There is no question that the big loser at Tuesday night’s CBS vice presidential debate was the audience.

It is not just that the debate was boring, although it was often stultifying. It’s that the debate itself obscured more about the core issues in campaign 2024 than it revealed.

After watching this debate for almost two hours, a viewer would never have known that Donald Trump was a convicted felon, that he was judged liable for rape, or that he has been charged with stealing national secrets. You would not have a clue that he has said he would suspend the Constitution on his first day in office, that he and his running mate J.D. Vance were, in fact, racists and misogynists, that Trump’s signature policy proposal, a round-up of 10-20 million “migrants,” would likely tear the country apart and lead to the creation of concentration camps. You wouldn’t know that Trump has said he would throw his rivals in prison.

If you were a viewer who knew nothing about the campaign or the people behind it, you would never know that Trump has said that we need a Kristallnacht-like day of violence in this country to “solve” our crime problem. You would not have known that he wants and has tried to pull the US out of NATO, and that he and Vance have advocated pro-Vladimir Putin policies that would simply hand-over Ukraine to Russia. You would not have known that Trump was twice impeached, or that a million Americans died from his mishandling of COVID, or that his family corruptly profited from his presidency.

You would not have known that Trump was a serial sex-abuser, or that his first wife said that he raped her, or that he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, and surrounded himself with Nazis and white supremacists. You wouldn’t........

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