The September 10 presidential debate played out as expected, summarizing Sappy and the Blob swarming Grouchy.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the elusive leader, offered pretense, posturing and empty platitudes.

The ABC presenters, as expected, proved unashamedly biased.

And an infuriated former President Donald Trump admitted he was overly sensitive and easily offended.

Harris' instructions were not to explain her policies, and she never defended rejecting the policies she has supported her whole life as a self-identified “woke” and “radical.”

On the contrary, Harris' three-point strategy was simple enough that it mostly worked.

One is to rile up Trump as a coward and a racist, and the other is to smile and call for unity and kindness and stop the name-calling.

Ms. Harris' instructions were to focus on irrelevant, immediate reactionary topics that would provoke and distract from a nervous Trump, so she claimed that Mr. Trump's large rallies were a mistake, stupid and, most of all, boring, adding falsely that exhausted attendees left early.

Missing from her adolescent belittling was former President Barack Obama, who previously made a lewd remark at a party convention about Trump's small genitals.

In Harris’ upside-down projected world, former President Trump caused Biden-Harris’ disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

He was blamed for being the person most responsible for the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 100 million people.

And somehow, Trump even appeased Russian President Vladimir Putin, who then bizarrely attacked neighboring countries under the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations but not under Trump.

Harris mocked Trump's business and claimed he was a failure — a tactic that worked, as a shaken Trump missed Harris's easy rebuttal to her blatant lies.

This resulted in her lies not being easily exposed, and her misplaced defense of the size and wealth of his congregation.

Second, Harris has predictably reinvented himself again.

She completely forgot about her sense of being raised in a privileged, upper-middle-class home, as the child of doctorate-holding parents.

There is no mention that her radical political career was conveniently gifted to her by her insider and lover's fixer, Willie Brown, a married left-wing Bay Area politician more than 30 years her senior.

Instead, Harris became the middle-class kid of a struggling small business owner.

To solidify that deception, Harris will claim that she has always been a border hardliner, supported fracking and was tough on crime. She will argue that she never rallied the public to bail out rioters during the looting, arson and violent protests of 2020.

Harris promised to answer the questions in detail but never did so.

Instead, she recited scripted talking points to avoid explaining her convenient transformation.

Vice President Harris remained silent about her apparent inability to implement policies for “progress” over the past three years or the next five months.

Third, everything else about the debate was outsourced to ABC's “hosts” David Muir and Lindsay Davis.

Both sides seemed to calculate that if it was a matter of blatantly helping Harris or appearing intellectually and professionally honest, it was a no-brainer partisan choice.

So the two of them constantly fact-checked Trump but never fact-checked Harris, trying to skew the tempo of the debate.

Without pause or correction, Harris repeated old, discredited lies about Charlottesville, the “bloodbath,” Plan 2025 and rumors that Trump supports a federal ban on abortion.

As Trump frequently strayed from topic, the moderator grimaced and directed him to answer questions that Ms Harris did not answer and was never pressed to do so.

Debate rules should have prohibited interruptions due to a hot microphone, but Harris made an exception.

The worst thing about the questions was that they were biased.

Muir and Davis stuck to the incitement of Jan. 6. They ignored Harris' lengthy speech on national television in which she said the 2020 protests, which proved violent, would not stop or cease, and that as a “movement” they would continue beyond Election Day.

When Harris lied about police being killed by protesters on January 6th, a day that was obviously worse than September 11th (when 3,000 Americans were killed), the two fact-checkers remained silent.

Will this debate change the race?

Probably not.

Ms. Harris acknowledged that she had been more tactful, but over the past 90 days, her customary smiling nods have come across as an encouragement to her shallowness, stonewalling and evasion.

Trump has once again shown himself to be an impulsive, hot-headed and easily angered man, but that's what the public already knew over the past nine years.

Half of the public has always felt that Trump's uncontrollable anger is directed at hypocritical politicians and the syncretic media, and the debate likely confirmed this.

The sentimental Harris won the visuals, the dour Trump presumably won the issues.

But the real losers were ABC and its two partisan presenters, Muir and Davis.

Both easily surpassed CNN's Candy Crowley's infamous partisan interruption at the 2012 Mitt Romney-Obama debate.

Just as we remember nothing about the spectacle except that Crowley ended his career by stepping in to support Obama, Muir and Davis also confirmed their shameless bigotry.

They tried to distort the debate, tarnished the media, and served as a reminder of why such media “moderators” should never be allowed near a presidential debate.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of World War II: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, published by Basic Books. He can be contacted at authorvdh@gmail.com.

The views and opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.