Hillary Clinton: Donald Trump's threat to not accept US election result is horrifying

David Gardner20 October 2016

Hillary Clinton has branded as “horrifying” a warning by Donald Trump that he may not accept the result if he loses the US presidential election.

The extraordinary threat, challenging one of the defining tenets of American democracy, stunned the tens of millions watching the third and final televised showdown between the warring White House candidates.

“I will look at it at the time,” said a defiant Mr Trump after he was asked if he would concede to his Democratic rival if the pollsters prove correct and Mrs Clinton becomes America’s first ever woman Commander-in-Chief.

The billionaire, who has spent the past week making largely unsubstantiated claims that the election is “rigged” against him, added: “I will keep you in suspense.”

His remarks were in stark contrast to his running mate Mike Pence and his daughter, Ivanka, who declared that they would respect the results of the November 8 poll.

By throwing into doubt the fundamental principle of a peaceful handover of power from one democratically elected president to a successor, Mr Trump may have doomed his chances of winning over voters questioning his temperament for the most powerful job on the planet.

Mrs Clinton reacted by saying: “That’s horrifying.

“That is not the way our democracy works. We’ve been around for 240 years. We have had free and fair elections.

"We’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them. And that is what is expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.

“He is denigrating - he’s talking down - our democracy and I, for one, am appalled that somebody who is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that kind of position.”

Any hopes Mr Trump may have had of appealing to those female voters not already put off by allegations by nine women over the past 10 days that they were either groped by him or kissed without permission can’t have been helped by his reference to Mrs Clinton during one confrontation as “such a nasty woman”.

The 70-year-old property mogul refused to apologise, saying the accusations were all false and that the women who came forward “either want fame” or were put up to it by the Clinton campaign.

“Those stories have been largely debunked,” he added. “I didn’t even apologise to my wife, who is sitting right here, because I didn’t do anything.”

Another group of voters with the potential to sway the election, Hispanics, were also up in arms on social media over his use of the words “bad hombres” when describing violent immigrants who were in the US illegally.

There was no love lost from the start with the candidates refusing to shake hands before the debate at Las Vegas University.

They parted without a handshake 90 minutes later after a relatively calm, policy-based first 15 minutes deteriorated into a terse, bad-tempered stand-off.

In pictures: US Presidential debate

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The first blow went to Mrs Clinton, 68, who claimed that Russian president Vladimir Putin was backing Mr Trump because “he’d rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”

Mr Trump spluttered: “No puppet, no puppet - you’re the puppet.” Composing himself, he added: “She has been outsmarted and outplayed worse than anybody I’ve ever seen in any government.”

The candidates clashed repeatedly over their very different visions for the nation’s future.

While Mr Trump said he would appoint Supreme Court justices who would oppose and possibly overrule the landmark Roe v Wade ruling making abortions legal in the US, Mrs Clinton made an impassioned appeal for the importance of women’s hard won right to choose.

Analysts and viewers appeared united in their view that Mrs Clinton dominated the final debate just three weeks before Election Day. Mr Trump disagreed, tweeting immediately afterwards, “Hillary is finished.”

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