The final debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, held on Thursday evening, was the first one of the entire campaign that actually felt like a debate.

The first debate was a chaotic disaster due to Trump’s constant interruptions; the second one didn’t happen because Trump refused to agree to debate virtually while he had Covid-19 (the candidates held dueling town halls instead). This time around, better moderation and the handy use of a mute button allowed both candidates to express their thoughts — leading to a mix of actual substantive policy exchanges and less-than-coherent mudslinging about families and personal finance.

The format seems to have suited Biden, who seemed energized and on target — getting in a number of strong attacks on Trump’s record on Covid-19, health care, and family separations. Trump was also better than he was in the first debate, where he came across as an unfit bully, but he was outclassed on policy and unable to tell a particularly cogent story on the question of why Americans should care about Hunter Biden’s emails.

A deeper analysis follows of who won and who lost — and not just candidates.

Winner: Joe Biden

During the primary and general election, Biden hasn’t particularly shined on the debate stage. His answers tend to meander and he mixes up words in ways that take the sting out of his attack lines. But on Thursday, Biden was sharper and more on target, allowing his strong qualities — his command over policy and his ability to connect with ordinary Americans — to shine through.

During the first segment of the debate about the pandemic, for example, Trump said “we’re learning to live with it.” Biden responded with a possibly rehearsed but nonetheless devastating line, “He says that we’re learning to live with it; people are learning to die with it.”

He continued needling Trump about his refusal to take responsibility for pandemic policy, provoking the president into the most embarrassing stumble from either candidate in the entire debate: “I take full responsibility. It’s not my fault that it came here. It’s China’s fault.” It’s a line that you can bet will be in anti-Trump attack ads in very short order.

Biden was like this for much of the debate, clever and empathetic and even a little feisty.

He got emotional about family separations (“violates every notion of who we are as a nation”), sounded a populist note on Trump’s obsession with markets (“‘the stock market is booming’ is his only measure of what’s happening”), and effectively hit Trump on his tenuous relationship with the truth (“I don’t know where he comes up with these numbers”). He even got in his favorite catchphrase — “there’s a reason why he’s bringing up all this malarkey.”

Was it an all-time great debate performance? No, I don’t think so.

But it was solid: strong when it really needed to be and certainly better than his opposition. With a lead of nearly 10 points in the national poll averages, that’s more than enough to call this a win for Biden.

—Zack Beauchamp

Loser: Donald Trump

It is perhaps telling that any praise of President Trump’s performance on Twitter during Thursday night’s debate involved terms like “well-tempered” and “composed,” an indication that the biggest hurdle Trump faced was himself.

Trump appeared to take notes during the debate. He managed to avoid interrupting Joe Biden quite as much as in the last round. He was coherent and, as opposed to the first debate, he did not seem entirely out of control. This is the lowest of bars to clear, but he cleared it.

Still, far too many of his references only made sense if you watch a lot of Fox News and/or spend a lot of time on right-leaning Twitter. There are viewers to whom “the Big Man” is obviously Joe Biden and “the laptop from hell” is clearly a device that allegedly belonged to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden (who is not, as far as we know, running for the White House), but the majority of these obscure references to the Trump campaign’s attacks on Hunter Biden likely flew over most viewers’ heads.

Trump could still win reelection. But currently, he is losing, in the polls and in the eyes of the public, as Covid-19 begins to surge (again) and stimulus negotiations falter (again). “Well-tempered” and “composed” aren’t enough to get it done — especially when the subjects Trump most wishes to discuss are ones largely disconnected from those that matter most to voters.

—Jane Coaston

Winner: Kristen Welker

The first time Donald Trump was challenged on national TV by a female journalist this fall — by Savannah Guthrie, at his town hall on October 15 — he and his allies responded by throwing a massive temper tantrum. The second time, when CBS News’s Lesley Stahl attempted to interview him, he shut down the interview prematurely after using much of it to complain about her tough questioning.

In sports, this is known as “working the refs.” If you yell at the refs, or in this case the media, enough, maybe they’ll back down and refuse to ask tough questions, or fact-check, or ask meaningful follow-ups. They’ll give you a break.

It didn’t work with moderator Kristen Welker, despite Trump’s attacks on her before the event.

Welker, aided by a mute button (see below) whose absence made the first debate such a disaster, was able to deftly move the debate between different topics. She allowed each candidate ample time to speak, without letting the debate devolve into the unstructured cacophony that Chris Wallace presided over in the first debate.

And she actually challenged the candidates when their responses didn’t add up. When Trump insisted a vaccine for Covid-19 will be ready by the end of the year, she pointed out, “Your own officials say it could take well into 2021,” and asked him to clarify. When Joe Biden criticized Trump’s diplomacy with North Korea, she asked, “You said you wouldn’t meet with Kim Jong Un without preconditions. Are there any conditions under which you would meet with him?”

That’s how you run a useful, informative debate, and basically everyone watching applauded. Journalists including Steve Inskeep, Philip Rucker, and Yamiche Alcindor were full of praise. So were progressive viewers. And while conservatives criticized Welker for not allowing Trump more time to bring up Hunter Biden-related attacks, even people like Ben Shapiro and Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis had positive reactions. Perhaps the strangest endorser was Trump himself, who told Welker, “I respect very much the way you are handling this.”

Moderating a debate with as mendacious a liar as Trump is almost impossibly difficult, and Welker wasn’t perfect at holding him to account. But she did quite well overall, and managed to perform in a way that both Biden and Trump supporters agreed was fair — an almost miraculous achievement.

—Dylan Matthews

Winner: The mute button

The first presidential debate didn’t go well. Pundits’ and journalists’ reviews ranged from “the worst presidential debate I have ever seen in my life” to “a shitshow.” And it was mostly due to Trump, who spent the entire debate interrupting Biden — making it impossible for Biden to get a point in and stifling any semblance of a coherent conversation.

In response, the presidential debate commission decided to use a mute button. The Associated Press explained the setup:

A representative of the Commission on Presidential Debates — not the moderator — is supposed to ensure each candidate has two full minutes of uninterrupted time to deliver opening answers on six major topics, according to debate commission chair Frank Fahrenkopf. A member of each of the Trump and Biden campaigns was expected to monitor the person who controls the mute button backstage, Fahrenkopf told The Associated Press, noting that the button would not be used beyond the first four minutes of each topic.

That this was necessary at all was a testament to Trump’s disregard for basic norms. In previous presidential debates, from primaries to general elections, the candidates would disagree, but they would at least let each other speak. Trump shattered that basic decorum, leading to a disaster of a debate last month.

Still, the mute button worked. Thursday’s debate was much more productive and substantive (to the extent any debate with Trump can be). At the very least, both candidates had a chance to voice their respective visions for America, and the public was able to follow what was going on.

—German Lopez

Loser: Medicare-for-all

“I support private insurance.”

Biden was unequivocal. He’s not the Medicare-for-all candidate Trump is looking for.

The president tried to turn the health care tables on Biden again, accusing the Democratic nominee of supporting “socialized medicine.” He wanted to lump Biden together with the more progressive Democrats who support a single-payer health care system.

Biden wasn’t having it. He wanted to remind voters he’d beaten several candidates — including the godfather of Medicare-for-all, Sen. Bernie Sanders — by promising to preserve private insurance.

“The reason why I had such a fight with 20 candidates for the nomination was I support private insurance,” Biden said. “Not one single person with private insurance would lose their insurance under my plan, nor did they under Obamacare.”

To be clear: Some Americans had a private plan canceled when the ACA’s new rules took effect (but most of them qualified for new coverage); Biden’s plan as written would allow people who get private insurance through their work to enroll in a government-run public option, but only if they choose.

But it is certainly true that Biden was running as the candidate who wanted to build on the current system, not replace it.

Trump has tried to turn Medicare-for-all into an election-year boogeyman, part of his strategy to make Biden look like a stalking horse for the left. But Biden keeps rebutting that argument with a simple truth: He doesn’t support Medicare-for-all. He wants to build on Obamacare with a plan that the Urban Institute estimates would provide insurance to every legal resident in the United States, including 25 million currently uninsured people.

At Thursday night’s debate, he said he’d even have a name for it: “Bidencare.”

—Dylan Scott

Winner: New York

Trump would like you to think that New York is very, very bad, always and including during Thursday’s debate.

“If you go and look at what’s happened to New York, it’s a ghost town. It’s a ghost town,” Trump said during the debate. He said the city that he was born and raised in was “wonderful” for so many years, but now it’s “dying” because everyone’s leaving New York.

So here’s the thing: New York certainly has had its problems, and like anywhere, it’s not perfect. But at least judging from the view from my Brooklyn apartment, things are kind of fine?

New York City was hit hard early on in the pandemic in a way that was painful and heartbreaking. But the city and state have gone to great lengths to get the virus under control and, by and large, have been successful. New York has flattened the curve, and it’s stayed there, with leaders now focusing on so-called “hot spots” where cases are spiking.

On the economic front, yes, it’s difficult, and there’s no denying businesses are being hit hard. But the city is resilient. That said, cities and states across the country, red and blue, need economic help from the federal government right now — help the president could make happen.

During the pandemic, we’ve seen a lot of finger-pointing. If only this state had acted faster, this mayor. And early on in the outbreak, New York was deemed the “bad place.” Now, the city’s doing better, but it’s heartbreaking to see the disease spread to places like Wisconsin and South Dakota. If we had treated this as a United States problem instead of a New York problem early on, could things have been different?

On Thursday, Biden brought home the important point that it doesn’t matter which state people are in, to gauge how good or bad they’re doing on the pandemic or how much people should care about them. “They’re all Americans,” he said.

It’s a lesson the president should learn.

—Emily Stewart

Loser: Senate Republicans 

Biden made a pointed observation about the reality of stimulus negotiations: Despite Trump’s repeated claims that he wants to “go bigger” on more aid, he hasn’t even been able to get his own party on board. 

When pressed about why there wasn’t another stimulus package even as millions of Americans grapple with unemployment, evictions, and business closures, Trump said that he wanted to get an expansive bill done — and tried to cast blame on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats. 

Biden, however, had a ready retort.

“The Republican leader in the United States Senate said he can’t pass it,” Biden said plainly. “He will not be able to pass it. He does not have Republican votes. Why isn’t [Trump] talking to his Republican friends?”

Biden’s statement spoke to one of the pervasive dynamics of the ongoing stimulus impasse. Throughout it, not only has Trump been an unreliable negotiator — even at one point calling off talks via Twitter — he’s never gotten the full backing of his party. 

Senate Republicans earlier this summer were already dismissing a comprehensive stimulus option out of concern about adding to the national debt — and potential backlash from base voters down the line. More recently, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has tried to discourage a larger compromise prior to the election. 

Biden’s remarks were a forceful reframing of the blame game over the stimulus.

—Li Zhou

Loser: Social justice

Biden and Trump effectively avoided answering nearly every question about race and the Black Lives Matter movement at the debate. Instead of taking a moment to discuss how they’d combat inequality, the candidates pointed fingers in a game of “who’s more racist than whom.”

“I can’t even see the audience … but I am the least racist person in this room,” Trump said, staring out into the dark. 

“He pours fuel on every single racist fire,” Biden retorted, after defending his role in crafting the 1994 crime bill and clarifying that he did not use the term “superpredators” to describe young Black men. 

Since late May, millions of Americans have rallied in protest of police brutality and systemic racism following the police killings of Black people including Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, making Black Lives Matter likely the biggest protest movement in American history. Though protesters have called for the defunding of the police, this rhetoric has not made its way to the debate stage. Instead, Trump has emphasized “law and order” in response to the protests and Biden has simplified the problem of systemic racism in policing to “a few bad apples.”

Though asked why he called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate,” Trump was given space to keep pushing the lie that he’s been the best president for Black America since Abraham Lincoln. He also claimed that the first time he heard about the Black Lives Matter movement was when protesters apparently chanted “pigs in a blanket” in response to police officers — the only moment in the debate when he acknowledged the movement.

Biden, to be fair, tried his best to articulate his newfound vision of criminal justice — people not being locked up for drug use, and fully funded community policing — but it felt like too little, too late. 

—Fabiola Cineas

Loser: China

The question of which candidate would be tougher on China has been a throughline in this election. That was on full display at the debate. 

I mean, really, China came up a lot. You’d think that would make it a winner, but if anything, it showed how the next president’s likely biggest foreign policy challenge has become a punching bag.

President Trump is much of the reason China got a lot of airtime. It feels like years ago (well, this summer) when he tried to make “Beijing Biden” a thing, but Trump has tried to make his tough-on-China policies a centerpiece of his campaign. Among those, he touts his trade war with China and his pushback on the country’s handling of the coronavirus.

Biden, meanwhile, tried to make the case that his administration would get China to play by the international rules. “Not like he has done,” Biden said of Trump. “He has caused the deficit with China to go up, not down.” At the debate, Biden didn’t give specifics on how he would get China to play by the rules, but he has already made it clear that he wants to reassert the US as a Pacific power. 

Otherwise, it was a lot of familiar territory. Trump, once again, tried to deflect from his failure to contain the coronavirus pandemic by blaming China for the virus’s spread, saying “it was not my fault” that the pandemic came here. “It’s China’s fault.”

Biden fired back by citing Trump’s praise of Chinese President Xi Jinping over the early handling of the outbreak. They wrangled over Trump’s China tariffs. Trump tried to claim that China was paying billions in tariffs; Biden, in an effective exchange, rightly said that wasn’t true. 

Trump also brought up China’s windmills, for some reason. Biden, at least, called out China for meddling in US elections.

But beyond policy, many of the oddest — and hardest to follow — exchanges on China came over allegations of personal financial ties to Beijing. Trump tried to argue that Biden wasn’t tough on China because of business ties his son Hunter had there — and that somehow Biden made money off the deal.

Biden denied those attacks (and there’s no evidence to support them), and then flipped it on Trump, bringing up New York Times reporting that revealed Trump had a previously unreported bank account in China. It was a confusing exchange if you’re not totally immersed in all of the latest drama, but the main takeaway seemed to be: Doing business in China is bad. 

Taken together, China probably took the most hits outside of the two candidates on the stage. Tensions with China have escalated sharply in recent months, sometimes likened to a cold war. How the next president will fix or change that might not be so clear from the debate — but an easing of tensions with China doesn’t look likely right now, no matter who wins in November.

—Jen Kirby

Dueling town halls between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden created a stark contrast between the two candidates — but probably not the one the president wanted.

This is all because Trump refused to do Thursday’s planned virtual town hall debate due to his Covid-19 diagnosis, so Biden decided to schedule a solo town hall on ABC at 8 pm ET. Trump, looking to counterprogram Biden, convinced NBC to schedule his own town hall at the same time — hoping to win the ratings war and come out looking stronger than Biden.

Trump may regret that strategy; he faced hard questions from voters and NBC host Savannah Guthrie on issues ranging from wearing masks to electoral fraud to Trump’s refusal to disavow extremist groups, eliciting a series of responses that ranged from blatantly false (claiming masks don’t really work) to the dangerously absurd (suggesting some parts of the QAnon conspiracy theory might actually be true).

Meanwhile, Biden’s town hall was calm, polite, and packed with policy substance. Biden laid out plans for how he would get Covid-19 under control and reorient the economy toward being more equitable for lower-income Americans — two things Trump has not accomplished. For voters yearning for a return to some sense of normalcy, Biden hit all the right notes.

The night-and-day contrast served to highlight the core differences between the two options in front of the American people: continuing the reality TV maelstrom of the Trump presidency or a shift to a Biden presidency, where politics returns to being boring, and maybe even calm.

What follows is our attempt to figure out who benefited from the events and their striking contrasts — and who came out looking just a little bit worse.

Winner: Joe Biden

Biden’s town hall made a big case for the return of boring normalcy in the White House. Even though it may not have made for the most riveting television, it could well work in his favor.

Biden’s town hall harked back to the days when Americans didn’t have to worry about what the president was doing — or tweeting — every day. As Trump was being asked why he wouldn’t wear a mask at the NBC town hall, Biden was talking about how he has started wearing two masks, and talked about his plan for implementing mask-wearing around the country.

“We’re in a situation where we have 210,000-plus people dead and what’s he doing? Nothing. He’s still not wearing masks,” Biden said of Trump. “It is the presidential responsibility to lead. And he didn’t do that.”

While Trump’s recent Covid-19 diagnosis signaled the president’s failure to contain the coronavirus in his own White House, Biden finally got to explain — uninterrupted — how he would coordinate a federal response to stop the virus’s spread around the United States. He even brought notes.

Talking to the American people directly about Covid-19 and the havoc it has wreaked on millions of people’s lives was Biden’s strong suit in the first debate. The town hall format seemed to benefit him even more. Biden seemed sharp and prepared — talking about commonsense virus control tactics like wearing masks and making sure schools had good air ventilation.

“We need more teachers in our schools to be able to open, smaller pods,” Biden said. “We need ventilation systems changed. There’s a lot of things we know now.”

Just recognizing that there’s a way to make schools safer for students to return could be a welcome answer to millions of overworked, stressed parents who are trying to juggle working from home and overseeing their kids’ remote schooling at the same time.

Pollsters have found a consistent theme among voters who dislike Trump and favor Biden: They’re tired of the daily chaos of the past four years — whether it’s the revolving door for White House chiefs of staff or Trump catching Covid-19 himself.

If a comparatively boring town hall means America can go back to the days where the country doesn’t have to worry about what the president is tweeting, that’s a win for Biden.

—Ella Nilsen

Loser: Donald Trump

Trump wouldn’t say whether he was tested for the coronavirus before the first debate with Biden. He couldn’t defend his refusal to require mask use at his rallies. He tried to downplay broadcasting a wild conspiracy theory that Biden tried to have members of Seal Team 6 killed by saying “that was a retweet, I do a lot of retweets.” He suggested parts of the QAnon conspiracy theory could be true, saying “I don’t know” when Guthrie asked him whether he believes the Democratic Party is run by a cult of satanic pedophiles.

That may sound like a list of the lowlights from the night. But it was all in the first 15 minutes of the event.

You could call this “Trump being Trump,” and you’d probably be right. But the difference is that, this time around, Trump was facing questions from ordinary Americans whom he couldn’t talk over and a host who was unafraid to follow up repeatedly and fact-check the president in real time. This format made it much harder for Trump to ignore questions through his patented combination of lying, bluster, and deflection — forcing him to engage on his own record, the area where’s at his weakest.

Take this health care exchange, for example. After a question about making health care affordable and accessible, Guthrie followed up by asking Trump about his administration’s plans to replace Obamacare — and the glaring contradiction between its claim to protect coverage for people with preexisting conditions and its argument, in court, that all of Obamacare (including said coverage) is unconstitutional.

Here’s the end of the exchange:

GUTHRIE: You’ve been in office almost four years. You had both houses of Congress, Senate and House, in Republican hands. And there is not a replacement yet. 

TRUMP: That’s right. I’m sorry. But if you look, we had both houses and what did we do? We got rid of the individual mandate. 

 GUTHRIE: The promise was repeal and replace. 

TRUMP: Look, look, we should be on the same side. I want it very simple. I’m going to put it very simple. We would like to terminate it and we would like to replace it with something that’s much less expensive and much better. We will always protect people with preexisting conditions. 

GUTHRIE: But if you’re successful in court in November, the preexisting conditions, that promise will be gone. 

TRUMP: If we don’t succeed, we are running the remnants of whatever is left because we took it apart. We are running the remnants of whatever is left much better than the previous administration, which ran it very badly. We would like to have new health care, much better and much less expensive.

Trump is unable to explain why he couldn’t come up with a better health care plan when his party controlled all three branches of government. His answer to the question about preexisting conditions is gibberish, largely because there is no good answer.

If the town hall format brought out Biden’s strengths — his ability to empathize with voters, his long experience with and knowledge about policymaking — it brought out Trump’s weaknesses in the same areas. His event served to remind us that his presidency has been four years of chaos and conflict, with too little in the way of substance done to help ordinary Americans in an especially difficult time in our history.

Trump is trailing badly in the polls, and he desperately needed a strong performance to try to turn things around. This seems, if anything, more likely to make that hole a bit deeper.

—Zack Beauchamp

Winner: Substance

There were a few moments in Thursday’s ABC town hall where Biden sounded a bit like the progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a onetime rival for the Democratic nomination.

If Biden’s audience was looking for wonky statistics on issues from the economy to climate change, the former vice president had them.

Biden came prepared for his town hall with notes, at one point casually throwing around statistics about the British Thermal Unit as it pertains to wind and solar power, and talking about pelletizing chicken and cow manure to take out the methane that contributes to climate change.

“Electric vehicles will save billions of gallons of oil … [and create] 1 million automobile jobs,” Biden said. “But we’re lagging. We’re not investing. We’re not doing the research.”

Discussing a long-standing racial wealth gap, Biden recognized that even as the economy has slowly recovered over the summer, the economic picture looks far bleaker for Black and brown workers. The most recent overall unemployment rate is 7.9 percent. But when you break it down along racial lines, the story on what’s happening is quite different: White unemployment is 7 percent, while Black unemployment is 12.1 percent and Hispanic unemployment is 10.3 percent.

“[Trump] talks about a V-shaped recovery; it’s a K-shaped recovery,” Biden said, pointing to the theory that those with means in America are bouncing back quite easily, while everyone else is suffering. “If you are on the top, you’re going to do very well. If you’re on the bottom, in the middle or the bottom, your income is coming down.”

At one point, Biden had a mea culpa about his 1994 crime law — one of the more controversial parts of his Senate history that contributed to mass incarceration in the 1990s and following decades.

After host George Stephanopoulos asked whether it was a mistake to support it, Biden simply responded, “Yes, it was.”

But Biden also tried to deflect blame away from the law’s original drafting, saying the worst effects of the crime bill came from state and local police departments implementing it themselves.

“Here’s where the mistake came: The mistake came in terms of what the states did locally,” Biden said. “What happened? They eliminated the funding for community policing.” 

While Biden has adamantly come out against defunding the police and maintained that “most cops don’t like bad cops,” he told Stephanopoulos he wants more reforms and additional resources going to community policing and strengthening mental health resources.

Even if viewers may have disagreed with some of Biden’s stances, the nominee came prepared and showed off his policy chops.

—EN

Winner: FOMO

This election is a choice between two candidates. To actually decide whom they want to vote for, voters typically need to be informed about both candidates’ views and positions. But tonight, voters had to choose between the Biden town hall or the Trump town hall.

It was a real-time example of FOMO (fear of missing out) in action. If you were on social media during the town halls, you might have seen people talking about the town hall that you weren’t watching. But you couldn’t contribute to the conversation because you couldn’t tune in.

Only in this case, the stakes are very high. This isn’t missing a movie’s opening day or brunch with your friends. It’s missing the kind of event that voters genuinely rely on to inform their decisions about who will run the most powerful country in the world. That’s particularly true in this case, because tonight’s main political event was supposed to be a debate between Biden and Trump.

It didn’t have to be this way. The debate could have been held virtually, given Trump’s recent coronavirus infection, but the Trump campaign rejected the idea of a virtual debate. The town halls could have been scheduled at different days or times, but Trump reportedly wanted to beat Biden in the ratings in a direct, same-hour matchup.

So we got a mess of FOMO. Americans — and especially any remaining undecided voters — were left less informed as a result.

—German Lopez

Winner: Savannah Guthrie

Savannah Guthrie is a lead anchor on the Today show for a reason — and on Thursday night, it showed.

NBC got a lot of flak for programming a Trump town hall at the same time as the Biden event on ABC, especially given that it was the president who dropped out of the originally scheduled debate in the first place. Guthrie’s quick line of questioning, pushback, and real-time fact-checking of the president probably made the White House wish they had just done the debate.

Guthrie, who has co-anchored Today since 2012, opened the night reminding the audience why the event was happening in the first place — the president got Covid-19 and refused to participate in a virtual debate proposed for safety reasons, causing this dueling town hall mess.

And then she got to the questions. Were you tested the day of the last presidential debate in Cleveland, which took place just two days before Trump’s positive coronavirus test? How often are you tested? Why did you hold the event honoring Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett at the White House without precautions? Shouldn’t you have known better? Are you blaming grieving military families for giving you Covid-19? Why did it take you two days to denounce white supremacy?

Then Guthrie asked the president about QAnon. In asking her question, she reminded him what it was — the dangerous conspiracy theory spreading across the internet that claims Democrats are behind a pedophilia ring and that sees Trump as a savior. 

“Can you just once and for all state that this is completely not true and disavow QAnon in its entirety?” she asked. “I know nothing about QAnon,” he said. “I just told you,” she responded.

Guthrie also asked the president about something he retweeted suggesting that Biden had a Navy SEAL team killed to cover up that the death of Osama bin Laden was faked. (This is not true.)

“That was a retweet, that was an opinion of somebody,” Trump said.

“You’re the president; you’re not someone’s crazy uncle where you just retweet whatever,” Guthrie said.

Guthrie stepped into a tough spot on Thursday, and in that spot, she seized on the chance to ask questions that really matter to the American people — and press on their behalf to get answers.

—ES

Winner: QAnon

Guthrie gave Trump as many opportunities as she could to denounce the online conspiracy theory about a satanic pedophilia ring run by global elites.

He wouldn’t do it.

“I don’t know anything about QAnon,” Trump said at first.

Guthrie pointed out she’d just explained the theory in brief: Prominent Democrats are satanic pedophiles and Trump is going to save the world from them.

So would Trump denounce QAnon? Quite the opposite.

“Let me just tell you what I do hear about it is they are very strongly against pedophilia and I agree with that,” Trump said. “I do agree with that.”

Guthrie pressed: “But there’s not a satanic cult.”

“I don’t know that,” the president said. “And neither do you know that.”

The rest of the short version of QAnon is that a top-level official — “Q” — is leaking a top-level state secret on the internet. Its believers thrive on tiny hints they claim they detect in official statements and social media posts by Trump and his confidants.

Now they had the president in front of a huge TV audience, saying that what he did know about QAnon, he agreed with.

—Dylan Scott

Loser: The individual mandate

The mandate has taken a beating lately, both from Trump and from health policy wonks.

At his town hall, the president defaulted to his favorite answer when a journalist or anybody points out he has not released a comprehensive health care plan, in case the Supreme Court overturns Obamacare early next year and millions of people could be at risk of losing health coverage.

When asked by a voter who buys her own health insurance about what his health care plan would be, Trump instead talked about his most significant legislative achievement on health care. As part of their tax bill, Republicans eliminated Obamacare’s financial penalty for failing to carry health insurance that was established by the 2010 health care law. (They had also, of course, failed to repeal and replace Obamacare earlier the same year.)

“We got rid of the individual mandate on Obamacare, which was the worst part of Obamacare, and now you could actually say it’s not Obamacare because that’s how big it was,” the president said.

Trump is right about one thing: The mandate was very unpopular. It makes sense for him politically to highlight how he got rid of it.

But he’s wrong about something else: Ending the mandate may not actually be that big of a deal in terms of how Obamacare functions.

A consensus has been forming among health policy experts that the mandate wasn’t as crucial to the law’s markets as its authors thought it would be because the actual size of the financial penalty was relatively small. More than 80 percent of the people who buy private insurance on the marketplaces get federal tax credits, which makes their premiums more affordable. Obamacare’s enrollment has declined only slightly since the mandate was repealed, from 12.2 million in 2017 to 11.4 million in 2020.

Yet Republican state officials, supported by the Justice Department, are suing to overturn the law in its entirety because the mandate is now gone. (To get into the weeds on the topic, read Vox’s Ian Millhiser.) Those millions of Americans who buy insurance on the marketplaces, and more than 12 million people covered by Medicaid expansion, could lose insurance unless there is a plan to cover them in that scenario.

“I want to give great health care,” the president said Thursday night, sounding much like he did four years ago. The rest is still TBD.

—DS

Loser: Trump’s purported toughness

If there’s anything we’ve been told over the past five years about Donald Trump, it’s that he’s “tough.” But responses to Trump’s performance in Thursday night’s town hall conversation with Guthrie from conservative media figures seemed to imply otherwise. They focused not on Trump’s answers, but on how “bullied” he was by Guthrie for asking him moderately difficult questions.

Trump is the president of the United States, and presumably would have the capacity to answer tough questions about his handling of the coronavirus and other issues (not to mention he had mocked Guthrie earlier Thursday during a rally).

And yet Fox News host and occasional Trump rally guest Sean Hannity introduced his show Thursday night saying, “NBC fake news did their best to ambush President Trump at tonight’s town hall,” and describing Guthrie as Biden’s surrogate.

The Trump campaign mirrored that language in a statement, again calling Guthrie a “Biden surrogate” and adding, “President Trump masterfully handled Guthrie’s attacks and interacted warmly and effectively with the voters in the room.”

Trump’s allies, in the face of his performance, focused on working the refs — the media. The rule for interviewing Donald Trump is very clear: He can be mean to you, but you have to be nice to him, obsequiously so, no matter what he says or does.

But this was Trump’s choice. As he said about the decision to do the town hall: “They asked me if I’d do it, and I figured what the hell? We’ll get a free hour of television.”

He did indeed. And now some of his biggest allies are very upset about it.

—Jane Coaston

When President Donald Trump chose Vice President Mike Pence as his running mate, Pence’s job was simple: Be normal.

And during his debate with Sen. Kamala Harris on Wednesday, Pence attempted to play the part, often seeming to represent an entirely separate administration from the one he purportedly serves.

While Trump waxed philosophical earlier Wednesday on Twitter about how Joe Biden shouldn’t be permitted to run for office because he “got caught in a Treasonous Act of Spying and Government Overthrow,” Pence spent the debate arguing for Trump’s reelection by citing the administration’s policies on China and its fight against ISIS. After Trump dithered on stimulus payments on Tuesday before posting videos about how having Covid-19 was a godsend, Pence said that Trump was a bold leader, “a president who cut taxes, rolled back regulations, fought for fair trade, and freed up trillions of dollars to make direct payments to the American people.”

During the vice presidential debate, Pence didn’t sound particularly enthused. But there was markedly little screaming. And while he repeatedly blew past his appointed speaking times, he did not seem outwardly unhinged. In short, he did not sound anything like President Trump did during the first debate. He sounded, instead, like a standard-issue suburban Republican. And he attempted to imply that someway, somehow, the president he served might be, too.

But in doing so, Pence didn’t make Trump look good — rather, he unintentionally made the case that the problem with the Trump administration is, well, Trump. And as the president spent Thursday morning ranting about his enemies on Fox News, that case seemed to grow in strength.

Mike Pence is a “normal Republican”

Back in 2016, my colleague Ezra Klein argued that Pence’s presence on the presidential ticket rendered the very conceit of Trumpism suspicious. After all, Klein argued, If “Donald Trump is neither generic nor particularly Republican, and his whole campaign was built on the idea that even Republicans didn’t want another generic Republican,” why did he choose “a vice president who undermines everything that was distinct about his campaign”?

However, the point of Pence was not to undermine Trump’s distinctiveness, but to perhaps make it palatable, seemly, understandable. And Pence did his job. Denounced by some conservatives as a “fraud” for his alleged weakness on religious freedom issues while governor of Indiana, he nevertheless was perceived by many on the right, including congressional Republicans, as a balancing force for Trump. (After all, Pence had endorsed Ted Cruz earlier in the race.)

That was the point of Mike Pence. But, arguably, that was his greatest political weakness with conservatives for the past four years. You voted for Donald Trump, and the concept of Trumpism (whatever you believed that to be), and you just so happened to be given Mike Pence in addition.

During the impeachment hearings last October, I asked a number of conservatives why it wouldn’t be better to remove Trump from office in favor of a President Pence. I was told that Trump acted as a bulwark against the excesses of the left, and that he was the only person truly willing to fight for conservatives. In their view, Pence was a “classical conservative,” with an outlook and style insufficient to meet the needs of the moment:

Josh Hammer, editor-at-large at Daily Wire, told me, “From a traditional, Reaganite, National Review-esque ‘three-legged stool of conservatism’ perspective, Pence is undoubtedly more traditional and ‘classically conservative’ from Trump.” But Hammer said that in his view, “The right is fundamentally under siege from the left,” and so now “there is a profound desire by many on the right for a blunt, crass instrument to push back against this.” … “Trump encapsulates this mentality — a mentality that refuses to be subdued and easily swept away to the proverbial ash heap of history,” Hammer said. “And it is unclear at best if Pence could provide the same.”

But that was before the coronavirus, a pandemic that has led to the deaths of more than 210,000 Americans, an economic crisis, and the complete upheaval of the lives of everyday Americans.

If the biggest enemy of American conservatives is the left, then Trump serves an important purpose. He can rant about the culture war and serve as a glaring symbol of the right’s unwillingness to acquiesce to the supposed excesses of the left.

But if the biggest enemy of American conservatives is a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and put the American economy into a massive downturn, then perhaps the person who spent Thursday morning demanding that a former president be charged with nonexistent crimes isn’t ideal for the job — perhaps someone like Pence is.

Trumpism without Trump — also known as Republicanism

Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro tweeted during the debate that Mike Pence’s debate performance is what the Trump administration would look like without Twitter — “GOOD, VERY GOOD.” But perhaps his performance was indicative of what the Trump administration would look like without Trump.

In truth, the administration would not look very different. Because rather than signaling the rise of economic populist conservatism, the election of Donald Trump ushered in four years of standard-issue Republican policymaking on a swath of issues. As I wrote after the Republican National Convention:

Rather than replace “zombie Reaganism” with a genuine populist effort — a real Infrastructure Week, for one — Trump, even with total control of Congress, demurred. It was too hard to get social conservatives, free-market libertarian conservatives, budget hawks, and foreign policy doves on board with the same domestic policies. Instead, he passed a deeply unpopular tax cut and yelled at people on Twitter. And in 2020, he’s focusing on “suburban housewives” and a capital gains tax cut that would likely benefit the wealthiest Americans.

Clearly, there are exceptions to the less-than-Trumpian Trump policy docket. Like immigration, Trump’s signature issue in 2016, and one that has gone curiously under-discussed in 2020. And trade, where Trump’s actions have resulted in a massive deficit that has expanded over his term in office. (And even on that issue, which supporters declared in 2016 was an indication of Trump’s willingness to stand with American families, supply-side economists who favor Trump are trying to change his mind.)

But overall, the Trumpism that was supposed to rattle the cage of GOP orthodoxy simply never materialized. Rather, Donald Trump became an orthodox Republican, but louder, meaner, and more conspiratorial.

That means that in many ways, Donald Trump is not the best ambassador for the Trump administration. Mike Pence, a normal Republican, is, because the Trump administration isn’t a marked deviation from GOP policy as usual.