Welcome back to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Izger joined as always by Steve Hayes, David French and Jonah Goldberg.

This podcast is brought to you by the Dispatch. Come on by and try out our free membership trial at the Dispatch.com slash 30 days free.

You can check out our full slate of newsletters, including the ones that are for members only like my midweek mop up for my political newsletter this week,

but there's lots more than that. And it'll be fun. You can try it. There's no downside really. For those of you who joined us last night for our special Dispatch live for the debates,

thanks for coming by. We had such a good time and we'll do it again for the next debate. But now our regularly scheduled podcast today's podcast is brought to you by bespoke post and Gabby. We'll hear from them a little later.

We're going to start with the debate a couple moments that the guys want to talk about in particular and then we'll do Trump tax return story in the New York Times and the letter from the director of national intelligence about the 2016 campaign.

Plus a little bit on cult movie classics.

Let's dive right in last night was the debate. We got to start with that. So we're starting with my topic, which is you go into these debates with a strategy and each campaign knows what they want to get out of it, who they're targeting.

And that's how they judge their metric of success.

Given that Steve, not who won or lost the debate based on your own thoughts, but based on the campaign's own metrics as you saw them and what you thought they were trying to accomplish last night, how did they do?

Well, that's a really smart way of framing the question because I would give two totally different answers to that. I thought Trump had a overall a pretty good night. If you're doing it sort of as I mean, you know, he was a bully, he was obnoxious.

He talked over the moderator and his opponent. He said things that weren't true. But in the context of Donald Trump and thinking back to his debate performances with Hillary Clinton and then in the primaries.

He seemed in command. He seemed he had answers. He seemed confident. And I think if you were coming to this debate and you haven't been following every twist and turn of the race. Trump came off. You don't like some of the the excesses of the personality stuff, but he wasn't, you know, he wasn't as bad as he was during the coronavirus briefings.

So in that sense, I think, you know, on a debater's scorecard, he would have done reasonably well if I were scoring that. But given the way that you asked it, I think he didn't accomplish what he set up to accomplish. I think he came into a conflict to try to make Joe Biden have a, you know, either a senior moment where he couldn't remember things because he was so flummoxed by all of the interruptions or have a real meltdown. And the closest we got from Joe Biden was when he.

Look at the president after the president erupted him 10 times in a row and said, you know, oh, shut up man. And I don't think that was a great moment for Biden, but it wasn't anywhere near the kind of catastrophic moment that I think some Democrats were worried Joe Biden might have.

Jonah.

Well, as we discussed in our exciting and vivacious dispatch live event last night, I think Steve's wrong about how good Trump did, but not not wildly wrong, not not Spanish wine wrong.

But that said, I think that the only one. So my answer last night was Biden clearly won because his strategy going in was do no harm.

Be non threatening let Trump be Trump to the extent that he. He may not turn off new voters, but he keeps the voters who have already been turned off that he needs will stay turned off. And Biden did that. He did no harm.

He had no flubs.

Trump's strategy going in, I think, was I thought last night and I still think today the primary strategy was as I believe you put it last night to get one minute out of this that was of Biden melting down having the senior moment, having the mental and competent moment, trying to eat the microphone, whatever it is, that they could run on an endless loop on social media.

That's.

...