Tuesday's first presidential debate was a "blown opportunity" for President Trump, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said Wednesday.
"Here is a basic truth: Joe Biden performed very poorly last night," "The Ben Shapiro Show" host told his listeners. "He ... said many many things last night that were literally not true, over and over ... but Trump himself was so busy interrupting Biden ... nobody could get a word in edgewise. Nobody knew what the hell was going on. It was the worst episode of 'Jerry Springer' in history because nobody hit each other with a chair."
Shapiro went on to blast Biden for turning in a "garbage" performance complete with several "blatantly untrue [and] immoral" statements. However, he added, Trump "was so busy being the rabid badger that all the attention was on the rabid badger.
"Last night was a blown opportunity," the conservative commentator said, calling it a "bleep-show from start to end.
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"If you want to see Trump win, he needed to come out, and he needed to allow Joe Biden to say dumb things and then he needed to pick it apart."
The 94-minute matchup, which featured attacks from both candidates in starkly personal terms, was "useless for everybody involved," as reflected in Wednesday's polling, Shapiro said.
"Maybe the strategy was for Trump to go so hot out of the gate that he sort of intimidated Biden into silence," Shapiro wondered. "Trump hit Biden with the kitchen sink last night and Biden didn't look good under the barrage. The problem is, there was no way for us to even gauge the blows."
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The commentator compared the debate to "watching a boxing match ... [where the] the blows are so fast that you actually can't tally the points.
"Except," he said, "these are not professionals. It was a clown car and everybody was just slapping each other with rubber hammers."
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