What happened when I tried to find the good in Donald Trump

“They eat the dogs. They eat the cats.” With this absurd and racist lie, Donald Trump lost the presidential debate on Tuesday night. To be clear: He also lost in the areas of policy, substance, style, temperament, coherence and truthfulness. If you could have thrown a white towel, you should have thrown it, although a white hood might have been more appropriate.

At the end of the debate, Trump looked like a deflated whoopee cushion.

The explosiveness of this bizarre statement undermines a central claim of the MAGA right: those of us who despise Trump only do so because we live in an echo chamber that magnifies the worst of Trump and ignores all that is good. To my Republican friends, I ask: Where was the good during Tuesday's debate?

From my vantage point, sitting alone on a hotel bed, laptop firmly in my lap, as I listened to the exhausting litany of Trump's complaints, it became clear to me that whatever benefits a Trump candidacy might have, they are far outweighed by the sneering, vindictive, petty and boring old man who tries to force his words through his teeth.

Where was the good?

Where was Trump's positive vision for the nation? Where was Trump's, for all the criticism of Harris' lack of policy specificity? What policies did he outline that you, my Republican friends, support? Because the only policy I heard him describe in detail was the use of the National Guard and local police to round up millions of people, herd them into camps, and send them God knows where.

We just saw how local police handled a minor traffic violation by Miami Dolphins star wide receiver Tyreek Hill. Now, should we trust these poorly trained thugs to go door to door in every neighborhood in the country to determine who stays and who goes? How exactly is that supposed to work? Trump hasn't gotten that far. And what happens when the first bullets of this endeavor fly? Is that the good thing? If not, where was it?

Was it his admission that after nine years of promising comprehensive and beautiful health insurance to replace Obamacare, he actually has no plan, but instead “the blueprints for a plan”? Was that the moment, my Republican friends, when you smiled and said, “See? He has the blueprints for a plan. And it only took him nine years.”

Was that the good thing?

Brian Snyder/Reuters

Or was it when he mentioned Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban by name as a character witness? Why not his former vice president? Why not his former foreign minister or his former defense minister or a former Republican president? Is it because they all hate him? Is it because many of them, having seen the man in action, now refuse to vote for him? Was that the good thing?

Or was it when he swore he would “solve” the Ukraine war before he even took office, without mentioning how he would do that without bringing Ukraine to its knees and allowing its people to be slaughtered. If he has another plan, I would have liked to hear it. But he didn't say it. “Trust me, brother” is not a war plan.

So I ask again: Where was the good?

Was it his latest lie that won him the 2020 election? Or was it one of his 30-plus other lies that CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale counted? (And compared to one by Harris.) As Dale made clear, these weren't little white lies or minor digressions from the truth. Trump's lies were simply untruths. Mendacious, easily refuted nonsense.

Was that the good thing?

Or are MAGA Republicans still clinging to the lie that the economy was better under Trump than it is today? It's easy for any administration to cherry-pick the good times and ignore the bad, but you can't take a break from a presidency, and the final numbers on Trump's economic record are abysmal: 2.7 million jobs lost, inflation up from 1.7 percent to 6.4 percent, and the highest trade deficit since 2008.

Yes, it's true that Trump's last year was tainted by COVID. That sucks. But it happened under his watch. We're not saying that the economy was great under Herbert Hoover until the Great Depression. Because everyone just remembers, and rightly so, that the Great Depression happened under his watch.

Do we need to restore Herbert Hoover's reputation to save Trump's?

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

So I ask again, from my lonely echo chamber: After listening to him for nearly two hours Tuesday night spout what comedian George Wallace called “a jukebox of gibberish,” what am I missing about Donald Trump? Is it his good character? His eloquence? His vigorous defense of American democracy? What the hell am I missing? I have spent nine long years trying — God knows I have tried — to understand this man's appeal. I have spoken to countless Trump supporters. I have had countless conversations with them, and during those dialogues I have invariably been assured that if I could only escape my echo chamber, I would understand.

Does Tuesday night count? This was a raw, unfiltered Trump, saying everything he wanted to say, the way he wanted to say it, with no censorship, and he seemed like one of those people you avoid when you see them talking to themselves on the sidewalk.

Where was the good?

“Our country is going to the dogs,” he said in his closing remarks. Is that it? Or is it about the personal life of Donald John Trump, who, as Kamala Harris rightly noted, is scheduled to be sentenced in a Manhattan courtroom on November 26 for 34 capital crimes. That's roughly 34 more capital crimes than any major party presidential candidate in U.S. history. This man, if elected, may have to defer his prison sentence to serve as President of the United States. Does that make sense to anyone? How can a penniless felon in the Oval Office make America great again?

Where was the good?

I would say that any cognitive dissonance I'm currently experiencing is due to my Republican friends insisting that Trump is the better candidate, even though everything I see with my own eyes tells me he's not fit to run a shoeshine stand. It's not us, the vast majority of rational Americans, who are trapped in an echo chamber. It's you. It's you jumping from a crazy podcast to a discredited website to your favorite news channel that sells Trump trout wind-up toys. It's you who live in that echo chamber.

What did you see on Tuesday night? Did you see the emperor parading around wearing only a long red tie? Or did you see Superman holding the baby Jesus and a duck under his arm as he fled from a horde of hungry Haitians? What did you see that is so inexplicable to the rest of us?

Where was the good?

Brian Snyder/Reuters

I would humbly suggest that the conservative media has created its own echo chamber in which President Trump can say no wrong thing and do no wrong thing. It's an echo chamber whose sound is muffled only because it's built with padded walls. It's a chamber in which reality doesn't have to match, you know. realityInstead, inmates can chatter among themselves about immigrants kidnapping their pets and imaginary gangs taking over apartment complexes and trying to recreate Venezuela, whatever that is. The means.

Look, I don't know what kind of president Kamala Harris will be. I suspect a very good one. But I know exactly what kind of president Donald Trump will be. Terrible. Shit. Vomit and shit. To be generous, I'll use the US News and World Report ranking, which lists Trump as only the third worst president in American history. Other polls call him the truly worst, but I'll put aside the opinions of communist professors because I like to see the good in people. Unfortunately, in the case of Donald Trump, I find less and less of that. Maybe none at all.

To be clear: No one is stealing and eating your pets. But if Donald Trump gets re-elected, you might want to check your wallet. And make sure the person eating your lunch is you.

Michael Ian Black appears on Do I have news for youCNN, Saturday, 9 p.m. ET