The truth needed a standard-bearer in Atlanta, and President Biden wasn’t up to the job.

Follow this authorDana Milbank's opinions

Not a question was asked without Trump turning it into a vehicle for deceit. Of Biden, Trump fabricated:

“He gets paid by China. He’s a Manchurian Candidate.”

“He wants to raise everybody’s taxes by four times.”

“He allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails, and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country.”

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“He has killed so many people at our border."

“He’s got the largest deficit in the history of our country.”

Trump lied about former House speaker Nancy Pelosi: “She said, ‘I take full responsibility for Jan. 6.’”

He lied about Democrats, saying they “will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth.”

He lied about his former chief of staff’s statement that he called fallen soldiers “suckers and losers.” Trump said Biden “made up” that story, too.

He lied about illegal immigrants receiving Social Security and being housed in “luxury hotels.”

And he lied extravagantly about his own record. The economy was “perfect” when he left office, he’s the one who reduced insulin prices, he deserves credit for “getting us out of that covid mess,” the government was “ready to start paying down debt” during his presidency, he had “the best environmental numbers ever” and there was “no terror at all during my administration.”

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These were all obvious howlers — yet none of it was corrected by the moderators and little by the struggling president. Capping the performance, Trump had the chutzpah somewhere in this litany of lies to say of his opponent: “I’ve never seen anybody lie like this guy.”

The few things the former president said that weren’t outright lies were arguably even worse. Trump absolved himself of any responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack on Congress, claiming “we were respected all over the world” on that day. He wouldn’t commit to accepting the election results this time, either. He called Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky a “salesman” and said “we shouldn’t be spending” money to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia.

The statements were so outrageous, the zany claims so easily refuted, that Biden should have made quick work of Trump. Instead, he looked stunned, he spoke in a faltering and raspy voice (his campaign explained belatedly that he had a cold), and he had difficulty forming coherent answers. He spoke, for example, about “what I’ve been able to do with the, uh, with the covid. Excuse me, with, um, dealing with everything we have to do with, uh — look,........

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