M. Gessen, an Opinion columnist, watched Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate with a sense of dread. In their mind, the question was not who would win the debate but, rather: How much did we lose? In this audio essay, Gessen argues that when we put Trump and his acolytes on the same platform as regular politicians and treat them equally, “that normalization degrades our political life and degrades our understanding of politics.”

Below is a lightly edited transcript of the above audio piece:

M. Gessen: I went into Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate with a sense of dread because I thought that the last debate was kind of a disaster.

And by disaster I don’t mean that Kamala Harris didn’t hold her own against Donald Trump, or that Donald Trump scored any points in the debate, but that the fact of the debate itself and the format of the debate, which placed these two candidates on a sort of level footing, treated them both as normal politicians and treated the things they said as normal political statements.

And so, while there were some, I would say, halfhearted attempts at fact-checking Donald Trump, basically, it turned into a “he said, she said,” where on the one side you had a lie and on the other side you had facts.

So, for example, the way that the moderators of the presidential debate handled the Springfield, Ohio, slander ——

snip

Gessen: When you place lies and facts on an even footing, it basically creates a political sphere in which there’s no fact-based reality. That’s a pre-totalitarian condition. You can’t have politics if you don’t have a shared reality and if you don’t place an absolute value on the truth. I think that normalization degrades our political life and degrades our understanding of politics.