“They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” With that absurd and racist lie, Donald Trump lost Tuesday night’s presidential debate. To be clear, he also lost on policy, substance, style, temperament, coherence, and truthfulness. Had there been a white towel to throw, it should have been thrown, although perhaps a white hood would have been more apropos.

By the end of the debate, Trump looked like a deflated whoopie cushion.

The salience of the bizarre pet-eating statement belies a central claim of the MAGA right, that those of us who despise Trump only do so because we live in an echo chamber which magnifies the worst of Trump while ignoring all the good. To my Republican friends, I ask: Where was the good during Tuesday’s debate?

Because from my vantage point sitting on a hotel bed by myself, laptop firmly in lap, it became clear to me over the course of the exhausting litany of complaints from Trump, that whatever good there may be with a Trump candidacy, it is far outweighed by the sneering, vindictive, petty and boring old man struggling to spit his words through his dentures.

Where was the good?

Where was Trump’s positive vision for the nation? For all the criticisms of Harris’s lack of policy specificity, where was Trump’s? Which policies did he outline that you, my Republican friends, support? Because the only policy prescriptive I heard him describe in any detail was using the National Guard and local police to round up millions of people, herd them into camps, and send them God knows where.

We’ve just seen how local police handled a minor traffic infraction by the Miami Dolphins’ star wide receiver, Tyreek Hill. Are we supposed to entrust these same undertrained goons to go door-to-door in every neighborhood across the nation to determine who stays and who goes? How exactly is that going to work? Trump didn’t get that far. And what happens when the first bullets in that effort start flying? Is that the good? If not, where was it?

Was it his admission, that after nine years of promising a big and beautiful health care to replace Obamacare, that he does not, in fact, have a plan, but........

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