Seriously? Did we just watch that? I’m sitting here after the debate, editing this article, and I’m baffled. There was no point to that. Constant interrupting, shouting about who knows what, disagreement on basic facts, no control by Chris Wallace, Trump refusing to denounce white supremacists, and Biden refusing to say that he would not court-pack.

Welcome to 2020, where we hard-pressed to find functioning adults running for president.

Let’s play a game. The 4 quotes below are from either Trump or Biden, pre-debate. Take a guess on who said these quotes:

“Poor kids are just as bright as white kids.”

“To be blunt, people would vote for me. They just would. Why? Maybe because I’m so good looking.”

“When you see the other side chopping off heads, waterboarding doesn’t sound very severe.”

“In [my state], the largest growth of population is Indian-Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.” 

Biden said the first and last one. Trump said the middle two. These have been said on the campaign trail for election to the highest office in the land. I’m flat out amazed that these are the two people that the DNC and RNC want us to vote for. But are you surprised? 

The sad fact is that American politics has become so toxic that we are left with a 78-year-old man with sexual assault allegations and a 74-year-old man with sexual assault allegations. 

Joe Biden has been in politics since 1972 and voted for or wrote the laws that created a good chunk of the problems in our country today. 

He wrote and advocated for the 1994 Crime Bill that targeted minorities and created the largest prison population in the world. The bill has decimated the Black community by removing key family members from households in black and other minority communities. Now he wants you to believe he’s a fighter for criminal justice reform. 

He was the Vice-President for the signing of ObamaCare, which jacked up health insurance costs by forcing young people who didn’t need health insurance to sign up for it. He still supports it. Health care costs have significantly gone up because of the artificial demand created by this policy. Furthermore, under ObamaCare, if you did not want to subscribe to the government health insurance, the government would fine you for it. You would have to pay extra taxes for not buying ObamaCare. Somehow this is legal. Additionally, more people are now uninsured because of ObamaCare, going against what it was trying to advocate for.

Biden is advocating for solutions for problems that he directly created. See the problem? 

He also opposed school busing for minority communities and voted for a measure aimed at cutting funding for schools that accepted homosexuality in the 1970s. Not good news for progressives. 

I have one question to those supporting Biden: How is he any different from Hillary Clinton? He offers nothing new to the national stage that has not been tried or been seen by the public. Hillary Clinton campaigned on more Obama-era policy, and lost. Biden is running on returning to Obama-era policy, and I don’t see it working with independents. 

Joe Biden has been in national politics for almost 50 years. He looked weak in the Democratic debates, consistently gaffing and getting schooled by younger, more energetic candidates. Kamala Harris attacked Biden on busing and calling his 1970’s political racist. That’s the VP pick?

Biden fits the mold of exactly what America didn’t want in 2016. America got tired of the establishment and wanted someone different. That’s how Donald Trump is here, whether his image as an outsider is true or not. Biden is the establishment. He offers nothing new in terms of policy and is campaigning on not being Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton was a similar candidate. 

But don’t think that this article is a hatchet job on only one side of the ballot. 

Donald Trump has almost become a cult figure for too many on the right. It does not matter what this man says or does, his supporters are 100% behind it. He said he could go and shoot someone in downtown New York and people would still vote for him. The scary thing is that he’s right. 

Trump has been in office for three years, and you still never know what’s really going on. He’s been through countless staff, and those who leave that leave often speak out against him. His time in office has been marked by constant contradictions, denigrating the American media the same way Hitler and Stalin atacked their news outlets, bragging about dodging taxes, and proving he’s unable to say he’s wrong about anything. 

The issue with Trump is that he became what he swore to destroy. Trump became the swamp. He inserted those he liked into positions they were not qualified for, most notably his daughter and son-in-law as senior advisors. 

But perhaps most importantly, Donald Trump is not a conservative. He’s been married three times, has had affairs with pornography film stars, and also runs a list of sexual assault claims against him. All of this goes against what his Christian base usually wants, yet they seem to make an exception for him. 

Trump has threatened to ban apps he doesn’t like, has racked up multi-trillion-dollar deficits, bypassed Congress on numerous occasions, and shifted to populism that is austerely nationalistic.  The impeachment debacle added another ugly chapter to his presidency.

If any other Republican candidate as little as seven years ago acted the way Trump has acted, they would have kicked out of the party. 

America has been decimated by the “lesser evil” mentality in national politics. The bright figures of the 20th century were ones who pushed to move all of America forward. They brought America to unprecedented heights of power, but now that luster seems to be gone. America has lost its way.  We have worse and more expensive education and crumbling infrastructure.  We’ve been going backward on civil rights issues, and now we actively pursue policies that aim to take away rights from citizens. 

The reason for all of this is simple: we trusted our government too much and let our two parties destroy the values of America from within. That is why we have Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the election next month. They want you to believe that those are the only two options. Outsider candidates like Ron Paul and Andrew Yang and a host of others were shut out of the discussion by the RNC and DNC long ago.  In fact, they probably didn’t have a chance to begin with. This, in turn, has made the party platforms much smaller and has disabled disagreement from within.

That is how we are here today — not because of the other side, but because of voters letting the DNC and RNC get away with it all.