It has been said that when coaching Sarah Palin for the VP debate in 2008, her handlers recognized that A) they would never be able to bring her up to speed on all the issues she would be expected to know about in time for the debate, and B) Palin was actually pretty good at memorizing scripts.

So they basically wrote out a handful of policy points they wanted her to make, and told her that no matter what question she was asked, she was to respond with one of them.

Trump has just delivered a more blatant version of this in his debate performances.

It’s easy to see where this is going. It won’t be long before debates are just places where candidates can speak about anything they wish in 2-minute sections. Which just means that their stump speech will be be divvied up into 2-minute bites, like a chicken is converted into nuggets.

And at this point, the American public needs to ask — why bother?