden keep talking.

There are a lot of weary voters out there who just want life to return to normal. An overdose of Trump pyrotechnics reminds them of how weary they are, especially when he's hammering personal stuff instead of national issues and second-term agenda items.

I don't know if Trump did enough to reframe the election from that up-or-down referendum on the last few months of his first term. Biden is a talking-points robot, but that's another way of saying Generic Democrat, and Trump is currently losing to the Generic Democrat.

Return to Normal is the big overarching issue, and Biden might be an ancient Beltway pol who uses the same three evasive tactics on every question, but that *is* kind of normal for D.C. Everything about Biden is generic, and there are tired, frightened voters who crave that.

Meanwhile, Trump's closing crusade about ballot fraud is going to sound like the promise of more bloody hand-to-hand political combat to people who are sick of it. He needs to motivate them by giving them something to work towards, a second term worth fighting for.

If I were advising Trump, I'd say stick to the points that really made Biden squirm tonight, like law and order, the economy, his incoherent ramblings on the coronavirus - but mix in much more about the second-term agenda, more about what comes next.

Trump should invest a lot more of his fiery energy on the cultural issues where the majority of Americans agree with him, like the insanity of political correctness. Stress how Democrats keep writing off half the country or more as deplorables. Remind people Dems are DANGEROUS.

Trump should hit corruption hard, too. It's a major weakness of Biden's, and not just because of Hunter. The entire system Biden spent 50 years building is hideously corrupt to its core. The stuff Trump complained about the Obama Admin doing to him is the tip of the iceberg.

Trump can build from his anger over the Obama-Biden-Clinton sabotage of his incoming administration to the larger point that the corrupt system Biden spent his life building will do crap like that to YOU, too. Corruption is hard-wired into almost everything it does.

If Trump doesn't build a solid re-election narrative, if he just wings it through the rest of the debates and throws haymakers, he might win some points but lose the war because he's perilously close to losing a thumbs-up, thumbs-down referendum on the year 2020. /end