Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. We've made it to Wednesday and if you can believe it it's the last day of September. I'm Niala Boodoo. Here's how we're making you smarter today. How to make sure your mail-in-vote counts. Plus, are we in the United States of burnout? But first, the Hot Mess Express that was the first presidential debate is today's one big thing.

His family's already...

My family... I already lost a fortune by coming down and helping us with government.

That was pretty much the soundtrack for the first presidential debate last night in Cleveland.

It was complete chaos and hard to watch, but no worries.

I watched it with Axios' White House and Politics Editor Margaret Taliv, and she's here

with us now.

It was an event that went completely off the rails. And if you listen to the television anchors

on all of the major cables immediately afterwards describing it,

they used words that normally get bleeped out.

I don't know if we can say them on the podcast. Go ahead.

Dana Bash from CNN called it a shit show and she's pretty careful

professional journalist but that's the feeling that everybody had. Chris Wallace was

exasperated, Biden was exasperated, Trump looked exasperated for most of the debate,

but if President Trump is actually behind as the polling suggests in many battleground states as well as nationally it was on him to use this debate to

shake up a dynamic where he came out on top and I'm just not sure that the debate helped him in his

cause. In a year where the Black Lives Matter movement

has swept the country, I thought the moment

where President Trump declined to condemn

white supremacy was particularly significant. Give me a name.

Give me a name.

White supremacist and white

...