I closed my eye last night and imagined Aristotle, the lover of Greek Tragedy,  sitting alongside me at the dining room table last night shaking his head,  watching the debate with me on my iPhone 11, sharing my bowl of homemade popcorn, and nodding, shaking his head. “So, this is what democracy came to?” He patted me on the back, spitting corn kernels over his robes, and saying just a few words softly and over and over again: “catharsis! Didn’t I tell you?”

He did tell us, or try to.

For me, and for many other people, Tuesday’s last night’s disgrace of a debate was a catharsis, a release.

It was a low point for our country, a perversion of democracy, a humiliation before the world. It was no debate at all.

The world us laughing at us.

We get it. We know what we need to know.

Trump’s followers are beyond truth and reality; we can release the notion that they will ever change, or that he is really capable of destroying our country, or that he has any chance now of winning re-election.

As he has been doing all year, he blew his final good chance for redemption.

Any politician or citizen who liked that debate or thought anyone won such a debacle it is lost, dishonest, or beyond reach or reason. We can let go of the idea of argument or persuasion.

If there weren’t winners, there were losers. One was the hapless moderator, Chris Wallace, who let the debate surge out of control. I’m not sure what he could have possibly done in the face of the runaway train that was Trump, but it happened on his watch, he is responsible.

The biggest loser was the President, mostly because he has so much to lose. It wasn’t that Joe Biden outdebated him. He did it to himself. His primary task was to convince wary women, blacks, moderates, and independents that he was a better choice for them than Joseph Biden, Jr.

His imitation of a bully junior high school child having a high sugar episode was not likely to win a single moderate, suburban woman or African-American voter off the fence. Amazingly, any rational human would want this person to lead the country after that debate, but I accept that some things are simply beyond me.

And I’m not sure how he wins over African-Americans by refusing to condemn a notorious white nationalist and extremist group.

Biden was hardly thrilling to watch; he seemed steady and earnest but confused and overwhelmed.  Trump takes up all the oxygen in the air in any room he’s in.

Biden couldn’t really keep up with his crazed opponent.  He seemed decent and honest.

He did some interrupting himself; he was just quieter about it. And I was sad to see him climb down to Trump’s basement and start name-calling.

The big thing to do would have been to not engage in adolescent name-calling, like calling the United States president a “clown” and a “liar.” Trump is a liar, and sometimes a clown, but it just seems small.

Biden is supposed to be the adult in the room,  the mature and grounded one. Trump has a gift for pulling people down to him, but that act is losing its originality.

And it might just be me, but he looks like Hell, he’s gained a lot of weight, seems vicious and bullying, lies obsessively and obviously, and is not someone you’d want to listen to for four more years.

Sometimes, politics is as simple as that.

One seer online said the debate was a powerful argument for women to run for President. The sight of three older men in their seventies, shouting at each other for 90 minutes, was dispiriting as well as nauseating.

Our country really is in trouble. The old white men need to get out their lawn chairs and try the beach.

Still, what made it a victory for Biden was that he put aside the notion that he was senile, on drugs, or unable to argue.

That was enough for him to win the night. Trump could not have made himself more obnoxious, unhinged, or unlikeable. He was cruel and crude even by his own standards.

His face was a sweaty mask of rage and hatred; he was actually frightening at times, not inspiring, uplifting, or honest.

Trump never said a coherent word about his plans and policies for a second term. He continuously demeaned his Supreme Court Justice nominee by suggesting she would make sure he won if the race was contested and ended up in court.

It’s a monument to his insensitivity and discomfort around strong women that he would think that would not bother so accomplished and independent a woman.

I can’t imagine a better way for her to win respect and admiration than to demonstrate, as Justices Gorsuch and Roberts have this year, that she is not a stooge, she can think for herself.

As the Greeks foresaw, the real demagogues always destroy themselves; the people who hate them never get the chance.

We don’t need to imagine Donald Trump’s world crumbling around him. We saw it last night, in his eyes, through his words. This man on stage was frightened and in a frantic rage; he was hateful, rude, and dishonest, all at the same time.

It seemed he gave up on arguing his positions; he went instead with the idea he could club  Biden to death with insults and lies. Biden bit more than once Trump never even gave him the chance to stumble; he couldn’t shut up long enough.

For many people, Donald Trump was an unacknowledged trauma, not just a political leader to fear and hate.

Catharsis is not just a theatrical term; it is a cornerstone theory of psychoanalysis and Greek Tragedy. It was all over that eerily empty stage:

Catharsis is a psychoanalytic theory concept wherein the emotions associated with traumatic events finally come to the surface. The word has its origin in a Greek term for cleansing or purging (/keTHarse/).

Catharsis is associated with the elimination of negative emotions, affect, or behaviors associated with unacknowledged trauma.

To understand the debate, you have to leave politics behind and understand the tragedy and ego. The play Romeo and Juliet is an example of both tragedy and catharsis.

In the end, the two young lovers end up dead because they made the mistake of following their immature and impulsive passions instead of being rational and patient.

In ancient Greek theater, the protagonist, usually a person of great importance and power, falls to disaster through the combination of personal failing and circumstances he or she cannot comprehend for varying reasons.

The Greek Tragedy was one form of theater.

It dealt with the large themes of love, loss, pride, the abuse of power, and the always fraught relationship between powerful men and the Gods.

In Greek drama, the Gods love to toy with powerful men, giving them great powers, but not the moral strength or courage to use them well.

Typically, the main protagonist commits blunders and crimes without realizing how foolish and arrogant he has been. Then, as he and his country and the people around him slowly and reluctantly realize his errors, the world crumbles around him.

Aristotle, a lover creator of theater, argued that tragedy cleansed the heart through terror and anger, purging us of our petty concerns and worries by making us aware that there can be learning, and rebirth and nobility in suffering.

There are always lessons in tragedy, he believed. That is the nobility in suffering.

Catharsis is a release of intense and painful emotion. The truth is right in front of us. We are free to learn, give rebirth to ourselves and our world, and make use of our suffering to cleanse ourselves and our world.

The Gods give us tyrants, but they also gave us the chance to see our flaws and challenge us to do better.

Aristotle nailed it all, our big debate, point by point. I do wish he could have come over with some apple cider and watched the debate with me. Maria listened while arranging some fabric on the dining room table. She just shook her head.

There it all was. The arrogant, sometimes even frightening,  protagonist. The blindly loyal followers. The world crumbling slowly around him.

The chorus of scolds and finger-waggers. The satyrs who appeared between the tragedy’s acts and made fun of the Emperor and his followers.

We have our own satyrs – the pundits, the aides, the boot lickers, even the Senators (they had them too) who were half-human, half-goat, and wore large phalluses for comic effect.

They were the loudest supporters of the protagonist and the first to run away when he stumbled.

There was much comfort to take for the wear and frightened people who ache for this nightmare to be over. In political and moral terms, this was Donald Trump’s last and best opportunity to show a huge audience that he merited re-election.

Today, the polling site FiveThirtyEight published its daily simulation of the election 40,000 times to see who wins in polling most often. Their sample of 100 outcomes gives a good idea of the range of scenarios their models think possible. The chances of Trump winning says their simulation is 21 in 100. Biden’s chances are now 78 out of 100, and this is before any post-debate polling.

FiveThirtyEight is widely considered the best polling site in the country.

More than a million Americans have already voted, and the election is about one month away.  Tuesday’s debacle raises the question of whether or not debates are outdated or necessary in the modern world. After tonight, I’d say no.

But the good news for people worried about Trump getting re-elected is that he just blew the best shot he had at turning things around. The polls have showed him losing to Biden all year; he is the most disliked President in the history of polling to seek re-election.

Tuesday night was the end of  Trump and Trumpism. He will be chased out of Washington and into an uncertain and forbidding world.

Donald Trump is a tragic figure in many ways. Last night the President revealed himself to be both frightened and desperate. His flaws and failures were never more apparent or nakedly revealed.

His ranting about the elections was frightening and the very obvious stand of a man who knows he is about to lose. We’ve already seen this movie a dozen times.

Trump will lose the election, and by a substantial margin. He will claim the election was rigged and hope that “my judges,” as he calls them, will save them if the election is at all close.

This will fail. Stacking the Supreme Court with conservatives is one thing: stealing an election on behalf of a historically unpopular and unhealthy president is quite another.

That would spark another American Revolution; the government would have no legitimacy; he would be ruling like any other Banana Republic strongman. Most of the country would not put up with it.

I don’t come close to believing this fiercely independent new court justice would want any part in the destruction of our democracy, nor would most of her fellow justices.

I can’t buy into the hysteria involving the Supreme Court either.

Whatever happens to Roe V. Wade, abortion will never be completely outlawed in America. Justice Ginsburg said several times the issue should really be decided in state legislatures, not in the Supreme Court.

President Trump has a habit of thinking everyone he appoints will become his flunky. That has not turned out to be true.

Like gay rights, women’s freedom of choice is a historical inevitability, just as gay rights were, just like RBG wrote, one step at a time. Stay strong. Stay calm.

The dismantling of Obama Care without a replacement would be a catastrophe for Americans and the people who eliminated it without a remarkably efficient replacement.

“It happens every time,” Aristotle told me in my dream last night. “It goes to their heads. They think they are Gods. The Gods don’t like it.”

There is a lot to feel badly about in Tuesday night’s debate. There is a lot to feel good about. Our era of cleansing, learning, and nobility is getting underway.