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Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast for Wednesday September 30th 2020. I am John

Potts the editor of commentary with me as always executive editor Abe Greenwald hi

Hey John senior writer Christine Rosenhy Christine hi John associate editor Noah Rothman hi Noah hi John so the debate

That was an enthusiastic introduction. Yeah, let me just

So that there's been a kind of general line, which is that it was a mess. It was a hot mess. It was an embarrassment to America and all of that and

I'm sorry, but I think that's both sides of them

It was only it wasn't a mess. It was a it was a deliberate

Act of destruction and self-destruction on the part of president Trump. I mean that is

It was a deliberate act of deconstruction. Let's say of of a debate

Where rules are agreed to and then basically he's like I'm not obeying any rules like it's the game of tag war

Mark Harris came up with this in his book and the movie

Bang the drum slowly tag war is a game that baseball players play with

civilians who are excited to play with them to fleece money out of them like professional baseball players

Tag war they just sit there and they say okay, well, I've got a threesey's so then you know you give me $10 and

Tag war is the exciting game without any rules. That's what tag war is the acronym for

And basically Trump agreed to all these rules and then then then spent the entire evening refusing to abide

by them and

which was

On the one hand predictable and on the other hand

unnerving in the extreme and I

Think that it was a calamity for him probably in the aggregate

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