dormouse

-Args

Pro and Con both provide arguments for their points, sufficiently substantiating their claims within the confines of the definitions they were using. The problem here is that both debaters were operating on a different understanding of "good," which ought to have been laid out/defined in the framework. This resulted in both debaters operating on different definitions of "good" depending on what issue they were addressing, which is not only sloppy, but also plausibly causes confusion on the reader. Another issue: neither Pro nor Con sufficiently justified why their definition of good was preferable, nor did they sufficiently address the other's use of the word, rather choosing to co-opt both uses, only muddying the assumption off which to address each point because one could feasibly argue that, yes, Donald Trump's insistence regarding, say, the wall, despite his intermittent failure, is a signal of toughness and committedness to his ideals, which is desirable in a leader. Alternatively, it could also be argued that his insistence on building the wall -- and through so doing, alienating a large demographic of people/restricting them from entering the country -- is not good. Most argumentation in this debate reduces to this exact issue: any specific issue can be called good since the debaters were operating on both definitions. I, therefore, am reduced to a state where I ultimately cannot decide a victor based on arguments from the basis of substance alone, and have to resort to how well-sourced they are. So, then, regarding sources:

-Sources

Both debaters used relatively mainstream but also not-fundamentally-unreliable sources. Sources from both debaters were, overall, of the same quality and generally factual, with them serving to substantiate the claims of both; on this basis in addition to the one considered above, I will regard the arguments point as a tie. Besides this, the only issue here was one of Pro's sources being inaccessible, which, though substantiable through other just-as-reliable sources, was not here in this debate. It is on this grounds, I will reward the sources point to Con.

-S&G

Both sides committed their errors with regards to this; however, there were times when I was reading Pro's case when I had to reread a sentence or two, and this occurred several times, much more than when reading Con's. Though neither case was unreadable/unintelligible, I will have to reward S&G to Con as well.

-Conduct

Both debaters equally composed themselves.