Final showdown
In third presidential debate, Trump dragged the nation into unfamiliar political territory.
We don’t know how you say “big league” in Farsi, but the people of Iran were saying it Wednesday night. The Persian theocracy’s censors allowed state-run television to air the third U.S. presidential debate. The network also aired the second showdown between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton two weeks ago — the first full coverage of a U.S. presidential debate in Iran, according to the Washington Post.
There was a time, not too long ago, when this news would be celebrated as a sign of growing political freedom in the notoriously repressive state. What a better beacon of liberty than democracy in action on the TV screen?
But this year, we’d almost prefer that Iranian censors stick with Ayatollah Knows Best.
Tehran, Moscow and plenty of other unfriendly governments are using coverage of our presidential election as anti-American propaganda.
Iranian television pundits discussed at length Trump’s reaction to his hot-mic recording from 2005 in which he bragged to Billy Bush about grabbing women without their consent. Iranian media has also extensively covered Trump’s claims that the U.S. election is “rigged.” It even used the opportunity to quote a writer who argued that our elections have been manipulated for “nearly 200 years.”
From his preemptive claims of a fraudulent election to bizarre speeches about “international banks,” Trump has dragged the final weeks of our presidential campaign into territory unfamiliar in the American political system. To say that Trump deals in conspiracy theories is an insult to the honest, hardworking Americans who think that aliens crash-landed in Roswell.
But it got worse Wednesday night in Las Vegas.
After being asked by moderator Chris Wallace, Trump refused to say whether he would accept the result of the presidential election.
“I will look at it at the time,” he said.
The words alone work to undermine our republic.
Bret Stephens, a Pulitzer Prizewinning foreign-affairs columnist for the Wall Street Journal, said that Trump’s answer was “the most disgraceful statement by a presidential candidate in 160 years.”
Since the end of Reconstruction, the United States has never had to question whether federal elections would end with a peaceful transition of power. Now this one man, apparently putting his ego ahead of the good of the nation, brings all that into question before a worldwide audience.
After this year’s unprecedented campaign, it was surprising to see Wallace open the debate like this was any other election, asking questions about the Supreme Court, gun ownership and abortion. For a few minutes, you could pretend that it was just politics as usual — for better or worse.
However, those moments did give Clinton the opportunity to raise the issue of women’s rights — specifically calling out China and Bulgaria. We hope it was something that the people of Iran heard loud and clear. We bet the censors weren’t happy about that one.