The week after September 11, 2001 I had to fly west on business, changing planes in Denver. When I got off the train at the concourse for my connecting flight, all I saw was a big emptiness. There was no one there. As I walked to my gate I saw a single figure, a soldier carrying a rifle.

I was overcome with a strange feeling. It was beyond grief; I had felt grief since I had watched the destruction of the towers over and over on television. I had spoken at church that Sunday about the grief and anger I felt. As I stood in the huge, empty airport, I had all of that plus a chilling disbelief that our country had come to this.

I hadn’t had that same feeling again the fifteen years since then. Until last night as I watched Donald Trump try to tell us why he was qualified to be Commander in Chief. It was to me another tragedy. Just a different kind.

Matt Lauer and several veterans asked him some questions. Essentially he had the same answer to each one: I’m smart, and they’re not.

Sometimes he added that he had a piece of paper with the names of 88 generals and admirals who had endorsed him.

For some answers he had nothing at all.

Consider the question about sexual assault in the military. His answer was that sexual assault is bad, that it was really bad, and somebody ought to do something about it, like maybe have a court system in the military. (I thought they already had one.) Then when Matt Lauer quoted him as saying essentially that a smart person would have expected that when they put men and women in the same place, he bumbled around for a while. He did add that bad acts such as rape should have consequences.

Then there was the question about Iraq. Forget that he’s on the record as being for the war in Iraq before he was against it. The substance to his answer was that he thought that the people running the war weren’t very smart. They didn’t “take the oil.” When he was asked by the moderator how he would do that, he said something in his sentence jumble about putting troops around the oil fields. Even the Bush administration, who probably wanted the oil more than anyone, wouldn’t have gone along with that.

Lauer asked him about his much ballyhooed secret plan to defeat Isis, the fact that he claimed to know more about fighting Isis than the generals, and how all of that lined up with his statement that when he is elected he’ll give his generals 30 days to come up with a plan to defeat Isis.  He came up with another sentence salad that said something like if he liked his plan better than the generals’, or their plan better than his, or some combination of the two plans, he’d do that.

For someone who doesn’t seem to have any concern for civilian deaths (I’ll bomb the **** out of them.) or having Arabs on our side in the Isis conflict (I’ll ban Muslims.), or who reportedly doesn’t understand why we can’t just nuke anybody we don’t like, it might be a simple question. But some really good minds have been working on this for a long time, and they haven’t found any simple answers.

There was in the half hour a lot of puffery, a lot about what Trump himself would do, and belittling statements about military leadership, President Obama, Hillary Clinton, the Bush administration, and almost anyone else who wasn’t Trump.

Then there was that grief, anger, and the chilling disbelief that our country had come to this.

Thankfully, that did pass. This morning, instead of remembering how I felt standing in an empty airport, I thought about an old advertising joke that seemed to fit at least as well.

The man and woman, just married, went on their honeymoon. When they went to bed, she asked him to be gentle because she was a virgin.

“How can that be” the new husband asked. “You’ve been married before.”

She shook her head sadly.

“I know,” she said, “but he was in advertising. All he did was sit on the edge of the bed and tell me how great it was going to be.”

And that’s what I think Donald Trump was doing.