Candidate Trump confirms everybody’s worst fears

It was a two-track debate. At times, it was the setting for a detailed argument over serious issues in which Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump offered voters a relatively straightforward clash of progressive and conservative perspectives.

But this is 2016, and eventually the third and final debate Wednesday reached the fundamental issue of the campaign: whether Trump is fit to be president. Despite her substantial lead in the polls, Clinton did not hang back. She pressed Trump sharply on the entire catalogue of his shortcomings, accusing him of being a “puppet” of Vladimir Putin and denouncing his treatment of women, his mocking a disabled reporter and his habit of saying that any contest he loses is “rigged” against him.

And she signaled one of the closing themes of her campaign when she declared that Trump had shown “a pattern of divisiveness, of a very dark and ... dangerous vision for our country.”

Trump drew from his own arsenal of favored attacks, from the work of the Clinton Foundation to her use of a private email server and her role in Obama’s foreign policy. “She’s been proven to be a liar,” Trump said.

Had the exchanges come down to an ideological fight, it might have constituted a kind of win for Trump. But Trump once again left behind moments that will only reinforce the doubts many voters already have about him. Repeatedly, he refused to disown Putin, and he once again praised him. “She doesn’t like Putin because Putin has outsmarted her at every step of the way,” he said.

He did himself no good when he accused the nine women who have said he groped and accosted them of being liars.

From the start, Chris Wallace, the moderator in Las Vegas, tried to press Clinton and Trump on specific issues — what sort of justices they would nominate, how they viewed the Constitution, where they stood on abortion rights and gun control. In each case, they stressed themes congenial to their core constituencies.

Clinton strongly endorsed Roe v. Wade, sharply attacked the Citizens United decision that undercut campaign finance limits and stressed that she wanted justices who would stand with ordinary citizens against the wealthy and powerful.

Trump began with his commitment to the Second Amendment and gun rights and kept coming back to the issue. Although Wallace pressed him repeatedly, Trump refused to say if he wanted Roe overturned, though he predicted that because his Supreme Court appointees would be “pro-life,” Roe would fall. Although Trump no doubt pleased opponents of abortion, Clinton showed passion in the exchange, while Trump seemed to be answering by rote.

Yet Trump suffered from what he always suffers from: an inability to control his anger or stop himself from interrupting.

The most important moment of the evening was Trump’s refusal to say that if he lost, he would accept the outcome: “I will look at it at the time,” he said. “I will keep you in suspense.”

Never has a candidate for president challenged the legitimacy of the entire electoral enterprise in which he was engaged. Clinton’s core claim is that Trump is a dangerous man who lacks respect for American democracy. On this central issue, Trump chose to prove Clinton right.