t's not most likely. But would you take a 30 percent chance of destroying the country? I think that Trump can do a better job of scaring the country into voting for him and it would be completely fair because I do think that these are roughly the odds. That's my opinion.

All right, here are some comments that people made on CNN about the debate and I wanted to see them because they were funny. So here's something that Sarah Isgur said. So these are all CNN-related pundits. She said that Senator Harris came in with sky-high expectations. Is that true? And in your experience, do you think that Kamala Harris had sky-high debate expectations? That never happened, did it? I think everybody thought that she would just be okay. I don't believe anybody thought she had sky-high expectations. But we did have high expectations for Pence because he's always performed well in debates. And he, I would say, he exceeded sky-high expectations in my opinion. You know, Pence will — he's doomed to never get the full credit for the good things he's done. He will never get credit for how good that debate was. That was one of the best debate performances I've ever seen. It's hard to top.

So they started out by trying to convince you that there were sky-high expectations and therefore if she didn't meet the sky-high expectations, well it's not because she did a bad job. It's because your expectations were too wrong. It's your fault. It's not Kamala Harris's fault. You have to take some responsibility for her failure because your expectations for her were too high. Way too high. Why do you do that? Why do you hurt Kamala Harris like that by making your expectations sky high? Okay, that never happened.

And then there's Julian Zelizer, also a CNN person. And he says, given her immense skill as an orator and in debating — what? That's his first sentence. Given her immense skill as an orator and in debating. I don't think that's in evidence, is it? Does she have immense skill as an orator or as a debater? Because I think if she had any of those things she might have been the candidate for president. It feels to me that she would have gotten a little bit deeper into the campaign in the primaries if she'd been a skilled orator or good at debating. And then he goes on to say she was incredibly restrained. So turning it into a good thing. Yeah, she's very skilled but she's restrained. All right, that's a good thing. Even sticking to her time. So she stayed within her timelines whereas Pence did not. So that's a little bit like a participation trophy, isn't it? It's like, sure, sure, Mike Pence won the debate but I don't think that's the whole story because you have to look at the fact that she stayed to her time limits. If that's what you have. She stayed to her time limits and she didn't have a fly on her forehead. That's losing the debate.

All right. And then there's Frida Ghitis also on CNN who said that Harris won because she had so much more material to work with. All she had to do was cite the facts, blah blah blah, about the catastrophic handling of the coronavirus. So Frida, she's decided that the debate can be decided not on anything that you do in the debate. It's just the facts that existed independent of what you said about them. Now these are so weak, the defenses of Kamala Harris, that they're hilarious.

How about Van Jones? So Van Jones trying to make lemonade out of a turd said, Vice President Pence was masterful at one thing: normalizing conservatism. He can take right-wing conspiracy theories and President Trump's grievances and make them sound mellow and unthreatening. Okay, was it Pence who was making that stuff sound unthreatening? Was that his magic trick? Or is it that that stuff is unthreatening and the only person who can make it sound threatening is Trump? Right? Trump's magic trick is he makes everything seem bigger, more important, sets your hair on fire. All right. So the real story is that Trump can make ordinary things sound dangerous and provocative. Pence can simply describe ordinary things as ordinary things. So is that like Pence's great skill? That you can take these extraordinary things and describe them as ordinary? No, that's not what was happening. Pence was describing completely safe and ordinary things like law enforcement, etc., in ordinary terms. It wasn't magic. He just described stuff. That's it.

But then Van Jones went on to say this: that Harris made history tonight as a Black woman. Okay, so made history again. I would like to think that we're at least on the verge, if not already there, where it's more sexist and more racist to call it out as special than it is to ignore it. All right. Is there anybody here who thinks it's special that a woman is running for the highest office? I hope not. I hope not. Is there anybody here who thinks that's weird or special or crazy? Because you know Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. So we shouldn't be talking about her being a woman anymore. That feels like a nothing. You know, we should be over that. How about talking about her because she's a person of color? Aren't we over that? We had eight years of Obama. Did his color matter? No. Except maybe as a positive. And just the fact that we still have to call that out as like it's a remarkable time for women who are who have a background from India and from Jamaica or wherever. We just got to stop talking about that.

All right. And then he says after 90 minutes of the debate, no one is saying she could not serve as president of the United States. That you know he says they'll quibble over her answers but now everybody can see her as a president. Is that true? Because I had the opposite feeling from the debate. Before the debate I could see her as president. After the debate, less. Because that facial thing, it looks like she can't control that and it's pretty bad. It's not a good look. The fact is that we do pick presidents like we pick ornaments. We do pick presidents for a look, a demeanor, a presentation. They become the brand and the logo of the country. So they don't have to be beautiful. You know, it's not about attractiveness per se. But you need a certain look of gravitas. Did Kamala Harris convey gravitas? Like did she convey weight? I would say no. I think she went the other direction. I believe that she looked non-confident and she couldn't handle a mild bully. Because you know Pence was, by strategy, he was taking extra time. But all he was doing was taking the shelf space that he could get away with. That's part of the game. Part of the game is if you can use up most of the shelf space, you know, use up the time, that's an advantage. So when Pence could see that he kept talking and he wasn't being stopped — they tried, you know, the host tried to stop him but there was no penalty. So he just kept going. That didn't look like a mistake to me. That looked like good strategy which was obviously decided in advance and he implemented it and it worked.

So in my opinion she looked less presidential last night than at any point during the campaign season. That's just my take.

S.E. Cupp said that, quote, "What I saw was a man who talked over not just his female opponent" — oh, we're going full sexist here — "but also the female moderator." Oh, double misogyny. Double misogyny. That mean old Mike Pence. Not only did he talk over a woman who was running for vice president but he talked over a woman who was a moderator. Double misogyny. But none of that is what happened. And other women who are being fair and honest about this are saying the same thing. Other women who have succeeded based on their talent and hard work and skill are looking at Kamala Harris and saying, you know, the right amount of talent and hard work and skill would have been better. She could have been better.

Paul Begala, who is sort of the Gollum of CNN. If CNN were sort of a Hobbit movie, Paul Begala would be the Gollum. And he's so far away from being anybody you should take seriously. He's probably the person I take least seriously. All right. He says Harris showed the world why Joe Biden's first presidential decision was a master stroke. So okay, she indicted the Trump regime with a relentless, remorseless command of the facts. She was cutting yet charming, righteously indignant yet likable. It was that last word that caught my attention. Would you have used the word likable for Kamala Harris last night? And again, watch out for your sexism because if you say that a woman is not likable you're sort of automatically suspected of being a sexist, right? Well would you have said that about a man? Let me be as clear as I can about this. In my own opinion, would I say that a man was not likable if he made the same faces that Kamala Harris did? Yeah. Yeah, I would. I would say that anybody who made those faces would be unlikable. Likewise, anybody who spread the fine people hoax is automatically unlikable in my opinion.

Megyn Kelly made some news by saying in a tweet, she said, "Take it like a woman. Don't make faces." So she was tweeting at Harris during the debate: take it like a woman, don't make faces. So what happened with Megyn Kelly when she did this tweet, "Take it like a woman"? Well obviously people decided to make that sexual. Do you think that Megyn Kelly intended that statement, "Take it like a woman. Don't make faces," do you think she was thinking of that as a sexual comment? No, no. That was not a sexual comment. It was a comment about look tougher. Look tougher. All right. So "take it like a woman" was like "take it like a man" except you know a more appropriate version. It was just saying don't make that face. That's all it was. And she got dumped on on social media.

Now will any of this matter? It will matter if the campaign takes advantage of it. So there is an advantage to take. The advantage is first of all you can paint Kamala Harris as the real top of the ticket so that you can attack her like she's the top of the ticket. And that sounds fair because people expect that at the very least she'd be the candidate for a second term if Biden got elected. So you can certainly attack her as the top of the ticket in waiting. And you could attack her on the fine people hoax now that it's been fact-checked by credible news organizations. You could just say — you can do a campaign ad where you say the Biden campaign was based on the biggest lie in American history. Now calling the fine people hoax the biggest lie in American history is technique. If you've heard me say it or tweet it, it's technique. The technique is this. You say to yourself, I'm not sure that's the biggest lie in American history. Let's look at some other ones and see how big they are. Let's compare them. That's what I want you to do. It doesn't matter if it's literally the biggest lie in American history. If I can put it in that category and make you argue about whether there might have been some other lie that was bigger, then I've already sold my point that it's among the biggest lies and that it's a lie. That's the point. So when you say it's the biggest lie in American history or the most divisive lie in American history, that might be true. That's the most divisive lie. You're trying to overclaim because that's strong technique.

So if you said Biden keeps telling this fine people thing and then you show the video clip of all that came out of the weeds with the bulging veins and then you show the debunk, show that it's not true, and then you end the campaign commercial with noting that Richard Spencer, the organizer of the Charlottesville march, has endorsed Biden. You just end it with "and the organizer of the Charlottesville event endorsed Joe Biden," which is true. And people will go to fact-check that. They're like, that can't be true. Oh, that actually happened. That's real, by the way. So while the vice presidential debate is not by itself something that will change the election too much, it did expose a line of attack that could change the election. So it did make possible a dismantling of their campaign.

The other big news is that Trump has refused to take part in the next debate if it's going to be a virtual one. And that's what they wanted to do. So they decided they wanted the next one to be virtual, which makes sense because the president and others have been tested positive for coronavirus. You don't know how long that stuff lasts. You don't know who else traveling with him might be exposed. So maybe you want to go virtual. It's not a mistake. But do you agree with President Trump refusing to do the debate? Remember he's behind in the polls. Generally speaking, when you're behind in the polls you do the debate, right? Have you ever seen an exception to that? Has there ever been an exception where the person who's behind in the polling didn't want to do a debate? Because that's the only way they have to make up ground for the most part.

I'm watching your comments. I won't be able to read my notes and also call out the super chats but I do look at them. So for most of them I'm seeing, in case you're wondering. But I can't read them out loud and look at my notes at the same time so I apologize for that.

So here's what is good about Trump refusing to do it. I believe that the second part of this which has been unstated but you know it was coming, if Trump had agreed to a virtual debate where they're in different places and it's just being broadcast, what is the predictable next thing that would happen? You know what it is. The next thing that would happen is they would change the debate rules to turn off the mic so that Trump could not be heard at all. Now if he was on the same stage with Biden and they turned off his mic he could still talk over him, right? And the camera might pick up the two of them and might see Trump talking. Maybe you could even hear it on the other microphones. So the idea of putting him in a remote location I think is probably 80 percent about turning off his microphone. Don't you think that that was the real play? It's about the microphone. And they'll use the excuse of coronavirus and that's a good excuse. It's a really good excuse. But it's about the microphone.

Now the president being behind says I'm not going to do it. Now it might be a negotiating ploy. Remember the president is always negotiating. Especially when he leaves the negotiation. Leaving the negotiation is just part of his negotiating. He does. He says that. So we know that to be true. And so maybe they'll still have some kind of a debate. But think about the fact that he could do this after Pence beat Kamala Harris in the debate. I think that Pence's solid win made it possible for Trump to cancel the other debates or at least made it easier. Because at least Pence goes out with a solid victory. I know some crazy people will say that he didn't win. And CNN's running fake polls showing that Kamala Harris totally won like by a lot. I don't think so. That's not the debate I watched. But the bottom line is that you can't win a debate as a vice president. You can't win any harder than having the top of the ticket say you know we don't even need any more debates. We just won this one so badly. And Kamala is really the head of the ticket. So we just beat my number two. Pence, my number two guy, just demolished your number one candidate. Because their number one candidate is sort of cumulative. That's not a bad time to leave if you're going to pull out of the rest of the debates. You couldn't pick a better time than that. So I think Trump is good at recognizing a moment and this was exactly the right moment for that play. It gets the news cycle. Gets you talking about the debates so you're talking less about the coronavirus. All good.

Lauren Kent said something funny on CNN that was funny enough that I just wanted to repeat it. She said COVID-19 thanks to the bad hair year. It's not a bad hair day, it's a bad hair year. I don't know. I thought that was funny.

Did you see the video of Trump talking about Regeneron? And he was doing a proof of life thing where he's not on camera as much. So he's doing these videos so you can see he's still Trump and he's still healthy. And I had a few impressions about that. Number one, I can't tell if it was just the lighting and it might be just the lighting, but it looks like there's no orange left in his hair. And it looks like there's no orange tone to his TV makeup now. There could be a reason for this and I'm just going to speculate. Now I'm guessing that because of his age that his hair color is colored, right? Doesn't he add something, some highlights to give it that non-gray color? I think I would assume he's gray. I would assume if he didn't do anything to his hair it would be gray. So if you go into the hospital and in particular if your problem is one that people can't be around you, is somebody else the one who colors his hair? I'm just going to speculate that he has some assistant who normally once a week or whatever adds a little tone to his hair to keep it that color. If you go into the hospital the nurses and the doctors are not going to perform that function and there's nobody else you can ask because you're infected with the coronavirus. So it could be that like other people who go into the hospital you just can't keep up your hairstyle while you're in hospital. So he may have let it revert. Now it could have been just the lighting. I may be completely off here so we'll have to see him again. But if he let it revert he emerged as Gandalf the Gray. You know Gandalf, he was actually Gandalf the Gray at first and turned into Gandalf the White when something happened and he transformed. I don't want to call him Trump the White because that turns into a whole different thing. So it's like he emerged as Gandalf the Gray. Like he came out of the coronavirus a different person or a different leader. And I gotta say I like it. If the gray is real and if he's gonna keep it — and I don't know either of those to be true — it works. And I think also there might be an issue with how he does TV makeup. Because how does a makeup artist put makeup on somebody who's got coronavirus? So he may not be getting TV makeup. Maybe a family member. Maybe probably Melania because Melania already has the virus. So maybe he says, Melania can you put on some TV makeup? And maybe she does it better. Maybe she just gives him a more natural look. Maybe it