Face it.

While it may not matter in the long run, Donald Trump’s debate performance Tuesday night left a lot to be desired.

It is still Trump’s election to lose, however.  All he has to do to blow it is to continue to allow Kamala Harris to come across as a semi-serious candidate for president, which he did.

He would have been better off if he didn’t show up. But when he did show up, he was mugged.

While Harris did not clean Trump’s clock, she did give it a good dusting.

Granted, Harris had help from a pair of ABC muggers posing as moderators — foppish David Muir and Linsey Davis — who were in Harris’s pocket. But Trump knew that going into the debate, just as he knows that ABC is in the tank of the Democrat Party.

But Trump so easily knocked hapless President Joe Biden out of the race for president in their previous debate that he thought he could do the same to Harris. And Harris, given her leftist extremism, word salad performances, her cackling, her lack of seriousness, and her flip-flops on the issues, looked like a pushover.

He was wrong.

While Trump was Trump, Harris was remarkably choreographed, prepared and confident, beginning with the moment she walked into Trump’s space on the debate stage to shake hands.

Given that she had spent weeks dodging and running from the press like a fugitive, that pre-planned move signaled a well rehearsed shift in her political demeaner.

While Trump had been out campaigning, holding rallies and giving interviews, Harris was well rested after being holed up with campaign aides for days preparing for the debate and plotting ways to get under Trump’s skin to throw him off balance.

Which she did, even though Trump’ and his advisors knew such an attack was coming.

The trick was to get Trump off script — if he had one to begin with — and have him meander. An example, among others, was when in response to a question about illegal immigration she goaded Trump about his rallies.

She never answered a question and the mugger/moderators, like co-conspirators, let her get away with it.

She said, “During his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”

Of course, that, like much else Harris said, was false. It is well known and established that Trump holds the most spectacular and successful rallies of any presidential candidate in modern history. He was even shot at and wounded at one of them,

But Harris’s trap set him off, and in his response, he ended up talking about illegal immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs.

This led to a side debate with Muir who said the city manager denied it was happening.

Trump: “The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food. So maybe he said that and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager.”

Muir: “I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking it from the city manager.”

Trump: “But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.”

Muir: “Again, the Springfield city manager says there is no evidence of that.”

Trump: We’ll find out.”

Muir: “Vice President Harris, I’ll let you respond to the rest of what you hard.”

Harris: “Talk about extreme. Um.”

Trump was at his best, however, when it came to his uninterrupted closing remarks following Harris’ in which Trump finally appeared to nail Harris.

Trump said, “She just started by saying she is going to do this, she’s going to do that, she’s going to do all these wonderful things. Why hasn’t she done it? She’s been there for three and a half years. They’ve had three and a half years to fix the border. They’ve had three and half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why hasn’t she done it?”

Of all the negative things Biden and Harris have done to the country, Trump said, “the toughest of all is allowing millions of people to come into our country, many of them are criminals, and they’re destroying our country. The worst president and the worst vice president in the history of our country.”

David Muir might have objected, but they ran out of time.

Maybe Trump should challenge Muir to a second debate.

Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter. Email him at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com