Welcome to Beg to BEEF, The Bull Works Weekly Roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum.

We range from center left to center right.

I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor of the Bulwark, and I'm joined

by our regulars Bill Galston of the Wall Street Journal and the Brookings Institution,

Linda Chavez of the Niskannon Center, and Damon Linker, who writes the sub-stack newsletter

notes from the middle ground. Our special guest this week is

Matt Bennett who is Executive Vice President for Public Affairs at Third Way and so welcome one and all.

We're going to spend a little time

dissecting the eating pets debate.

That's my shorthand. Pet's

my shorthand for what happened on Tuesday night.

So let us begin with our guest, Matt.

Matt, I guess the first thing, the only thing you needed to know about how badly it went for Trump

was that even as the debate was ongoing people on the right

were screaming and outrage about the moderators. Yeah it was a horrific night

for Trump and and look Scott Jennings who you know does his best to stand up for Trump on on CNN had a great line he said you don't get to complain about the refs if you can't hit your jumpshot.

And the problem for Trump was he just was awful.

He's almost always awful in debates.

The Harris campaign did a good job of promoting how skilled he was after seven of these things, but he's terrible at debating and that came through loud and clear despite the fact that everyone in the political world,

including my 22-year-old son, knew what Harris was going to do.

Trump certainly knew.

He fell for it anyway.

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