I only lettered in one thing in high school. And it may have been the only year they actually gave a letter for debating. I still have the letter, propped up against the back of my desk. I’m pretty proud of it.

The last year I debated, we made it deep into the brackets for the state championship; I don’t remember just how deep, but I remember my debate partner and I got our picture in the paper, but we didn’t win the State.

Mr. Thompson was our debate coach, and he would frequently give us small talks on what our debating would do for us later in life. Now I’m pretty sure that it was simply as a morale booster for us since we all knew that the debate team didn’t have nearly the following of the baseball or basketball teams. It probably didn’t even have as large a following as the band.

“You’ll use the skills you learn here all your life,” he’d tell us, implying that the star pitcher on the baseball team would probably blow his elbow and not be able to use his curveball far into adulthood. And he was right.

He taught us to marshal our facts, develop our arguments in a persuasive manner, and understand the rules so that we succeed within them.

Last night I was wishing that Mr. Thompson had been Donald Trump’s debate coach. Trump did none of these things.

What he did do was ignore the rules that his side had agreed to, prevent any real communication, and hold truth in the same low esteem that he has since his last campaign. As someone commented today, they had hoped that Trump would somehow rise to the occasion. Instead, he stooped even lower. It was, as Biden muttered, not presidential.

I didn’t really expect to learn anything from the debate. I’ve coached enough candidates for debate (some more successfully than others) than to expect any new information. It’s an opportunity for the candidate to deliver his or her four or five basic points, probably multiple times. However, what the viewer might get from it is how the candidates handle themselves, what sort of personality and character do they portray. And last night they did.

Trump was every bit the fact-free bully that I’ve considered him to be since the Trump-Clinton debates. He blustered, interrupted, and lied at every turn. He “made ACA better” by getting rid of the individual mandate. Evidently, he doesn’t know why the individual mandate was put in there in the first place. He had a “better, cheaper health care plan,” although he said that four years ago, and nobody knows what it is yet.

He said (according to what I’ve read since I’d already gotten sick enough of his nattering to turn off the TV) that Hunter Biden had received a dishonorable discharge.  He didn’t, nor did he say what Hunter Biden was doing being a subject in this debate anyway. Biden is to be commended for resisting the understandable impulse to bring up some unsavory facts about Trump’s children, such as the Russian meetings, Ivanka’s five new Chinese trademarks, and the denied security clearances that were pushed through.

Trump proved himself to be on the debate stage exactly what he has been as president. A person who ignores the rules, the truth, and the need to actually lead the country. He simply does what he thinks is good for Trump. And he’s often wrong about that.

He said to Biden last night, “You couldn’t do the job we’ve done. It’s not in your blood.” That may have been the truest thing he said. It takes a genius level of ineptitude to get almost 10 months into a pandemic without showing any sign of a workable plan or any real leadership. Biden couldn’t have done it that badly if he had tried.

He also interrupted Biden to say that it was a lie that 100,000,000 Americans have pre-existing conditions. Once we put in all the people who have chronic lung or heart damage from COVID-19, that number may well be low.

As an old debater and debate coach, I wished Biden had done a few things differently, but I’m not sure that he could have, since Trump not only didn’t listen but didn’t stop talking. Bident's stuttering interrupted him occasionally, but that didn’t bother me. When he was able to get a whole sentence out, it was correctly structured and most often true.

But the thing that really got to me, that made me embarrassed for my country was that Biden called the President of the United States a liar, and everybody watching knew that he was absolutely right.