ver met it’s sort of normal to say your name. It’s kind of weird when famous people say their name. I’ve had the same experience. You know I’ll be in an event where people went there to see me and I’ll still introduce myself. You know like we came here to see you we kind of know your name but it’s just an automatic habit anyway.

So I think that she immediately and strategically—I don’t think any of that was an accident—she took the handshake initiative. Number two, I thought they both looked great. Did anybody have that impression? So compliments to hair and makeup, compliments to whoever dressed them, compliments to whoever did the lighting. But I thought both of them looked great. Like as good as they’ve ever looked. Trump looked great. I mean he looked young and energetic. His hair was on point. Makeup was good. Harris looked better than I’ve ever seen her recently. So real good job on the support staff making both of them look good.

The bottom line is that Harris beat expectations because she was well prepared, probably knew the questions, and she simply did her standard answers. Now Trump said he had his best ever debate and he’s not wrong about that. I actually felt that if it had been a normal debate against a normal person under fair circumstances I could imagine that you would rank him the winner. But it wasn’t that. The moderators were clearly on one side. We’ll talk about that. And he missed a lot of layups. Meaning that she gave him so many openings to end the race. He didn’t take any of them. Why? I don’t know. Was he not skilled enough? Was he not prepared?

I mean when the fine people hoax came up you know he dismissed it as a debunked hoax. Do you know what else he could have done? He could have turned to the moderators and said, “Are you guys debunking hoaxes today or are you just going to leave this one for me?” Just imagine that. If he just turned to the hosts and said, “Are you jumping in with any fact-checking here or do you want me to do this one?” Then he should have said if it was up to him. So first of all he should have called out the hosts for not being equal fact-checking. If not then, then at least when it became an obvious pattern he should have hit it. So that was a missed opportunity.

He should have said if you’re watching at home for some of you this will be the first time you ever heard that the fine people hoax was a hoax. You’re not going to believe me when I tell you it’s a hoax but do this: go to Snopes and just look up the fine people hoax. You’ll find out that Biden ran his entire campaign on something that you could have told was fake simply by listening to the whole video instead of the edited one. Just think about who I’m running against. They ran that entire hoax and the media and you see that your ABC hosts are sitting here silently. They let that go. It’s the most dangerous hoax in American history and they just sat there and let you say that right in front of the public. I’m going to end that tonight. Every one of you, you’ve got a computer at home, go to Snopes. It’s a left-leaning fact checker so you can know that if they fact-check this one it wasn’t because they were being biased.

And he could have ended the entire—the entire election would be over. She just handed him the kill shot and he didn’t take it. And I felt like that happened several times. He is terrible at explaining his way out of hoaxes. I don’t know why because he’s so good at everything else. It’s kind of a mystery to me. But it’s obvious now that the campaign knows that she’s not going to get fact-checked by the media and they know that they can overload him with hoaxes and it will just make him frustrated and keep him off point. So she offloaded. She just went heavy with the hoaxes and it worked. It worked. So once again yet another signal that her advisers are really, really good. I hate to say it but they’re really good. I keep telling you it’s not an accident that things look different. It’s your advisers. They’re really good. And if they told her look just keep dumping those hoaxes on them because you just bury them in hoaxes, nobody’s going to fact-check it anyway—that was the right advice. I mean if you’re unethical and a weasel but it’s politics so it’s normal.

Some people said, “Scott you idiot it wasn’t a tie.” I kind of called it a tie meaning that it didn’t change many votes. But people said to me but Scott she said the thing that was wrong and then Trump correctly corrected it so he gets the point and then there were lots of points he made so if you add it all up he won. That’s not how anything works. It wasn’t a debate in the sense that there was any back and forth of any consequence and it doesn’t matter who won on points. It matters how you felt. That’s it. So I didn’t even score it on points. It’s not like a boxing match where you could win with a knockout. No. None of those points made any difference to anybody at all.

So if she avoided a question some people said ah but the public’s going to notice that she avoided the very first question: are people better off or worse off? She didn’t even answer. To which I say nobody’s going to care that she avoided a question. It’s the most ordinary thing that politicians do. And I will go further and say that when I first got into the public sphere when Dilbert took off my publisher decided that I needed some media training. Here’s the entire media training: if you don’t like the question that they ask, answer the question you feel like answering. The one that you want to answer. That’s good for you. And then run out the clock. Because if somebody’s asking you questions it’s usually on video. They usually have a time limit. So if you don’t like their question just ignore it and answer some adjacent question that’s the one you wish they had asked. And she did. So if you’re saying to me but Scott she’s showing her weakness by avoiding a question—nope that’s not what she showed. She showed she’s well trained. Avoiding that first question was exactly the way she was trained. That is media training. It’s exactly what it looks like. So was she prepared? Yeah yeah she was prepared.

Some say her smugness will be a turnoff. Others say—I saw a Fischer King note this on X—that her facial expressions where she was sort of mocking Trump for his various points as you know looking like what’s wrong with you? Oh are you being crazy now? You know so she really worked the facial stuff and to me it was very off-putting. But was I going to vote for her? No. Didn’t matter what I thought. What do the single women and the people in her base think about all the faces she was making? Trump probably loved it because they were feeling the same feeling that her face was exhibiting and it probably worked. So you can’t judge it by what you think of it. You have to judge the debate by what the people she’s talking to likely responded to and I think they probably responded to her face if they liked her.

There were no great memorable lines that change anything but there were a couple of funny ones. When Harris interrupted Trump he did the “I’m talking now” basically a callback to her doing that in the debate and it worked. So he took away from her the ability to do that to him. So he was prepared for that and he h