Having listened to the much-hyped presidential debate Thursday, let me offer my sundry impressions. Like most TV pundits responding to what they saw and heard, I think Joe Biden was definitely not up to dueling with his political opponent. He clearly showed signs of senile dementia, and even as a longtime critic of his, I was taken aback by how weak and incoherent he sounded. Joe clearly should not be running in this presidential race, and for anyone who imagined that he was at the top of his game (I do know people who believed this), his dismaying performance on Thursday evening has given the lie to that illusion.

To be even-handed about the matter, however, I was not at all impressed by how Trump handled questions or by how he responded to Biden. Our former president answered very few of the well-chosen questions posed by the CNN moderators (who, despite their political allegiances, did their work quite credibly). Trump often responded to what Biden said quite emotionally, and with few exceptions did not engage the queries that he should have answered.

 Does Trump have a position on “climate change,” other than assuring us that the Paris Accords, from which he withdrew (justifiably in my opinion), were “horrible”? What is Trump’s vision for the future, other than closing the border and repeating ad infinitum that “we had the greatest economy of all time” and “we had the largest tax cut in history.” I’m sure other former Republican presidential candidates who lost out to Trump would have responded more thoroughly to the questions posed.

Did all the legal scholars, as Trump claimed, actually agree with the Dobbs decision? They should have, but unfortunately very few did. That’s because most of the “legal experts” on TV and almost all Ivy League law professors are politically on the far left, a fact Trump should have known and mentioned. If 159 historians, as Biden kept telling us, think Trump was the worst president of all time (and that Obama by the way, was among the best), that’s because these historians, like law professors, are preponderantly on the political left and are often Democratic activists. Biden rates 14^th in a similar listing.

The same is true for the 18 economists who signed some document stating that Trump would destroy the country economically if elected. One of those supposed experts is the very Democratic husband of Janet Yellen, Trump’s zany secretary of the treasury. Trump didn’t seem to know much about the intellectuals who are attacking him or about their transparent ideological bias. The fact that he kept repeating a patently inaccurate statement about who was attacking Roe v Wade and supporting the Dobbs decision bothered me profoundly.

Other omitted answers rolled through my mind as I listened to Trump belabor the horribleness of the Biden administration. Although it’s truly that we likely wouldn’t be facing our present international conflicts and challenges if our current administration weren’t so weak and so preoccupied with pushing LGBT agendas internationally, how exactly would Trump end the Russian-Ukrainian war “even before taking office”? Would he be able to do that without acceding to Putin’s demands that, in return for an end to the war, Ukraine must concede the entire Donbas region to Russia? It’s one thing to claim that one’s own administration was better than the one that succeeded in dealing with international problems. But the unanswered question here is how exactly Trump intends to change the situation that Biden-Blinken produced for the better.

When Biden assured us that he was going after the rich with new taxes, Trump also missed the opportunity to point out that all that is just empty talk. While Trump has transformed the GOP into a working-class populist party, Biden and the Democrats are financially dependent on filthy rich wokesters. The top 1.4 percent of the income ladder heavily favors the Democrats and contributes disproportionately to Democratic campaigns. Does Biden really intend to inflict suffering on his most generous benefactors? Or would the new taxes be taken out of the earnings and consumer costs of the Deplorables? Biden’s handlers have been notably resourceful in redistributing income, for example, to the professional class and from workers with terminal high school degrees, through the government’s payment of student loans and by handing out public funds to Democratic donors in green energy.

 My daughter, who called after the debate, mentioned another point that Trump should have stressed. He might have reminded Biden that his own party is now split between pro-Israel and pro-Hamas factions. How does our president intend to bring the two sides together? Trump should also have referred to pro-Hamas demonstrators as Democratic voters, if only to bring up a topic that Biden might wish to avoid.

Shortly before the debate I heard an interview with Donald’s son Eric, who was asked how his father might approach the forthcoming debate. Eric was superbly articulate in listing all the points that he assumed his father would be making. After listening to Eric and afterwards his father responding to Democratic points, I found myself wishing it was the son, not the father, who was debating Joe Biden last night.