The first presidential debate was, thanks to Trump’s participation, anything but presidential. Trump was a national disgrace. Even by the bizarre standards of the Trump era, the debate was a painful tour of Trump’s erratic psyche, as he bounced from football to Biden’s alma mater to the size of his crowds. In one sense, at least, Trump was successful: he made it all about him, which highlighted all the horrible things about him. It wasn’t what Trump wanted. Trump’s strategy all along has been to create chaos, and that’s what he did during the debate. Taken individually, Trump’s statements were ridiculous and irrational. Taken together, it was a pathologically incoherent, repetitious, incessant, and obsessive assault on Biden and reality. Trump believes that he can dominate anyone, and that was clearly his intent during the debate. Instead, it made him look like an incoherent fool.

His strategy was a risky bet for Trump, something he often takes in his business dealings and always fails. Trump was appealing to his base, but his base is not big enough to get him re-elected. All you need to do is look at the polls. Because Trump can’t focus on anything for an extended period of time, he threw wild punches at Biden including taking a shot at Biden’s son Hunter. When Biden was talking about his late son Beau’s military service, Trump attacked Biden’s other son, Hunter, and brought up his past cocaine use. It backfired. “My son, like a lot of people you know at home, he had a drug problem,” Biden said. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him.” In contrast to Trump, Biden kept coming back to his core messages: primarily, that the election is about the voters’ needs not about Trump’s needs/ego. But Biden was also blunt about how he viewed the president, calling him a racist, a liar, and a clown – something that would have been unheard of in any previous presidential debate. 

Trump made some very serious errors pandering to his base. Notably, Trump never bothered to refute the racist label. Chris Wallace, the moderator, asked Trump to condemn violent right-wing groups and white supremacists, and Biden goaded him to call out the Proud Boys, who are neo-fascist, racist, and anti-LGBTQ+. Needless to say, Trump never condemned them. Instead, he said, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” STAND BY? Stand fucking by? He was telling his supporters to wait for now, but attack if he doesn’t win the election, and the Proud Boys are now using Trump’s words as part of a new logo. He is building up his own Blackshirts (the paramilitary wing of the Mussolini’s Italian National Fascist Party) and Brownshirts (the SA or paramilitary wing of Hitler’s Nazi Party). Yesterday, Trump claimed he didn’t know who the Proud Boys were, which means he’s either a liar or stupid. I’m betting on both. He could have just used Google like normal people do. Proud Boys organizer Joe Biggs posted after the debate that he was “standing by,” and he said the president “basically said to go fuck them up.”

What’s more, Trump would not urge his followers to remain peaceful as votes are counted, including if there are delays in reporting the results. “I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully because that’s what has to happen,” Trump said, adding, “If it’s a fair election, I am 100% on board. If I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that.” When Trump was asked directly whether he will tell his voters not to engage in any sort of violence or “civil unrest” while the votes are being counted on and beyond November 3, the President of the United States not only refused to do so but also reiterated his call to his supporters to go to polling places and “watch” people casting votes. Furthermore, when he was asked whether he was going to tell his people to take to the streets if the election results are either not decided on November 3 or not decided in his favor, Trump responded, “It means you have a fraudulent election. You’re sending out 80 million ballots.” Trump is telling Americans loud and clear that he will only accept the election if he wins, and he’s going to do everything he can to encourage his followers to intimidate voters. These statements about not accepting the election are the only thing he said Tuesday night that is probably true. The rest was lie after lie after lie.

Trump tried his best to paint Biden as a socialist, or at least beholden to the “radical left.” But on issue after issue—”Medicare for All,” defunding the police, the Green New Deal—Biden disavowed policies the Trump campaign has tried to attach to him. Biden just restated his positions, which line up with the middle of the electorate, far more than Trump’s policy positions do. I think that had the potential to harm Biden with the progressive left, particularly when it comes to the Green New Deal, but only if Trump hadn’t gone quite so, well, Trump and made a complete fool of himself.

While this might not have been Biden’s greatest debate, it is not his fault. Trump’s constant interruptions and Wallace’s total ineptitude in getting control of the debate made Tuesday night a disgrace. I will credit Wallace with asking some tough questions, but what Wallace really needed was a mute button for Trump’s microphone. (Something that is rumored to be considered by the Commission on Presidential Debates [CPD] for the final two debates.) Biden tried to play by the rules, and he did remarkably well under the circumstances. Biden said several times, “Will you shut up, man?” and called Trump a “clown” more than once. Biden missed an opportunity when it came to the discussion of the pandemic. For example, when Trump was talking about the role of masks in preventing the spread of the coronavirus, Biden should have interjected more forcefully to talk about Trump’s largely maskless rallies. When Trump claimed his rallies caused no harm, Biden should have pointed out the spike in coronavirus cases after Trump’s pitifully attended Tulsa rally. Some pundits are saying that Biden missed the opportunity to say whether he would add justices to the Supreme Court — “pack the court” — if Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s nominee to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is confirmed, but I wholeheartedly disagree. Biden was absolutely right to refuse to say one way or the other. I agree with his response that if he had made a statement on adding justices to the Supreme Court, it would dominate the campaign for the rest of the election.

The bottom line is simple: Trump’s bullying, cajoling, and constant interruptions in the first 2020 general election debate with Biden on Tuesday night made the whole affair confusing and difficult to follow. Trump looked and acted like a petulant child not getting his way and lies when he gets caught doing wrong. If the CPD enacts new rules that Trump doesn’t like, I predict that Trump will refuse to debate Biden anymore. He will claim that the process is unfair towards him, even though he was the one disregarding the rules most often. I suspect that Trump will refuse to play by rules that are fair, and he will take his toys and leave, going back to his dangerous and largely maskless campaign rallies.

In 2009, I had my first teaching job; it paid pennies. If you factor in my debt, mostly from student loans, I may have been just above the poverty level. I was forced to pay nearly half my gross income in student loan payments. I was forced to have two jobs: teaching grades 7-12 at a private school and working as an adjunct instructor at a local college. Neither paid well. I was still barely making ends meet. When I did my taxes for that year, I owed over a thousand dollars because having two jobs put me in a higher tax bracket, and neither job had taken out enough tax from my paychecks. I didn’t have the money, and I was scared to death. I finally scrounged up enough money to pay my federal income tax though it meant I didn’t always get to eat, and I still could not come up with enough to pay my Alabama state income tax. They eventually garnished that amount from my 2010 tax refund. I’d gotten a minuscule tax refund that year, because I had lost my second job which lowered my income drastically.

Therefore, it makes me angry when politicians run on a platform of reducing taxes; it’s usually Republicans, and the only people who get the reduced taxes are the wealthy. The poorest among us rarely get tax cuts, and yes, some of the middle class received more money in their checks after Trump’s tax cut, but mine was only a few dollars. I doubt it has amounted to even $100 a year since it went into effect. However, taxes on wealthy Americans have fallen sharply in recent decades. Many still pay a lot to the federal government. A typical billionaire pays tens of millions of dollars in federal income taxes each year, but what is that compared to ordinary people like me paying nearly 25 percent of my annual salary? The wealthy’s tax rate may be higher than mine, but they have numerous ways to lower their tax burden with deductions. In 2018, I did not get a tax break because I moved into a slightly higher paying job and into a new tax bracket; I went from paying 15 percent to 22 percent. 

While most billionaires do pay some taxes, President Trump is apparently different. On Sunday, The New York Times(NYT) published an investigation of his finances based on thousands of pages of documents not previously made public. The Times exposé of the President’s tax returns revealed a pitifully inept businessman and a serial tax evader crushed by massive debt that could expose him to conflicts of interest given his position as President with the power to help undisclosed lenders. The number one reason for being denied top-level security clearance is debt; it makes you susceptible to bribery and blackmail. His personal debt underscores a long-time fear about his administration—that he is managing US diplomacy to prioritize his own personal and financial goals rather than the broader national interests. Trump receives millions of dollars in income from countries like Turkey and the Philippines led by autocrats whom he has praised but who infringe on traditional US values like human rights. 

The NYT article showed that Trump paid no taxes in 11 of the 18 years between 2000 and 2017. In both 2016 and 2017, he paid only $750. That means in 2010 when I had to pay an exorbitant tax bill because I was working two jobs to survive and still ended up doing without in order to pay that tax bill, Donald Trump paid nothing in taxes. Trump was able to do so both because many of his businesses reported losing vast sums of money—which reduces his taxable income—and because he has engaged in questionable tax practices. Even while declaring losses, he managed to enjoy a lavish lifestyle by taking tax deductions on what most people would consider personal expenses including residences, aircraft, and $70,000 in hairstyling for television—all of this during a period when I went without food and had to work two jobs.

The publication of the well-researched article, based on more than two decades of his tax information obtained by The Times, came just days before the first presidential debate, and 37 days before an election in which he appears to be trailing Biden. It poses a serious challenge to a presidency that Trump may need to preserve to outrun creditors with hundreds of millions of dollars in loans soon coming due. It leaves the president facing many questions about his morals, behavior, and patriotism since he appears to be paying more in taxes to several foreign nations than he is to the United States. The reporting also raises the possibility that Trump’s deceptive accounting practices, already the focus of several investigations in New York, could open him up to serious legal issues when he leaves office. For instance, The Timesreport says the president has been battling the Internal Revenue Service for years over whether losses he claimed should have resulted in a staggering tax refund of $73 million. 

The fact that Trump paid just $750 in taxes in two straight years should be the most damning since it is so identifiable and strikes such a clear comparison to the larger figure almost all Americans pay. If a man with his own airliner, gold-leafed homes, and a string of golf resorts can get away with that who is to argue the system is not permanently biased against regular people? Seth Hanlon, a Democratic policy adviser, pointed out, “In 2017, a single worker without children who made $18,000 would have paid $760 in federal income tax. Donald Trump paid $750.” Biden recently made this very explicit in a new ad that came out Sunday night:

Which Donald Trump is the true Donald Trump? Is he the business mastermind who has been lying to the IRS about his losses? Or is he the failed businessman who has been lying to the American people about his success as a businessman? It seems every time Donald Trump is caught in a new lie or yet another political scandal, there’s always a tweet from the president’s past that makes him look like a hypocrite on the issue of the day. He is a Republican after all; it’s the party of hypocrisy. Here is what he said about Barack Obama’s taxes in 2012:

To compare Trump to his predecessors, the federal taxes paid by presidents over the past 40 years during their first year in office are as follows:

• Ronald Reagan: $165,202
• George H.W. Bush: $101,382
• Bill Clinton: $62,670
• George W. Bush: $250,221
• Barack Obama: $1,792,414
• Donald Trump: $750

Lily Batchelder, the Robert C. Kopple Family Professor of Taxation at New York University School of Law, said, “Trump’s tax returns suggest he has only ever been successful as a showman, not at running actual businesses.” I realize these revelations about Trump’s finances and tax evasion are unlikely to change his strong emotional and cultish connection to his followers. He has been successful constructing alternative political realities while discrediting journalists and with the help of propaganda from conservative media. After all, his supporters have ignored numerous stories about Trump’s refusal to pay his creditors, casino bankruptcies, and morally questionable business practices that have been circulating for years. Throughout a political career filled with scandal, Trump has rarely paid a price for any of his scandals, outrages, and insults—any one of which would have doomed a normal politician. His brand is well known; he is a rule-breaker and a successful businessman. He may be a rule-breaker, i.e., a criminal and a fraud, he is definitely not a successful businessman according to his finances. In the past, he has explained that avoiding taxes shows he is a smart businessman and is an approach anyone would take if they could. Yet, what he has been doing is equivalent to tax evasion. On Sunday, Trump quickly adopted his typical tactic of trying to pass off serious revelations as nothing to concern voters because he said, “It’s fake news. It’s totally fake news. Made-up, fake.”

For any of my readers who continue to support Trump, I have some questions: What will it take for Trump to lose your support? His amoral, misogynistic, homophobic, racist behavior didn’t do it. His shady dealings with foreign countries haven’t done it. His rude and arrogant behavior hasn’t done it. His disdain for the press and our veterans hasn’t done it. His lack of business acumen and his penchant for tax evasion for over a decade are apparently not going to do it. What would change your mind? Can anything change it? Can you not see what is wrong with supporting this man?