It was at a dinner in Barcelona, less than a year after the 2016 elections.

      We were eating with an old colleague of my wife’s, relocated to southwestern France, and his twenty-something cousin. The young cousin didn’t have a university degree, but she spoke Catalan, Spanish, English, French and had thought deeply about politics.

      She asked us about Trump.

      She explained that there were equally reactionary government leaders throughout Europe. There were xenophobes and racists and pseudo-fascists with horrible ideas, people like France’s Marine Le Pen and Britain’s Nigel Farage.

      They were awful, she acknowledged, but they were also smart as hell. They were highly educated. They knew their stuff.

      How, she asked us, could Americans have elected someone so obviously, so completely … stupid? Wasn’t it apparent to everybody that Trump—aside from his attitudes and his cruelty and his petulance and the whole history of failure and grifting—regularly had no idea what he was talking about? How could Americans have elected, she asked again, someone obviously so uneducated about governance, about politics, about the issues, someone so stupid as Trump?

      It was a question I kept asking myself all the way through Tuesday night’s debate.

      As Trump fumbled and blustered and garbled his way through the 90 minutes, wasn’t it obvious to every single person who watched that he frequently had no idea what he was talking about? That he couldn’t communicate a clear thought or idea?

      Wasn’t it clear that he covered up his total ignorance with lies and petulance? Wasn’t it overwhelmingly evident that he was so completely out of his depth?

      And wasn’t it blindingly clear that this was a person who should have never been president and who should never be president?

      Wasn’t all that clear to the seven or 12 or 23 undecided voters left in America? Didn’t they see what all of us have been seeing for years now?

      We can only hope so.