the heart of the problem. Tuesday night’s debate featured a sitting president and a former vice president who did not have a disagreement of opinion so much as two completely different sets of facts. Biden was literally working from a set of prepared talking points, circling back to them even when they were irrelevant to the question at hand, and simply dismissing everything Trump said as a lie.

Trump did not behave the way Americans have been taught a sitting president should. Instead, he acted like a journalist, peppering Biden with tough questions he never gets from the press. And how could he, when the Democrat has spent the past week calling a “lid” on the press first thing in the morning? When Biden does talk to the press, they ask him what he thinks of Trump’s (supposedly rotten) soul.

It is precisely because the press has been totally derelict in its duty that Biden can assert Trump is “Putin’s puppy” (thanks, Russiagate!) or the above-mentioned Charlottesville lie, or treat the debunked stories about “Russian bounties” and Trump’s alleged disdain for US troops as proven facts, while declaring any criticism of his record or his family’s business dealings as “discredited.” The mainstream media saying so doesn’t make it so.

The proliferation of hyper-partisan “fact-checkers” who routinely label Trump’s hyperbole as “lies” but bend over backwards to cover for the whoppers coming from his critics only make the situation worse. Nearly the entire mainstream media industry had endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. Millions of Americans voted for Trump to send them a message, but instead of soul-searching they just doubled down.