On what earth do people actually think he had a "good 40 minutes"
How sway, how!?
40 minutes is generous, but he was doing really well up until Russia. "Really well" being a relative descriptor for Donald Trump, of course.
Trump's campaign doesn't care about truth, accuracy, or correctness. It's running the biggest deficit a Republican candidate has had in.. at least a generation, because he's alienated a huge part of the Republican party.
You could put a scarecrow up for either party's candidate and easily come within a 53-47 margin. He's outside of it. The goal tonight was to bring back all those lost votes, and the fact that he didn't have a meltdown and said a lot of things, especially on immigration, that will play exceedingly well to all parts of the Republican party means that he was probably net positive to that point.
Fortunately, he took those gains and dumped them in the garbage before things wrapped up.