From the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt…

Stop Looking for Scapegoats, Trump Fans.
Donald Trump and his fans can complain about #NeverTrump and recalcitrant Republicans all they like. But last night, starting at 9 p.m. Eastern, in front of tens of millions of people, perhaps a hundred million viewers, nothing else mattered but the candidates. The ads, the surrogates, the rallies, the ground game – all of that fades away, and for an hour and a half, it’s just Trump, Hillary Clinton, and questions from Lester Holt. There are no other outside factors, no distractions. Winning the race is all on him, and it’s perhaps the single biggest moment of the campaign, his single best opportunity to lay out the case for himself and the case against Clinton.
If you’re a Trump fan, and you feel like he did a great job, then great, you have nothing to worry about. If you’re a Trump fan and feel he missed a lot of opportunities… that’s on him. That’s not the fault of Ben Sasse. That’s not the fault of Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney or anybody who’s refusing to support him.
There has been this inane argument that one or two senators, a couple of retired GOP figures, some writers and bloggers and folks on Twitter are going to cost Trump the presidency by refusing to jump on the bandwagon. That’s nonsense. That’s scapegoat-shopping. We’ll see if last night’s debate changes the numbers in this race. It’s been enough of a topsy-turvy year where it’s quite possible Trump enjoys a surge; particularly for the first half-hour, he came across as a figure you could picture in the Oval Office. But there seems to be pretty broad consensus that she got a lot of attacks in, mentioned a lot of the unsavory or controversial parts of Trump’s record, and made him spend a lot of time on the defensive. He never got around to mentioning some of her weakest spots – the Clinton Foundation, allegations of favor-trading, Benghazi, her support for arming the rebels in Syria. He barely mentioned Libya. The word “e-mail” came up four times in ninety minutes.
This morning he’s blaming the microphone. Last night on CNN, Corey Lewandowski blamed Lester Holt. But the person who has more control over Donald Trump’s debate performance than anyone else is… Donald Trump. No one else can go up there and make his argument for him. If his fans are disappointed this morning, they should be disappointed with him. And if they’re mad, they should be mad at him.