Whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump won Tuesday evening’s presidential debate in Philadelphia, the American people were the losers. The elephants in the living room to ordinary Americans were evaded.

Immigrants entering the country illegally are storming across the southwest border in hordes, and some have murdered and raped citizens. Maryland ICE agents have arrested a record-breaking 161 sex offenders this fiscal year. Those entering illegally are stealing jobs from hard-working Americans by accepting substandard wages and working conditions. They are overwhelming our public schools and major cities like New York and Chicago. In Plyler v. Doe (1982), the United States Supreme Court held that children of immigrants who enter illegally are constitutionally entitled to free public education.

This is madness. Neither Harris nor Trump has a credible plan to end illegal immigration with the stroke of a pen, such as the executive order President Barack Obama unsheathed to create 800,000 DACA Dreamers. Building a wall without more legislation to back it up creates an illusion of safety, like the French Maginot Line against a Nazi attack.

I have an apology to make. I accepted at face value and broadcast Trump’s alarmist, counterfactual declarations about immigrants during the debate: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there … The people on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food.’” Shame on me for not being skeptical. Rottweilers are hard to swallow.

Crime is out of control, creating havoc in the lives of Americans who cannot afford to live in gated communities. The number of annual murders exceeds a whopping 20,000, while the corresponding number in the United Kingdom is a tiny 600. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, there are over 133,000 reported rapes annually. A woman cannot leave her home anymore without trembling for her safety.

The American people are demanding an end to crime. They have recently ousted local prosecutors who were not paying attention. Neither Harris nor Trump has exhibited any ability to arrest the crime wave even though the answer is in plain view: Incarcerate the guilty to prevent recidivism.

What about homelessness that is destroying the American Dream and urban serenity? The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reports the number of homeless is approaching a staggering 700,000. They are a public nuisance, interfering with the use and enjoyment of public spaces by regular Americans. Neither Harris nor Trump unveiled granular plans to bring the blight of homelessness to an end.

In 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a warrior’s warrior, warned against a military-industrial complex that would lead the nation into bankruptcy, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

President Eisenhower’s warning went unheeded. Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and running victory laps for winning the Cold War, the military-industrial complex mushroomed into a multitrillion-dollar military-industrial-security enterprise eager for preemptive wars to destroy pre-embryonic threats of aggression against the United States, as we saw with Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Afghanistan. The magnitude of military waste is unfathomable. The apocryphal tale of the $600 hammer is symbolic. The Pentagon itself — notwithstanding its conflict of interest — found in 2015 that $125 billion could be cut from its budget over five years without feeling a pinch.

We spent more than $300 million every day for 20 successive years in Afghanistan, exceeding $2 trillion to restore an even more grisly, misogynistic Taliban. We helped to spark 9/11 by deploying 5,000 troops in Saudi Arabia near Islam’s two holiest places in Mecca and Medina to defend Kuwait and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from invasion by Iraq. Kuwait and KSM are monarchies that scorn American freedoms and profiteer off of American consumers by artificially hiking oil prices. Iraq was a cost-free bulwark against Iranian hegemony in the Middle East until we turned it into an Iranian satellite in 2003.

Our annual national security spending now approximates $1.5 trillion, substantially more than 50 percent of all discretionary expenditures. Pointless military spending has fueled a national debt that has soared past $35 trillion and climbing. A policy of invincible self-defense eschewing racing abroad in search of bee hives to crack open could be maintained with a fraction of our current national security extravagance.

The huge savings if devoted to tax cuts would spur the economy to untold heights. Unemployment would be a thing of the past. Yet there is not a dime’s worth of difference between Trump and Harris on national security. Both support our budget-busting roles as belligerents or co-belligerents in Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Gaza, Iraq and Ukraine on behalf of peoples whose loyalties are not with the United States.

Let’s be serious. The fate of Ukraine is irrelevant to the national security of the United States. How many times does the domino theory need to be discredited?

Finally, the American people do not want a king. They want balanced and measured government among the three branches to foil extremism — especially tough congressional oversight of executive operations. Yet neither Harris nor Trump have uttered a word about downsizing the White House, which has grown like topsy turvy to replace the republic with an empire. Ponder this fact: The president now wields more unchecked power over the American people than King George III did over American colonists that provoked the American Revolution, playing prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner to kill any person who the president decrees could become a national security threat based on unsubstantiated speculation.

We desperately need candidates who put the interests of the American people above their personal ambitions. We need candidates who would rather be right than be president. Did either of the two on the debate stage fit that bill?

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.