For whatever it is worth, last night was Trump’s strongest debate performance in his two campaigns. But, it is obvious his campaign and operators have invested a great deal in the Hunter Biden story. And Trump refuses to tell it. After Trump’s last debate, I wrote this:
By far Trump’s most self-defeating habit in these debates is to refer to stories rather than tell them. He speaks as if he’s talking to people who, like himself, spend hours a day watching Fox News and have a shared folklore of scandal stories that can be referred to in shorthand. He refers to events, like ballots found in a wastepaper basket, but doesn’t tell the story of where they happened, or why they matter.
It’s still true. Nobody watching that debate who hadn’t been following the Hunter Biden story would know what happened, and what Joe Biden’s role in it really was.