Jake Tapper, a host at CNN, said the first presidential debate was a “hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck” on air following the event.

I have to say, I agree with him.

I’m an avid follower of politics, so going into the debate I was expecting some heated exchange between President Donald Trump and democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, but I was also expecting at least some form of debate.

That, however, is not what happened.

Instead of a friendly exchange of ideas, the debate pretty much consisted of Trump and Biden talking over each other the whole time while a moderator, at times, had no control over what was going on.

The candidates discussed a variety of issues, from the Supreme Court to race issues in the United States. These topics were touched on, but were largely overshadowed by the amount of interruptions made by candidates.

After looking at the debate transcript, the Washington Post concluded there was actually one interruption per minute during the debate. The debate lasted 90 minutes.

The lack of structure, professionalism and overall content in this debate made it pretty painful to watch. A couple times I caught myself wanting to just change the channel.

I give Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who moderated the debate, props for trying to keep a lid on things, but unfortunately he seemed to be powerless over it.

There was very little talk about the policies each candidate supported and even when the candidates discussed them, both presented pretty weak arguments. I’m not even sure you could classify it as a debate.

I think the purpose of presidential debates is for people to get to know the candidates and where they stand on various issues. I can’t speak for every other viewer, but I didn’t think this purpose was fulfilled. 

To me, the only thing I think this debate did was turn viewers off from ever watching a presidential debate again. This is very sad, because most of the time presidential debates can be very informative and helpful to the public.

There are differing opinions about which candidate can declare victory in the first debate of this election cycle. I don’t think it is possible for anybody to declare victory in a debate where there was basically no debating going on.

It is for this reason that I don’t think anybody won the debate — not Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, not even the American people.

Fanetti can be reached at [email protected].