Clinton and Trump face off in the third presidential debate

“I will tell you at the time,” he said. “I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?”

This is how Donald Trump answered a question at the third debate about whether the election would be rigged and if he’d accept the outcome if he lost.

For months now, pro-life leaders have been lining up behind the least likely pro-life hero our country has ever seen. Donald Trump may not have been their first choice. But as we draw near to the end of this long and sordid campaign, they are standing behind and beside the Republican nominee for president, explaining away his misogyny and racism for the promise of Supreme Court justices.

But the truth is there has never been a pro-life case for voting for Donald Trump. And his comments on abortion at the final debate last week demonstrated that Trump doesn’t care much about pro-life issues — and that he doesn’t know much about them, either.

At the final presidential debate, Donald Trump said doctors do abortions in the “ninth month” of pregnancy, that they “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month, on the final day. And that’s not acceptable.”

I’m a doctor who was trained to do late-term abortions. I did them for five years in residency and for 10 years in practice and I have no idea what Trump is talking about. I have even practiced in states with no gestational age limit for abortions. So while I no longer perform abortions, I know much more about this subject than Donald Trump or any of his advisers can ever hope to know.

Trump’s falsehoods about abortion at Wednesday night’s debate were no less wrong and dangerous than many of his other lies.

It’s not only false to suggest, as Trump did, that Hillary Clinton supports abortions “in the ninth month” of pregnancy — those kinds of abortions don’t even exist, as Vox’s Sarah Kliff explained. If a woman wants an abortion after a fetus is viable, no doctor will give her one unless there is something seriously wrong with either the fetus or her own health. And if a pregnancy has to be ended early in the ninth month, it will be an induced labor, not an abortion.

During the third and final presidential debate, Donald Trump flubbed a question about the Syrian city of Aleppo so badly that an apt metaphor for what viewers had just witnessed began to take shape on Twitter:

One tweet in particular, from St. Louis city alderman and popular Twitter commentator Antonio French, quickly went viral and ultimately spawned a hashtag: #TrumpBookReport. Before long, the hashtag — a rare example of a genuinely funny use of the form — had achieved “worldwide trending topic” status, which it retained for the rest of of debate night and much of the next morning.

America has an astonishingly narrow view of “health” — and that was reflected in the rhetoric from this season’s presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

When the topic of health was broached, which was rare, the focus was mostly on health care — access to doctors, hospitals, and medicines to treat people when they’re sick. There was very little discussion of public health, the goods and regulations that give us clean air and water, safe roads, and mosquito control. Unlike health care providers, public health officials work on preventing illness and injury. They devise plans to prepare for those increasingly frequent pandemic threats, like Ebola and Zika, and regulate tobacco use to give us smoke-free environments.

Final round: The third and last presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is over.

The two candidates faced off Wednesday, October 19, at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas for 90 minutes, no commercial breaks, in a debate moderated by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. The debate covered debt and entitlements, immigration, the economy, the Supreme Court, foreign hot spots, and “fitness to be president.”

“I will keep you in suspense.”

There were several instances during the third and final presidential debate where Donald Trump said something obtuse, but that jaw-droppingly irresponsible moment — when Trump suggested he might not concede the election in the event that Hillary Clinton wins — is the moment we’ll be talking about for years to come.

At Wednesday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump asserted that nobody has any idea who is behind the email hacks of the Democratic National Committee and top Clinton aide John Podesta — despite the US intelligence community having officially blamed Russia.

“She has no idea whether it’s Russia, China, or anybody else,” Trump said. “Our country has no idea.”

Something about Donald Trump’s debate performances against Hillary Clinton has been bothering me.

At various points throughout the three debates, he’s turned to her and said, in effect, “Why didn’t you solve every problem in the US while you were first lady/senator/secretary of state?” In particular, he seems baffled by the thought that she would let someone like him get away with taking such massive tax write-offs.

Last night, a lot of Americans tuning in to the final presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton probably ended up with a question: Who the hell is Heller?

The name came up in the course of the debate’s section about the Supreme Court and the Second Amendment. Specifically, the name was a reference to a 2008 decision by the Court, District of Columbia v. Heller, that effectively expanded and validated Americans’ right to privately own a firearm for self-defense.

There was only one moment that really mattered during the final presidential debate: Donald Trump said that he might not accept the results of the November election.

It wasn’t Trump’s first assault on democracy, or on the legitimacy of his opponent. Trump has often been a little too comfortable with the idea of using violence to get his way, and a little too willing to egg on his followers’ worst instincts.

Calling Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” may have been the best thing Donald Trump has ever done for her campaign.

Trump has spent most of the election reminding us just how difficult it can be for a woman to run for president in a world still steeped in patriarchy. First there was that debate when Trump manterrupted Clinton three times more than she interrupted him. And then we kicked things up a notch, when we all watched him justify bragging about sexual assault. (You know, right before he threatened to put her in jail.)

It’s over. There will be no more presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. (Hopefully.)

The final debate looked, at first, like it could have been pretty normal. At the start, there were some Trumpy moments — but for the most part, it appeared like both candidates, thanks to Trump’s slightly better behavior, were going to mostly stick to the issues.

About an hour into last night’s third and final presidential debate, during what was supposed to be a discussion on the economy, Donald Trump turned to Hillary Clinton and had this to say:

In turn, Clinton dished out a brutal, point-by-point comparison of her past 30 years with Trump’s past 30 years.

During Wednesday night’s third and final presidential debate, there was a moment when Donald Trump felt everything slipping away.

Hillary Clinton made a brief dig about how Trump has avoided paying taxes for 18 years, saying that she would raise taxes on the wealthy in order to put more money into the Social Security trust fund and noting that both she and Trump would have to pay higher taxes as a result — “assuming he can’t figure out a way to get out of it.” As Clinton continued speaking, Trump couldn’t stop himself from letting one final insult escape his thin lips.

The scariest moment of Wednesday’s final presidential debate was when Donald Trump refused to say whether he would concede if he lost the election, treating a crucial pillar of American democracy like a reality TV twist to be manipulated.

But the second-scariest thing was that much of the debate felt, well, normal. Trump has so radically readjusted our expectations for presidential candidates that a debate in which a major candidate threatens democratic traditions, blatantly insults his opponent, and is asked about a history of sexual assault could seem, at times, ho-hum.

When Donald Trump talks about black and Latino people, he does something unusual — he uses the word “the” before the names of these racial and ethnic groups.

Here’s what he said Wednesday night during the third and final presidential debate against Hillary Clinton (emphasis added):

In the final presidential debate on Wednesday night, Donald Trump was true to form — he interrupted Hillary Clinton 37 times. Clinton only interrupted him nine times.

This was a departure from the second presidential debate, which was structured as a town hall discussion that devoted large chunks of time to audience member questions and, as a result, produced limited interruptions from either candidate — 18 from Trump and only one from Clinton. Instead, the final debate’s format allowed Trump to showcase the argumentative and combative debate tactics he is known for.

It’s all finally over. The final debate of the 2016 presidential election is behind us, the last event of its kind after two other general election debates, nine Democratic primary debates, and 12 Republican primary debates. More than a year after Donald Trump began the election season in earnest by calling Rosie O’Donnell a fat pig on Fox News, the nights of chaotic sparring and inchoate yelling from presidential candidates have come to an end.

The final debate was more raw and pugilistic than any of its predecessors, with Clinton particularly at her most animated to date. The moderating could have used some work — like when Chris Wallace decided to mislead his viewers by implying the stimulus package hurt growth, when it actually increased it — but the result was remarkably substantive, and touched on some key issues that past debates neglected.

The three 90-minute presidential debates are officially over.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump faced off for the last time Wednesday, October 19, at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas in a debate moderated by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. The debate covered debt and entitlements, immigration, the economy, the Supreme Court, foreign hot spots, and “fitness to be president.”

It finally happened. After three straight debates without a single moderator asking about climate change, Fox News’s Chris Wallace decided to focus the final presidential showdown on a slow-moving issue that would greatly affect future generations. He wasn’t going to let Trump or Clinton avoid the topic, either. He pulled out facts and figures and demanded to know why the two candidates were ignoring the problem.

Wait, sorry, I’m just kidding. Wallace didn’t ask about climate change at all. He wanted to talk about the national debt.

The third and final presidential debate has ended, and it can now be said: Hillary Clinton crushed Donald Trump in the most effective series of debate performances in modern political history.

The polling tells the story. As Nate Silver notes, on the eve of the first presidential debate, Clinton led by 1.5 points. Before the second, she was up by 5.6 points. Before the third, she was winning by 7.1 points. And now, writing after the third debate — a debate in which Trump said he would keep the nation “in suspense” about whether there would be a peaceful transition of power, bragged about not apologizing to his wife, and called Clinton “such a nasty woman” — it’s clear that Trump did himself no favors. Early polls also suggest Clinton won.

A few more days will go by before we get really methodologically rigorous polls measuring how the electorate felt about the third and final presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Still, the early indications suggest that Hillary Clinton won — though by less than in previous debates.

Donald Trump still refuses to say whether he will concede the presidential election if he loses. As many people have explained, this is dangerous; it undermines the trust that our democratic system of governance relies on and could lead to voter intimidation on Election Day.

It’s also unprecedented in modern history. In fact, presidential candidates can be very gracious in their defeat. Exhibit A: George H.W. Bush’s letter conceding the Oval Office to Bill Clinton after Bush lost his reelection campaign: