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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
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Tom McCarthy (now) and Scott Bixby (earlier)

The third presidential debate – as it happened

Presidential debate highlights: Clinton and Trump’s final face-off – video

Summary

The third and final presidential debate of the 2016 election cycle is in the can. Here’s what happened:

  • Donald Trump said he might not accept the election result. “I will look at it at the time,” Trump said. “I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense.”
  • “That’s horrifying,” Hillary Clinton replied. “It just shows, you’re not up to doing the job. He is denigrating, he is talking down our democracy, and I for one am appalled.”
  • At least three Republican senators, among many alarmed voices, immediately objected to the Trump line, with Arizona’s Jeff Flake calling the remarks “beyond the pale”.
  • The debate was surprisingly policy-oriented, with the candidates staking out contrasting positions on abortion, gun laws, Russia and much more. Trump allowed that his supreme court would likely overturn Roe v Wade.
  • Trump rejected questions about women who have accused him of sexual assault, branding them fame-seekers and Clinton campaign plants and saying “I don’t know those people”.
  • Clinton had a ready response, saying “every time Donald is pushed” – about women, a disabled reporter, the Khan family, John McCain, a federal judge – he denies responsibility and refuses apology.
  • “Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger,” Clinton said. “I don’t think there’s a woman out there who doesn’t know what that feels like.”
  • Trump interrupted a Clinton answer about social security by muttering, “Such a nasty woman.” His favorite interruption was “wrong.” “Wrong.”
  • A new web site was born: www.nastywomengetshitdone.com.
  • Clinton turned a question about her emails released by Wikileaks into a challenge to Trump to condemn Russian hacking. He did, provisionally. She called Trump Putin’s “puppet”.
  • Trump said the only reason Iraq was going into Mosul was because Clinton was running for president: “She wanted to look tough.” Clinton said he was trapped in conspiratorial thinking.
  • Trump warned about “bad hombre” immigrants:

Updated

In a brief but jarringly vicious aside towards the end of the debate, Trump leaned in to the microphone to call Clinton a “nasty woman”, slightly undermining his earlier assertion that “nobody has more respect for women than me” (a moment which, according to pollster Frank Luntz, did worse with his live focus group than any other in the debate for Trump).

The response from Twitter was swift and merciless.


Many users even changed their Twitter names:

The chair of the national party joins the crowd rebutting Trump on accepting the election result:

Updated

Palin: accept election results 'if they're legit'

Here now is Sarah Palin, in the spin room, looking a bit cornered but firing away. She’s asked about accepting the results of the election. “If they’re legit results then of course they’ll be accepted,” she says.

“Such a nasty woman”

Sessions: contesting an election gratuitously 'would be wrong'

This from Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s most stalwart backer in the senate, who we can’t remember ever having disagreed significantly with the candidate to this point:

Updated

Two Republican senators have condemned Trump’s refusal to say he will accept the result of the election. Arizona’s Jeff Flake (see earlier) and now Lindsey Graham of South Carolina:

Trump has departed the debate venue, his campaign tells his assigned media pool.

Easy for her to say.

Reactions II

(Warning: Donald Trump Jr trigger alert):

Lawyer Gloria Allred announces that a “woman who accuses Donald Trump of victimizing her with inappropriate sexual conduct will hold a press conference tomorrow”:

Reactions I

Trump behind Clinton after the debate.
Trump behind Clinton after the debate. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Hillary Clinton exits the stage.
Hillary Clinton exits the stage. Photograph: Joe Raedle/EPA
Donald Trump
Trump speaks with his family on stage. Photograph: David Goldman/AP

Updated

#ff

Here are the top three tweeted moments of the debate according to Twitter:

And check out the top most-retweeted tweet of the night:

Fact check: healthcare, vets and 'inner cities'

Trump: “Next week [the healthcare premiums] are going to go up 100%”

Trump and Clinton both accept the reality that healthcare premiums have increased since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, but Trump appears to be exaggerating wildly. On average, premiums have risen by about 5.8% a year since Barack Obama took office, compared with 13.2% in the nine years before Obama, Politifact found earlier this year. Trump, however, is cherry-picking data from various states and providers where rates have had higher jumps. The most common healthcare plans will increase 9% on average, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Trump: “We take care of illegal immigrants … better than we take care of our vets”

This claim flies in the face of evidence and logic. Like all US citizens, veterans enjoy the basic rights and benefits granted by US law (voting rights, social security, Medicaid, etc), while undocumented migrants (noncitizens) do not. Trump has in the past tried to justify this claim by saying the US spends more on undocumented people than on veterans, but has drawn a $113bn price tag from an explicitly anti-immigration foundation. He also inflated that number.

The campaign has said the US spends $2.8bn on housing migrants in prisons, combining an estimate on prison costs and the 2016 budget for the care and processing of children who came to the US without adults. The Veterans Affairs administration has a 2016 budget of $69.7bn. Veterans and undocumented migrants alike have access to K-12 education, though few veterans would likely seek it, and veterans have access to the Affordable Care Act, military benefits and health benefits, while migrants do not.

Trump: “Our inner cities are a disaster. You get shot walking to the store, you have no education, no jobs”

Trump’s repeated claim that “African Americans, Hispanics, are living in hell” defies most of American history, from antebellum slavery through the Jim Crow decades, great depression and segregation. Even if Trump is only referring the past half century, he is still wrong by most metrics.

Data on employment, education and health show empirical evidence for the persistent reality of discrimination against black Americans, but also show major gains in the last few decades. In 2015, black people earned just 75% as much as whites in median hourly earnings, whether full- or part-time, according to a Pew Research analysis. The black unemployment rate in August 2016 was 8.1%, compared with 4.4% for white people, but still lower than for most of the last 40 years. Black life expectancy has increased from the mid-30s around 1900 to the mid-70s in 2016, according to the CDC. Education rates have similarly increased in the last 40 years, according to the census.

Who won? What was the headline? Trump saying he would keep the country in suspense as to whether he will accept the election result? What was that?

Watch our post-debate panel

Our post-debate panel is starting now – it’s live! Join WNYC and the Guardian US live from Tumblr headquarters as we discuss the final presidential debate.


Moderator: Nicholas Thompson, editor of NewYorker.com

Kai Wright, host of WNYC & The Nation’s United States of Anxiety Podcast

Jessica Valenti, Columnist at The Guardian

Tanzina Vega, National Reporter at CNN

Spencer Ackerman, Editor at The Guardian

Closing statements

Wallace: Let’s end this nicely. Closing statements. One minute, go.

Clinton: I’m reaching out to all Americans because we need everybody. Let me speak directly to the camera. We need your talents. I’ve seen the presidency up close. Responsibility and opportunity. I have made the cause of children and families my life’s work. That will be my mission. Families against corporate interests. Give me a chance.

Trump: She’s raising the money from the people she wants to control. Doesn’t work that way. We’re going to make America great again. We have a depleted military. Take care of our veterans. Policemen and women disrespected. Inner cities.. shot walking to the store. All she’s done is talk to the African Americans and the Latinos. We are going to make America strong again... it has to start now. “We cannot take four more years of Barack Obama and that’s what you get when you get her.”

For some reason Clinton smiles broadly at that last line.

Question for Trump: Would you raise taxes to save Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security?

Trump: We’ll cut taxes, grow economy, repeal and replace Obamacare. Presto. But she wants to make Obamacare even worse.

Clinton: We need to add to the social security trust fund by raising taxes on the wealthy. We want to...

Trump interrupts her: “Such a nasty woman.”

Clinton: “I will not cut benefits; I want to enhance benefits... I’ll say something about the ACA – [Obamacare] extended the solvency of the social security trust fund...”

Updated

Trump and Clinton on the stage at the Thomas & Mack Center at the University of Las Vegas.
Trump and Clinton on the stage at the Thomas & Mack Center at the University of Las Vegas. Photograph: Joe Raedle/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump
Trump takes his turn at the mic. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Updated

Fact check: jobs and drugs

Trump: “Our country is stagnant. We’ve lost our jobs”

About 10.7 million people have gained jobs since Barack Obama took office in 2009 (not 15 million as the Clinton campaign sometimes claims). Growth is not stagnant, though it is not significant, and it requires context: the 2008 financial crisis that nearly collapsed the economy. According to a 2015 nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus may have increased GDP buy up to 0.2 percentage points. US growth in the second quarter of 2016 was 1.4%.

Trump: “Their [the people of New Hampshire’s] single biggest problem is heroin that pours across our southern borders, just pouring and destroying their youth”

Trump is correct that heroin deaths have increased dramatically since 2007, in part because of the abuse of painkillers and the growth of a number of powerful heroin-related drugs, such as fentanyl. According to the DEA, 10,574 Americans died from heroin-related overdoses in 2014, more than three times the number in 2010.

Updated

Trump admits disagreeing with Reagan on trade policy

Trump on the debt: I’m going to create a bunch of jobs and hit 6% growth with my “tremendous economic machine.” Protectionism. Trade barriers. “I’m going to create the kind of country that we were from the standpoint of industry.” Trade deals bad. He’s finishing strong. “We have the greatest business people in the world... we use political hacks.” “We have to use our great people.”

Will there be closing statements? This all seems to be ending so... irresolutely.

Clinton: When I hear Donald talk like that, “I wonder when he thought America was great.” He says before me and Obama. But “He has been criticizing our country for decades. In 1987 he took out a $100,000 ad in the New York Times, when Ronald Reagan was president, and said exactly what he said just now.”

Clinton: “If you look at the debt, I pay for everything I’m proposing... we’ll have what economists call middle-out growth... I want to invest in you, I want to invest in your family... he started off as a millionaire...

Trump can’t help himself: “We’ve heard this before.”

Trump: “I did disagree very strongly with Ronald Reagan.” (ooooh.) We should have had much tougher trade policy, he says.

Donald Trump
Trump takes aim with talk turning to foreign policy. Photograph: Joe Raedle/AFP/Getty Images

Now Wallace wants to talk about the national debt. Final segment.

Stay tuned for our post-debate panel! We’ll post a live feed as soon as we’re done talking dollars and cents.

Hillary Clinton urges viewers of the debate to Google “Donald Trump Iraq”. Apparently, a lot of people don’t need the nudge - US searches already spiked at the end of last month. They’re less interested in the former secretary of state’s relationship with the country.

Google search trends
Google search trends: Trump and Clinton and Iraq Photograph: Google

Updated

Now we’re on to a no-fly zone for Syria. Only a few minutes left here, fewer than 10. Clinton makes the important point that the millions of displaced inside and outside Syria need help.

“I am not going to let anyone into this country who is not vetted... but I am not going to slam the door on women and children... that picture of that little 4-year-old boy with blood coming down his face... that is haunting.”

Clinton says that the Pulse Nightclub shooter “was born in Queens, the same place Donald was born. Let’s be clear about the threat.”

Trump: “It’s so ridiculous. .. Wait one second... they had a ceasefire three weeks ago. And Russia took over vast swatches [sic] of land...” etc.

Updated

Trump is increasingly punchy as the night goes on. Clinton seems to realize that none of this is really dangerous territory for her, for the voters she’s after. She seems to be leaning back a bit, kind of reclining on her hips. Looking at him and nodding and blinking as he rants and waves and gestures.

Current rant: “We don’t know who the rebels are. But if they ever did overthrow Assad... you may very well end up with worse than Assad. And if she did nothing, we’d be in great shape.”

Now he’s on to the Syrian refugees, who are “the great Trojan horse.” “You’re going to see what happens.”

Trump: “Lots of luck Hillary. Thanks a lot, you’re doing a great job.”

Clinton: “Once again, Donald is implying that he didn’t support the invasion of Iraq.”

Trump: “Wrong. Wrong.”

Clinton: “Google it. Google ‘Donald Trump Iraq.’”

Trump: “Wrong”

Clinton: “Why does that matter? It matters because he has not told the truth.” Then she gives a mini-lecture on Mosul, “a Sunni city on the border with Syria, and yes we do need to go after Baghdadi, just as we went after bin Laden, when you were on celebrity Apprentice.”

Trump yells over her.

Clinton keeps talking.

Trump: “Wikileaks came out, and John Podesta said horrible things about you, and boy was he right ... John Podesta said you have terrible instincts. Bernie Sanders said you have bad judgment. I agree with both.”

Clinton: “You should ask Bernie Sanders who he’s supporting for president... he has said you’re the most dangerous person in the modern history to have run for president. I think he’s right.”

Buurrrn.

Updated

Fact check: Mosul and Isis

Trump: “These people have all left. The element of surprise … all she had to do was stay there”

Isis has not left Mosul: several thousand fighters remain there and are fighting the coalition of Iraqi and Kuridsh troops, backed by US airstrikes and special forces. Isis leaders have known for years that Baghdad would try to retake the city, if they have not known since they took the city.

Trump did not support leaving a residual American force in Iraq, but actually called for a complete withdrawal from Iraq, despite the likelihood of civil war or an authoritarian coup. “You know how they get out? They get out. That’s how they get out. Declare victory and leave,” he told CNN in 2007. “This is a total catastrophe, and you might as well get out now because you’re just wasting time, and lives.”

The argument that Isis rose out of the vacuum of post-withdrawal Iraq also ignores that its origins were in the country’s civil war, while George W Bush was in office, and that the terror group concentrated strength in Syria’s civil war before Barack Obama began a bombing and special forces campaign there.

Trump, told he was for the invasion of Iraq: “Wrong”

This is a lie. In the months before the Iraq war began, Trump mildly endorsed invasion to radio host Howard Stern, who asked him whether US forces should attack. “Yeah, I guess so,” Trump answered. A few weeks later he told Fox News that George W Bush was “doing a very good job”. Several weeks after the invasion, Trump told the Washington Post: “The war’s a mess.” In August 2004 he told Esquire: “Two minutes after we leave, there’s going to be a revolution, and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over.”

Even in an interview cited by the Trump campaign, Trump expressed impatience with Bush for not invading sooner. “Whatever happened to the days of the Douglas MacArthur? He would go and attack. He wouldn’t talk.”

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump listens.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump listens. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Hillary Clinton talks tough.
Clinton talks tough. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump gestures.
Trump with one of his typical hand gestures. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Updated

Fact check: 'rigged' election

Clinton says Trump has called the election ‘rigged’, while Trump says he won’t necessarily accept the election results

All available evidence shows that in-person voter fraud is exceedingly rare: you are more likely to be struck by lightning in the next year (a one in 1,042,000 chance, according to Noaa) than to find a case of voter fraud by impersonation (31 possible cases in more than a billion ballots cast from 2000 to 2014, according to a study by Loyola Law School).

Voter fraud would have to happen on an enormous scale to sway elections, because the electoral college system decentralizes authority: each of the 50 states has its own rules and local officials, not federal ones, run the polls and count the ballots. This complexity makes the notion of a “rigged” national election, at least in the US, logistically daunting to the point of practical impossibility. Thirty-one states have Republican governors, including the swing states of Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada and Ohio; Pennsylvania only elected a Democratic governor in 2015. Polls show Trump losing even in some states where governors have strongly supported him. In Maine, for instance, the Real Clear Politics average shows him down five points.

About 75% of the ballots cast in federal elections have paper backups, and most electronic voting machines are not connected to the internet – though they have other flaws and may be vulnerable to tampering. But voter fraud to swing a major election, whether by tampering, buying votes or official wrongdoing, would quickly attract attention by its necessarily large scale.

If Trump loses the presidential election, it will be because American voters do not want him in the White House, not because of a conspiracy involving Republicans and Democrats alike at state and city levels around the nation – a conspiracy for which Trump has provided no evidence.

Trump: I started with a small $1m loan

Trump does not come from modest beginnings. In 1978 his father gave him a loan totaling almost $1m – about $3.7m today – and acted as guarantor for the young Trump’s early projects. A 1981 report by a New Jersey regulator also shows a $7.5m loan from the patriarch, and years later he bought $3.5m in gambling chips to help his son pay off the debts of a failing casino, a transaction found later found illegal. Trump also borrowed millions against his inheritance before his father’s death, a 2007 deposition shows.

Trump has not proven that he is worth $10bn, though his tax returns, which he has refused to release, could provide a clearer picture of his worth. His financial filings suggest he has less than $250m in liquid assets, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Trump has a history of overstating his properties: he has, for instance, told the FEC that a New York golf club is worth $50m but also argued in court that it is worth only $1.4m.

Trump says Iraqi offensive in Mosul rigged to make Clinton 'look tough'

Question for Trump: Would you use US troops in Syria or Iraq?

Trump: “Mosul’s so sad. We had Mosul.”

“About three months ago, I started reading, that they’re going to attack... whatever happened to the element of surprise... these people have all left. The element of surprise.”

Trump hails “the stupidity of our country.”

Trump says the only reason Iraq is going into Mosul is because Clinton is running for president. “She wanted to look tough.”

He’s on to Iran, who he says will emerge victorious in Mosul.

Voter fraud can be described as nothing other than a “myth”, according to a report released by the Brennan Center at New York University School of Law.

According to the authors “every major study, investigation, and court decision has found little evidence of fraud — and substantial evidence of disenfranchisement. Instead, these claims are used to push restrictive laws that block legitimate voters”.

Donald Trump went there. Having convicted her of a crime, without trial, Trump has already thrown Clinton in jail for her emails. Now he says, as a convicted felon, Clinton should be punished further, he says. “She shouldn’t be allowed to vote,” he said. “She’s guilty of a very, very serious crime.”

Updated

Fact check: 'criminal enterprise'

Trump: “Criminally, after getting a subpoena by the United States Congress, [Clinton deleted emails]. One lie.”

Trump has the timeline correct, but not the criminality. He omits the FBI’s conclusion that there was no evidence of an intentional effort to conceal anything, and the FBI learned that a Clinton aide had asked for the emails unrelated to government work to be deleted in December 2014, months before the 4 March 2015 subpoena.

The emails were deleted at the end of March, according to the FBI, when an employee had what he called an “oh shit” moment about his previous order. The State Department first agreed to produce records in July 2014.

Trump: General David Petraeus faces a worse deal than Clinton

The Justice Department’s lenience toward Petraeus actually made it more difficult, in part, for prosecutors to recommend charges against Clinton.

In 2015 Petraeus, a former CIA director and a four-star general, pled guilty to giving a large amount of classified information – including the identities of covert officers and war strategy – to his biographer, with whom he was having an affair. During the FBI investigation, Petraeus lied to agents, according to the plea deal. But the justice department only sentenced Petraeus to two years’ probation and a $100,000 fine, provoking accusations that this relatively lenient sentence was evidence of a double standard for the powerful.

Trump: the Clinton Foundation is a “criminal enterprise”

There is no evidence that the Clinton Foundation is a “criminal enterprise”, or that its donors or the Clintons profit from the charity.

Trump appears to be alluding a garment factory built after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake in the town of Caracol , while Bill Clinton was the UN’s special envoy to Haiti and co-chairman of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), an organization that approved US government funded projects that added up to hundreds of millions of dollars. The IHRC approved a project between the US, Haiti’s government and Sae-A Trading, a South Korean clothing company, and it now provides 8,900 jobs to Haitians.

An eventual review by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found “mixed results” with the project, including “unrealistic initial timeframes”, delays, incomplete information in the feasibility study, and funding problems. Earlier in October, labor organizers alleged that factory managers were mistreating workers there, but an ABC News investigation found no evidence that Clinton Foundation donors profited from the project, though some were involved in the project. The US committed funding but did not participate in building the industrial park; a labor group that reviewed the factory found it had adequate oversight and had dealt with concerns, though the factory remains within the range of the often grueling garment industry.

He was correct, at least, that the Clinton Foundation has accepted millions from Middle East countries with records of repression of women and gay people.

Clinton: “We at the Clinton Foundation spend 90% [of what’s given] and have the highest rating from watchdogs”

The Clinton Foundation does have high marks from charity watchdogs, which also show that the group does spend the vast majority of its donations on its own charitable programs.

Trump: “I don’t buy boats, I don’t buy planes [with the Trump Foundation], we put up the American flag, and that’s it … We fought for the right in Palm Beach to put up the American flag”

Trump is not being wholly honest about his charitable foundation, at least according to the Trump Foundation own documents, which show that he used its money to pay for legal settlements and even self-portraits, as Clinton said and the Washington Post has reported at length.

Debate moderator Chris Wallace from Fox News attempts to keep things in control on the stage.
Debate moderator Chris Wallace from Fox News attempts to keep things in control on the stage. Photograph: Joe Raedle/AFP/Getty Images
Chris Wallace has to turn his attention to the crowd who’ve begun cheering and applauding the candidates’ answers.
Wallace then has to turn his attention to the crowd who’ve begun cheering and applauding the candidates’ answers. Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Updated

Question: What to do to ensure that Isis does not re-fill left behind when they are defeated for example imminently in Mosul?

Clinton: “I am hopeful that hard work that American military advisers have done will pay off but we know we’ve got lots of hard work to do.”

Thousands of civilians have fled Mosul and its surrounding region to crowded refugee camps in war-torn Syria, aid officials have said, as Iraqi forces continued to advance on the most populous city under Islamic State control.

Trump: 'I will keep you in suspense'

Trump says there are millions of people registered to vote who shouldn’t be. Then Trump says Clinton should not be allowed to run. “And just in that respect I say that it’s rigged. She should never have been allowed.”

Wallace: “There is a tradition in this country” of a peaceful transfer of power? I’m not saying that you’re necessarily going to be the loser.. are you saying it’s not fair?”

Trump: “I will tell you at the time. I will keep you in suspense.”

Clinton now comes out with great force: “Chris, let me respond to that, because that’s horrifying.” She says Trump always says things are rigged: the Iowa primary, the judge in Trump U lawsuits, the Emmys...

Trump: “Should’ve gotten that.”

Clinton: “This is a mindset. And it’s funny,” but it’s deadly serious, she says:

It just shows, you’re not up to doing the job. He is denigrating, he is talking down our democracy, and I for one am appalled that a nominee from one of our two major parties...”

Trump says Trump’s meeting with Loretta Lynch on a tarmac was “disgraceful.”

Politicians aren’t the only ones who are distrusted - so are we, the members of the media and (if this election weren’t already ironic enough) presidential candidate Donald Trump is tapping into those feelings of distrust on live, mainstream media.

According to Gallup, just 32% of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the media - down from 54% in 2003.

Trump on election result: 'I will look at it at the time'

Question for Trump: Will you accept the result of the election?

Trump: “I will look at it at the time.”

Wow.

Fact check: TPP, Isis

Trump: Clinton flip-flopped on the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Trump is right: Clinton has not been consistent on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and her language from 2010 through 2014 suggests she was broadly in support of Barack Obama’s trade deal, before eventually opposing it as a presidential candidate. As secretary of state in 2012, she said: “This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field. And when negotiated, this agreement will cover 40 percent of the world’s total trade and build in strong protections for workers and the environment.”

She continued to praise it while she worked for the Obama administration, variously calling it “high quality”, “cutting edge”, “groundbreaking” and “high standard”.

Trump: “She gave us Isis … she created a vacuum”

The claim that Hillary Clinton “gave” the world Isis condenses and distorts a conservative view that, closer to its original form, says that that by withdrawing American forces from Iraq Barack Obama created a power vacuum in which Isis could rise.

This argument ignores that Isis’s first segments formed out of Iraq’s civil war, while George W Bush was president; that the group gained strength in Syria’s civil war, where the US did not intervene until 2014; that Obama withdrew American forces in 2011 under the timeline agreed on by Bush and Baghdad; and that both Bush and Obama failed to come to an agreement with Baghdad over troops – in large part over a disagreement about whether American troops could be prosecuted by Iraq.

Trump supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and “surgical” intervention to remove Libyan dictator Muammar Ghaddafi in 2011, though he now claims otherwise. He also supported withdrawal from Iraq in 2007 and 2008.

Trump: those stories have been largely debunked

The sexual allegations against Trump have not been “debunked”, though they have not been proven, either. For context, Jill Harth sued Trump in 1997 for “attempted rape” and earlier this year told the Guardian he “me up against the wall” of a child’s bedroom “and had his hands all over me and tried to get up my dress”. Jessica Leeds and Rachel Cooks recounted to the New York Times that Trump had groped the former “like an octopus” and kissed the latter without consent. Reporter Natasha Stoynoff has said Trump cornered her in a room in 2005 and “within seconds, he was pushing me against the wall, and forcing his tongue down my throat”. Mindy McGillivray told the Palm Beach Post a similar story, saying that Trump groped her 13 years ago, also at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida. Summer Zervos, a former Apprentice contestant, has alleged that he groped and kissed her without consent in 2007. Temple Taggart accused Trump of advances at rehearsal for the 1997 Miss USA pageant, photographer Kirsten Anderson said Trump groped her at a nightclub in the 1990s, and Cathy Heller said he grabbed and kissed her at a Mar-A-Lago brunch in 1997.

The Trump campaign has denied the allegations. It has produced a self-professed witness, who has a history of making unproven claims, from the flight with Leeds, and a letter from the cousin of Zervos expressing doubt about her claim but not calling her a liar. “I can only imagine that Summer’s actions today are nothing more than an attempt to regain the spotlight at Mr Trump’s expense,” his letter said.

Trump: “I did not say that [women were not unattractive enough for him to advance on]”

Trump clearly suggested that he did not find at least one of his accusers attractive, saying “She would not be my first choice, believe me.”

Trump: “They hired people [to incite violence at rallies], they gave them $1,500 … she caused the violence, it’s on tape!”

Trump appears to be alluding to an edited video that suggests a few Democratic staffers had hired people to incite violence. One of those staffers has resigned, and said that “none of the schemes described in the conversations ever took place”. So far there is no proof that anyone was actually hired to cause violence.

Updated

Trump says the Trump Foundation money goes to charity. He denies foundation funds were used to pay a penalty to Palm Beach County for a zoning-violating-flagpole.

Clinton: “He hasn’t released his tax returns... what we have learned... he has not paid a penny in federal income tax.

“We have more undocumented immigrants in America paying more in federal taxes than one of our [nominees].”

Trump is trapped in this conversation: “You should have changed the law when you were a United States senator.”

Trump says earlier today “I was sitting in my apartment in the very beautiful hotel”.

Clinton with a zinger! “That the Chinese built,” she interjects. Zing zing zing feel the heat ...

Updated

TV crews recording the debate.
TV crews recording the debate. Photograph: Julio Cortez/AP
Donald Trump gestures at Clinton.
Donald Trump gestures at Clinton. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Clinton looks on.
Clinton looks on. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

Updated

Question for Clinton: At your senate confirmation you promised no conflict of interest with Clinton foundation. But donors had special access, your emails show. Did you keep your pledge?

Clinton: “Everything I did as secretary of state was in furtherance of our country’s interest and our values. ... but I am happy, in fact I am thrilled to talk about the Clinton foundation, because it is a world-renowned charity.”

Clinton begins talking about HIV/Aids treatment. Wonder if she’ll manage to cut herself off in time to mention the Trump foundation?

Wallace cuts her off, Trump is yelling “it’s a criminal enterprise, Saudi Arabia giving $25m... these are people that push gays off buildings... why don’t you give back the money that you’ve taken from certain countries.”

Clinton is smiling, small-ly, to herself.

Trump says that Haiti hates the Clintons.

Clinton: “The Clinton foundation spent 90% of all the money that is donated on behalf of programs around the world.. I’d be happy to compare to the Trump foundation that took money from other people and bought a six-foot portrait of Donald.

“I mean, who does that?”

Sexual assault happens every day. What makes the allegations against Trump rare is not just who Trump is, it’s that the allegations were ever even heard. Only two out of three sexual assaults are reported to the police according to Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Of the sexual violence crimes that were not reported to police from 2005-2010, victims provided reasons for not reporting the incident. They included:

  • 20% feared retaliation
  • 13% believed the police would not do anything to help
  • 8% believed it was not important enough to report
  • 7% did not want to get the perpetrator in trouble
  • 2% believed the police could not do anything to help
  • 30% gave another reason, or did not cite one reason

Trump: “Nobody has more respect for women than I do.” (There is some audience laughter at this. “And frankly those stories have been debunked. And I want to talk about something slightly different.”

Guess what he wants to talk about? Clinton’s emails. You know the highlights. Some 33,000 deleted emails. Four-star generals (Petraeus). She’s lied hundreds of times. And she gets away with it?

“That’s what you should really be talking about, not fiction,” says Trump.

Clinton: “Every time Donald is pushed, he immediately goes to denying responsibility, and it’s not just women. He never apologizes ... he also went after a disabled reporter...”

Trump: WRONG.

Clinton: He went after Mr and Mrs Khan. He went after John McCain ... [and] a federal judge born in Indiana ... because his parents are Mexican.

So it’s not one thing. This is a pattern. A pattern of divisiveness... that is not who America is, and I hope that as we move to the last weeks of this campaign, more and more people understand what’s at stake.

Trump: “She talks about violence at my rallies, she caused the violence... I’d love to talk about other things.”

Updated

Clinton: “At the last debate, we heard Donald talking about what he did to women. And we had a number of women coming forward saying that’s what he did to them.”

Clinton says Trump said that he could not have possibly done that because they weren’t attractive enough.

Trump: “I did not say that. I did not say that.”

Clinton keeps up. She’s unloading on him, quoting him to himself. “Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger... I don’t think there’s a woman out there who doesn’t know what that feels like.”

Clinton says that’s who Donald is and the country has to stand up and declare its own identity. “America is great because America is good, and it really is up to all of us to make that true.”

Here’s another way Donald Trump isn’t fit to be president.

In attempting to re-up a favorite talking point of his about Clinton’s general dishonesty, Trump said Clinton is “a liar on so many different ways”.

The trouble here is not just that is a substance-free attack - Trump has been shown to lie roughly every five minutes while Clinton is actually unusually truthful compared to other presidential candidates, as Politifact has previously observed.

Jill Abramson has noted that in all the investigations into Clinton’s business dealings, fundraising, foundation and marriage that she launched in her tenure as the top editor of the New York Times, she never found any smoking guns.

In fact, she came away with a rather different revelation: “Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy,” she wrote back in March.

Next topic: fitness to be president.

Wallace asks Trump about the nine women who have accused him in recent weeks of groping and or kissing them. Why would they do that?

Trump: “Those stories have been largely debunked... I don’t know those people. I have a feeling it was her campaign that did it.”

Then Trump says Clinton and Obama hired people to cause violence at his rallies.

“The stories were all totally false, and I didn’t even apologize to my wife, who is sitting right here, because I didn’t even do anything.”

Then he repeats his claim that his accusers just want fame. And now he’s back to his violent Chicago rally, “Started by her.” He accuses Clinton of infiltrating his rally.

Fact check: debt and 'missing' money

Trump: Obama has doubled the debt

Trump has the raw numbers just about right. When Obama took office on 20 January 2009, the federal debt was $10.63tn. As of 28 September 2016, it was $19.5tn. Trump omits, however, two key points: Congress controls the government’s wallet (ie Obama cannot spend or tax without approval from lawmakers), and Obama took office during the financial crisis, when Republicans, Democrats and most economists agreed that the US needed to spend in order to counteract the collapsing economy. Pence has the right numbers but imputes too much responsibility on the president.

Clinton: Trump’s plan largely helps the wealthy and add $20tn in debt

Clinton is correct that although Trump’s tax plan would cut taxes for everyone, it would disproportionately help the wealthiest Americans, saving them millions of dollars and adding $5.3tn to the national debt, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation, a conservative thinktank. She seems to be citing another analysis, by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, about the debt, and possibly overstates its estimated consequences.

That center warned that without severe spending cuts, the plan would balloon national debt “by nearly 80% of gross domestic product by 2036, offsetting some or all of the incentive effects of the tax cuts”. According to that group, half of Trump’s tax cuts would go to the top 1% of earners, and most families below the top 20% of earners would have income gains of less than 1%.

Trump: “When you ran the State Department, $6bn was missing! Maybe it was stolen … nobody knows”

This is not correct. Trump is alluding to a March 2014 alert, about contractor spending in the Middle East and Africa, by the State Department’s inspector general, who was so perturbed by careless language around the $6bn figure that he wrote the Washington Post a letter that April. His alert did not conclude that the money was “missing” he told the Post, but rather that officials had failed “to adequately maintain contract files” that created “significant financial risk”. Files were missing or incomplete regarding several dozen contracts, not the money itself, and the State Department agreed to his recommendations.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump takes notes.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump takes notes. Photograph: Joe Raedle/AP

Updated

Clinton’s parallel histories of the last 30 years is effective. She draws a contrast between killing bin Laden and Trump running Celebrity Apprentice.

Trump says he’s proud of her experience. Then he says “Take a look at Syria.”

“She gave us Isis,” Trump says. He says it twice. “She gave us Isis as sure as you are sitting there.”

Wallace jumps in. It’s not time to talk foreign policy yet, he says.

Clinton gets to reply on trade. She says the final TPP agreement did not meet her test. We’ve heard that explanation many times. “There’s only one of us onstage that’s shipped jobs to Mexico, and that’s Donald, who has shipped jobs to 12 countries... Donald has bought Chinese steel and aluminum, in fact the Trump hotel right here in Las Vegas is made with Chinese steel.”

He is stone faced. Speak, Trump:

“I asked a simple question. She’s been doing this for 30 years. Why the hell didn’t you do this over the last 15, 20 years?”

Clinton tries to get in, but Trump says “my turn.”

Trump: “The one thing you have over me is experience. But it’s bad experience.”

Chinese steel? Trump says. “I’d make it impossible for me to do that. I wouldn’t mind.”

Trump: “If you become president this country is going to be a mess, believe me.”

Clinton says the issue of her 30 years of experience is important. Now she starts to describe their parallel experiences over the last 30 years.

Fact check: endorsements, borders and debt

Trump: “The border patrol agents, 16,500 plus, ICE, endorsed me. First time they’ve ever endorsed a candidate”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a government agency. It does not endorse political candidates. A union representing about 7,600 ICE officials endorsed Trump in September. A group representing 16,500 of 21,000 border patrol agents similarly endorsed Trump; this does not represent all the agents.

Trump: Clinton called for “open borders”

Clinton is correct that Trump took the quote out of context: she was talking primarily about trade to Banco Itau, a Brazilian bank that eventually became Unibanco. Here’s what she said, according to a hacked email released by Wikileaks:

My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.

Clinton has flip-flopped on free trade since 2013, most notably supporting and then rejecting the Trans Pacific Partnership.

Trump: I’m a big fan of Nato but they have to pay up

Trump is not necessarily a big fan of Nato, which he has called “obsolete”, and he’s wrong that allies do not pay for US military bases, though they do not pay perhaps as much as some Nato commanders want.

The US has urged its Nato allies to pay more for years, especially as eastern and central European allies have loudly warned about aggressive Russian action. The US currently pays about 22% of overall Nato spending, compared to Germany’s 15%, France’s 11%, the UK’s 10%, etc, and most Nato members fail to pay the 2% of GDP into defense as the alliance’s guidelines dictate. But the US does receive payments for military bases abroad from countries like Japan and South Korea, and takes profits from arms deals (sometimes to controversial clients, such as Saudi Arabia).

The US also benefits strategically through foreign military bases, which have acted as foundations for American influence abroad.

Clinton: I will not add a penny to the debt

Estimates suggest Clinton is not wholly correct. Her proposed tax plan would add $191bn to the debt over the long term, according to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, a conservative thinktank. The Tax Policy Center, however, estimates that she would add $1.1tn in revenue in a decade, though much of that would be offset by increased spending. The Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s plan would add $5.3tn to the debt.

Trump: I never said Japan should have nuclear weapons

Trump has suggested Japan and South Korea should develop their own nuclear weapons. He told the New York Times in March: “Well I think maybe it’s not so bad to have Japan — if Japan had that nuclear threat, I’m not sure that would be a bad thing for us.”

Wallace says that conservative economists have scored his plan and found it unrealistic.

“I just left some high representatives of India, they’re growing at 8%... we are growing at the 1% level and I think it’s going down. ... last week they came out with anemic jobs report. And I said, is that the last jobs report before the election, because if it is, I should win easily.”

Trump says the economy is terrible. He’s made new friends and cried over shuttered factories. “It is just horrible what’s happening to these people.”

He hits Clinton over the Bill Clinton -era Nafta deal, which is currently nationally unpopular.

Wallace tells Clinton her jobs plan was like the Obama stimulus plan which did not produce strong growth.

“Right,” Trump interjects, smiling. He can’t stay off the mic. We’re halfway through.

Clinton is taking us through a thumbnail history of the bailout and stimulus years. She says Obama does not get credit. She says it’s time to invest “from the middle out and the ground up, not the top down!” She invests that last phrase with some Sandersesque passion. OK not quite Sandersesque but some.

Clinton: “Let me translate that if I can.”

Trump: “You can’t.” That was a bit rude.

Clinton says Trump would cut a bunch of taxes and grow the debt in contrast with the Bill Clinton administration. Then scampers on to investments in new jobs. “Cutting taxes on the wealthy, we’ve tried that, but it has not worked.”

Clinton turns to Trump.
Clinton turns to Trump. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Updated

Trump charges ahead. “I’m a big fan of Nato.” How did he get here? Did we fall asleep? We thought we were on taxes. Let’s tune back into Trump. “We’ve doubled our national debt. We’re up to $20tn in debt.”

Did he just say “we’re going to have more free trade than we have right now”? That’s what it sounded like. Couldn’t have been though, from the cycle’s most protectionist candidate ...

Trump continues. “We’re gonna cut taxes massively ... We’re gonna cut business taxes ... We’re gonna start the engine rolling again.”

Updated

Trump: “Her plan is going to raise taxes... her tax plan is a disaster.”

Fact check: refugees and Russia

Clinton: Trump exploited undocumented workers

Clinton is not quite right. A Trump contractor hired undocumented Polish workers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and in 1983 union members sued one of their organizers. Trump appeared in court in 1990 and blamed the contractor overseeing the project, which was for Trump Tower.

Trump: Obama “has thousands and thousands of people, they have no idea where they come from”

Ten thousand Syrian refugees have come to the United States in 2016, but Trump makes it sound misleadingly large.

He is patently wrong about the screening process. The US has among the most intensive screening process in the world for refugees: it requires they register and interview with the United Nations, which then must refer them to the US; refugees who pass this test then interview with State Department contractors and have at least two background checks; then they have three fingerprint and photo screenings; then US immigration reviews the case; then Homeland Security interviews the refugee; then a doctor examines the refugee, and finally several security agencies perform one last check after the refugee has been matched with a resettlement agency.

The process takes 18 months to two years. The US has a very clear idea about which refugees it allows into the country.

Trump: “I don’t know Putin. He said nice things about me … He has no respect for our president.”

It’s not clear whether Trump has ever spoken with the Russian president. Putin was invited to but did not attend a 2013 beauty pageant in Moscow, according to one of the oligarchs who helped organize the event. “Will he become my new best friend?” Trump wondered beforehand.

The pair may have communicated through intermediaries. In 2014, Trump told a National Press Club luncheon: “I was in Moscow recently and I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer, and we had a tremendous success.” A year earlier, Trump told MSNBC: “I do have a relationship and I can tell you that he’s very interested in what we’re doing here today.”

Last November, Trump claimed in a debate that he “got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes”. They appeared in separate, pre-taped segments and were not on set together.

Trump has repeatedly tried to do business in Russia, and his refusal to release tax returns prevents him proving that he has no assets there.

Putin has never called Trump “a genius”; he used the Russian word яркий, which means “colorful” or “flamboyant”. Trump likely heard the word translated as “bright” or “brilliant”, though its connotations are often more pejorative than not: bright in the sense of glaring and gaudy, brilliant in the sense of dazzling light. Putin also called him “talented, undoubtedly”.

“It’s not our business to decide his merits; that’s for US voters,” Putin said earlier this year. He did say, however, that he would welcome the rapprochement in Russian-American relations that Trump has suggested. You can read more about Putin’s remarks here.

Trump: “She has no idea whether it’s Russia, China or somebody else … Our country has no idea”

US intelligence officials have formally accused Russia of hacking Democratic organizations, saying they have “high confidence” that the Kremlin is behind cyberattacks on the US government, Democratic organizations and polling centers. Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on this claim, despite personal briefings with US intelligence officials.

Even his running mate, Mike Pence, has accepted the briefings, and told NBC on Sunday: “I think there’s more and more evidence that implicates Russia.” Earlier Wednesday a Russian man suspected of involvement in the hacks was arrested in Prague.

Now on to taxes and spending and regulation! Whee.

Question: why will you create more jobs and growth?

Clinton: When the middle class thrives the country thrives. Biggest jobs program since WWII. New jobs. Clean energy. She could give this spiel in her sleep. People in poverty who work full time should not still be in poverty. Equal pay. Is she in fact napping? Debt free college. Check check check, down go the boxes. We are going to have the wealthy pay their fair share. “That is a plan that has been analyzed by independent experts which said that it could produce 10m new jobs.”

Clinton says Trump could cost the country 3m jobs because his whole plan is to cut taxes on the wealthy. She calls it “trickle-down economics on steroids.”

Less than 30 minutes in, an exchange on Roe v Wade has put things in perspective, and Clinton has already accomplished what she needed to do tonight: calmly display how Trump has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to actual policy.

After Trump said abortion supporters like Clinton want to “rip the baby out of the womb in the 9th month,” Clinton cooly corrected his misinformation. “that is not what happens,” Clinton replied, calling this “scare rhetoric”.

The 1973 Roe v Wade decision Clinton wishes to uphold allows a women’s right to abortion up until fetal viability, which justices in a later case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 defined as 23 or 24 weeks or earlier - in other words nowhere near the ninth month.

“He doesn’t know what Roe allows, and he clearly thinks doctors are monsters,” Clinton concluded.

Trump underscored his lack of understanding with regard to the abortion debate earlier this year when he suggested women who have abortions should face “some sort of punishment”. For the record that’s something no one on either side of the aisle wants. He clearly hasn’t done his homework since then.

Clinton: “I find it ironic that he raises nuclear weapons.” She says he’s been cavalier and “terrifying” on the issue.

“The bottom line is, when the president gives the order, it must be followed,” Clinton says. She says ten people who have their fingers actually on the triggers have come out to say they would not trust Trump.

Trump brings up his 200 generals and admirals. “As far as Japan and other countries, we are being ripped off... we have to renegotiate these agreements... she took that as saying nuclear weapons. .. this is just another lie.”

Clinton: “I’m just quoting you.. you said go ahead, enjoy yourselves, folks.” She quotes him back to himself.

As Clinton spoke there, Trump got in one of his trademark “Wrong”s – he low bullish belchlike interruption. “Wrong.” “Wrong.”

Trump: 'Of course I condemn' any Russian interference

Trump interrupts: She has no idea. She has no idea. Hillary you have no idea.

“She doesn’t like Putin because Putin has outsmarted her every step of the way. Putin has outsmarted her in Syria...”

Wallace for Trump: “Do you condemn any interference by Russia?”

Trump: “By Russia or anybody else? Of course I condemn. I don’t know Putin... Let me tell you Putin has outsmarted her and Obama every single step of the way.”

Updated

Clinton calls Trump Putin's 'puppet'

Trump says “I don’t know Putin. If we got along well, good ... He has no respect for her. He has no respect for our president ... 1,800 nuclear warheads and she’s playing chicken...”

Clinton has a whopper of a line: “That’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”

Trump: “No Puppet! You’re the puppet.”

Clinton hammers him. She accuses Trump of accepting Putin’s help.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Trump and Clinton. Photograph: Mark Ralston-Pool/Getty Images

Updated

Fact check: abortion and immigration

Trump: “If you go with what Hillary is saying in the ninth month you can rip the baby out of the womb of the mother … up to the last day.”

Clinton does not support such an extreme view on abortion, nor have courts ever ruled such a late term operation legal, or suggested that they would. States vary on how late they allow abortions, ranging from a ban six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period (North Dakota) to three states with third-trimester abortion bans. There are nine states without specific term prohibitions, but clinics do not abort at such late terms: only 1.2% of abortions occur after 21 weeks, according to the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute.

Trump: Clinton wants open borders

Clinton does not want “open borders”: she supports reform to let people pass background checks and pay back taxes in order to stay in the US, and she supports Obama’s executive actions to shield some migrants, such as people who were brought to the US as children. Like Obama, she supports deportation for people with criminal records.

Trump: “Obama has moved millions of people out”

Trump is correct: Barack Obama has deported more than 2.5 million people, more than any other recent president, but he has prioritized migrants with criminal records. “Millions and millions”, however, is an exaggeration, and Obama also supports shielding millions of undocumented immigrants without criminal records, and reform for citizenship.

Wallace quotes from a Clinton email released by Wikileaks in which she says, “My dream is a hemispheric common market with open trade and with open borders.”

Trump: “Thank you.”

Clinton: “I was talking about energy. We trade more energy with our neighbors than we do with the rest of the world combined.”

Clinton: What’s really important about Wikileaks is that the Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans... this has come from the highest levels... from Putin himself... to influence this election.

The most important question of this evening, she says: “Finally will Donald Trump admit that Russia is doing this?” And will he reject Putin?

“That was a great pivot,” Trump says. Crowd laughs.

Hillary Clinton on screen.
Hillary Clinton on screen. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Updated

Donald Trump has returned to a recurring theme of his candidacy - that immigrants drive up crime. It’s a false claim.

Since 1990, violent crime rates have fallen as immigration to the US has risen. The American Immigration Council analyzed the 2010 American Community Survey and found that roughly 1.6% of immigrant males age 18-39 are incarcerated, compared to 3.3% of the native-born.

Trump points out that Barack Obama has increased deportations. “We even have a country or we don’t. ... Now you can come back in and you can become a citizen.”

This is a relatively moderate Trump speaking. He sounds almost... reasonable, if you can get past any policy disagreement you might have with him.

Clinton: “We will not have open borders... this used to be a bipartisan issue.”

Wallace gets control, with effort.

Trump with a bombshell: “Hillary Clinton wanted the wall.”

Clinton: “I voted for border security and there are some limited places where that was appropriate.. but it is clear when you look at what Donald has been proposing... that he has a very different view about what we should do.”

She’s running circles around him? This debate so far seems to be playing to Clinton’s strengths, policy expertise, and not to Trump’s strengths – fired

Trump speaks as the debate turns to ‘the wall’.
Trump speaks as the debate turns to ‘the wall’. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

It didn’t work at his convention, but at this late stage of the election, Donald Trump has nowhere left to go. Undocumented immigrants are murderers and rapists. The country is in mortal danger. Heroin is poisoning the blood of the youth. The problem for Trump is that scare tactics didn’t work in the summer, and they’re not working in the fall. All those supposedly bad, bad people don’t drive lots and lots of votes.

Clinton on Trump's Mexico trip: 'He choked'

Clinton: I met a young girl in Las Vegas. Karla. She was born in this country. Her parent were not. She’s worried. “I don’t want to rip families apart. I don’t want to be sending parents away from children. I don’t want to see the deportation force that Donald has talked about in action in our country.”

“It means you would have to have a massive law enforcement presence... rounding up people who were undocumented. And we would have to put them on trains on buses to get them out of the country.. I think that it is an idea that would rip our country apart.”

She’s for border security but wants to prioritize violent criminals for deportations...Now an attack: “at [Trump’s] meeting with the Mexican president, didn’t even mention it [the wall]. He choked. And then got into a Twitter war.”

The candidates strongly disagree on abortion - and so does the US public. Polling from Gallup suggests that national opinion is split almost equally on this subject, and has been for four decades.

US public opinion abortion
US public opinion abortion Photograph: Gallup

On to immigration.

Trump: He says Clinton wants to “give them amnesty.” He says four mothers in the crowd have children who were killed by “illegal immigrants.” “You have no borders you have no country.” “ICE endorsed me.” “I was up in New Hampshire..many of the problems caused by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama...heroin. We have to have strong borders.”

Build a wall? Build a wall? Anyone?

There it is: “I’m going to build a wall. We need a wall... we stop the drugs. .. one of my first acts would be round up all of the drug lords (SNIFF)...and we’re going to get them out.”

Donald Trump under the spotlights.
Donald Trump under the spotlights. Photograph: Joe Raedle/EPA

Updated

Who’s winning? Have your say

This is an extremely well-behaved debate so far. Nothing here that wouldn’t fit in your high school library. On topic, on-point rebuttals...

Trump: “If you go with what Hillary is saying, you can take the baby, in the ninth month, and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother.. it’s not OK with me.”

Clinton: “That is not what happens in these cases, and using this kind of scare rhetoric is just terribly unfortunate. You should meet some of the women who have been affected.”

Clinton levels him in this rebuttal. But we haven’t heard him deny advocating punishments for women who get abortions.

Wallace tries to move on.

Trump: “Nobody has business doing what I just said. Doing that.”

Fact check: guns in America

Trump: “We will have a second amendment that is a very small replica of what it is now” in a Clinton administration

Trump is being reductive: Clinton has never called for abolishing the second amendment, the right to bear arms, though she does support gun control measures such as an assault weapons ban, increased background checks and greater liability for manufacturers.

As moderator Chris Wallace noted, Clinton has said she disagrees with the supreme court’s 5-4 decision in 2008 to broadly affirm the personal right to gun ownership. Her campaign has said Clinton would prefer states have the right to enact as strict gun control laws as they see fit.

Clinton: “We have 33,000 people a year who die from guns”

Clinton is broadly correct. The Centers for Disease Control reported 33,636 firearm deaths in 2013, and similar figures in the years preceding it.

Trump: Chicago has the toughest gun laws and the most gun deaths

Chicago police have pushed back on the notion that the city’s gun laws have proven ineffective, noting that a huge number of gun seizures were of firearms purchased outside the city or outside Illinois, where laws are more lax. Trump is largely correct about Chicago’s homicide problem: the city is on pace to have more than 600 gun deaths in 2016.

Updated

Wallace goes further into the details of abortion policy. Clinton is right there with him. How far should abortion protections extend. She says that Roe v Wade takes into account the health of a mother, which she says often applies in late-term pregnancies where abortion is a possibility.

“I do not think the United States government should be stepping in in those most personal of decisions.”

Next up, abortion. Do you want the court to overturn Roe v Wade?

Trump: “If that will happen ... I would think that that would go back to the individual states.”

Clinton’s eyes go wiiiide.

Trump: “If you put another two or three justices on, that’s what will happen. It’ll happen automatically ... it will go back to the states.”

Clinton: “I strongly support Roe v Wade ... and it’s not only about Roe ... It’s about ... so many states are putting very stringent regulations on women, that block them from exercising that choice.”

She points out that defunding Planned Parenthood would end cancer screenings and other valuable treatments the group administers.

“We have come too far to turn back now.”

“He said women should be punished” for abortion, Clinton says, which is true.

Updated

Trump is asked why he supports a national right-to-carry law.

Trump replies that Chicago has a lot of gun violence despite its tough gun laws. “I’m very proud to have the endorsement of the NRA,” he says.

He says he will appoint justices “that feel very strongly about the second amendment.” He does not answer the question.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Updated

Different twist for Trump. Do you think Clinton will protect it?

Trump says that Clinton was “ignorant” of the DC v Heller decision and “upset.”

Clinton says she was “upset because unfortunately dozens of toddlers” injured or killed people with guns.

She calls for “sensible, common sense legislation.”

Clinton mentions that Trump is supported strongly by the NRA. Trump nods in agreement.

Wallace introduces a twist. He quotes Clinton saying, “The supreme court is wrong on the second amendment.”

Clinton explains. “I support the second amendment,” she says. “I understand and respect the tradition of gun ownership.”

But “there can be and must be reasonable” control. “We have 33,000 people a year who die from guns. We need comprehensive background checks,” close the online loophole and gun show loophole.

These measure would not conflict with the amendment.

Clinton says in the quote she disagreed narrowly with the way the amendment was applied. She recalls details of the case with ease.

Now Trump.

He has a coarse voice? Hoarse voice?

“The supreme court is what it’s all about,” he begins. He’s croaking.

He alludes to a Ruth Bader Ginsberg statement impugning Trump. “These were statements that should never ever have been made.” It’s about him.

He brings up the second amendment. Says Clinton would create a “very very small replica” of it.

He says he’ll name pro-life justices with “a conservative bent,” who will be “great scholars” protect guns and interpret the constitution the way the founders intended.

This answer is on-point too. We’re really in between the ditches so far here.

Republican nominee Donald Trump takes a sip of water.
Republican nominee Donald Trump takes a sip of water. Photograph: Joe Raedle/AFP/Getty Images

Updated

Clinton goes first. She thanks everyone.

The supreme court raises “central issues,” she says. What kind of country will we be?

She feels strongly that the supreme court needs to stand “on the side of the American people, not the corporations and the wealthy”.

She lists women’s rights, LGBT rights, and nixing Citizens United, the permission-of-dark money decision.

Clinton’s all business. Answering the question on the nose.

She brings up marriage equality, Roe v Wade by name. “The supreme court should represent all of us.”

Clinton says she hopes the senate would confirm Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaks.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaks. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

Updated

First question is about the supreme court. Where do you want to see the court take the country and what’s your view on how the constitution should be interpreted?

Here are the candidates. Clinton is in white. Trump in red tie. They don’t come within 50 feet of one another and settle behind their lecterns.

The candidates enter the stage.
The candidates enter the stage. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Updated

OK we’re starting. Good luck all.

Updated

The families are seated. They didn’t shake hands as in the first two debates. This new arrangement was per a Clinton campaign request after it emerged that at the second debate the Trump team had wanted Bill Clinton’s accusers to file in with the Trumps to confront Bill Clinton.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton and his daughter Chelsea Clinton.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton and his daughter Chelsea Clinton. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Updated

In case you had forgotten, both of the presidential candidates in this final debate are deeply unpopular. Both are viewed unfavorably by over half of the US population according to polling averages. So whoever “wins” this debate and whoever becomes US president, a lot of Americans are going to feel unhappy the day after the election.

Trump favorability
Trump’s favorability Photograph: Real Clear Politics
Clinton favorability
Clinton’s favorability Photograph: Real Clear Politics

For usage specialists:

Here comes Chris Wallace, the moderator. He wishes everyone a good evening. And says “be quiet.”

What can it mean

Updated

Here is a live video stream of the debate hall:

Welcome to debate night

If you’re just joining us – welcome to our live-wire coverage of the third and final presidential debate in the 2016 presidential contest. We’re almost home now.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will face off starting at 9pm ET in Las Vegas. The debate will last 90 minutes, with Fox News’ Chris Wallace moderating.

If you’ve come this far, really, you know pretty much what to expect. There’ll be a first question, then an attack, and a counter-attack, and suddenly we’ll be nipples-deep in a swamp of misdirection, denial, insult and despair. Thank you for joining us.

The commission on presidential debates has announced six topic areas for this evening. (Somebody please remind us at night’s end of how many of these we actually get through.) The designated topics are: debt and entitlements, immigration, economy, the supreme court, foreign hotspots and fitness to be president.

Not on the list, once again: climate change.

We’ll have a video live stream atop the blog once the action starts.

Our Guardian reporting team tonight includes Paul Lewis, Sabrina Siddiqui and Ben Jacobs in Las Vegas; Alan Yuhas contributing his instant fact-check; Dan Roberts providing analysis; Mona Chalabi nailing down data; Nicky Woolf chasing breaking news; Adam Gabbatt chilling with Trump supporters; and Nicole Puglise checking in from a pop-up debate party the Guardian US is doing with lovely partners WNYC and Tumblr.

Read further debate preview coverage:

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.

Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”

– Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

Updated

20 minutes to go time

We wanted to repost this logistical information in case it’s useful. We’ll have a live video stream here shortly before the event begins.

What: Third presidential debate

When: Starts at 9pm ET and runs 90 minutes with no commercials

Who: The nominees plus Fox News anchor Chris Wallace

Where: Thomas & Mack Center at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas

Why: ...

Format: The debate will consist of six 15-minute segments, approximately 15 minutes long. Wallace will open each segment with a question, after which each candidate will have two minutes to respond.

Clinton’s Twitter tweaked Trump today for mispronouncing the host state:

If the last three presidential elections are anything to go by (and so far, they haven’t been), tonight’s debate is unlikely to have a huge impact on polling figures. After the DNC, Hillary Clinton got a significant boost in polling averages, as is often the case after the party conventions. Debates, on the other hand, especially final debates, tend to have a smaller impact on public opinion unless there is a very clear winner. That’s partly just a matter of timing - with just 20 days to go until the election, most people have made up their minds and so polls tend to fluctuate less.

Debates and polls

Here’s activist Tom Moran, inside Trump at a rally at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas earlier today:

Tom Moran with his large Trump head at the rally at UNLV hours before the debate Wednesday.
Tom Moran with his large Trump head at the rally at UNLV hours before the debate Wednesday. Photograph: ZUMA Wire/REX/Shutterstock

Here’s new work by the New York-based artist Hope Gangloff:

Courtesy of the artist.
Courtesy of the artist. Photograph: Hope Gangloff

And a worker paints a mask of Donald Trump at the Shenzhen Lanbingcai Latex Crafts Factory in Shenzhen, China (picture from Tuesday):

The factory employees 20-30 people and produces all sorts of Halloween and party costumes and masks.
The factory employees 20-30 people and produces all sorts of Halloween and party costumes and masks. Photograph: Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

Tough luck for whoever’s behind him:

Stick around for our post-debate panel

Assuming we all make it through all 90 minutes of this, we have an invitation we’d like to extend.

We’ve joined forces with WNYC and Tumblr to throw a Pop-Up Debate Party at Tumblr’s headquarters where, after the debate, we’ll be hosting a post-debate flash panel featuring:

Moderator: Nicholas Thompson, editor of NewYorker.com

Kai Wright, host of WNYC & the Nation’s United States of Anxiety Podcast

Jessica Valenti, columnist at the Guardian

Tanzina Vega, national reporter at CNN

Spencer Ackerman, national security editor at The Guardian

We’ll have a live video stream of the panel right here in the blog, so stick around! if you feel like. The Guardian’s Nicole Puglise sends this from the scene:

Updated

Trump’s running mate makes the supreme court argument – whatever you think of Trump, the argument to wavering Republicans goes, you certainly cannot accept the prospect of Hillary Clinton nominating supreme court justices.

Happily for wavering voters everywhere, and ultimately for the republic, Arizona senator John McCain promised this week that Republicans would block any Clinton nominee anyway:

I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up,” he declared.

What will they debate about?

There are many forms of political punditry that seem always to miss the mark. Post-debate analysis comes to mind. Also, pre-debate analysis. Every description in advance of what we expect to happen onstage – the candidate chemistry, the tone, the issues they must surely discuss – those predictions seem unfailingly to miss.

So let’s give it another whirl. What will they discuss tonight? Moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News will have questions cued to the six topic areas announced in advance: debt and entitlements, immigration, economy, the supreme court, foreign hotspots and fitness to be president.

But the candidates’ preferred messages in recent days, especially as Trump is concerned, touch on different themes. Trump has been talking a lot about a rigged election and promised to “drain the swamp” of Washington. In recent days he has proposed ethics reform laws and congressional term limits. Meanwhile, Breitbart, Trump’s phantom media arm, published today (for the first time, it seems) the story of a former Arkansas broadcaster, Leslie Milwee, who says Bill Clinton sexually assaulted her in 1980. She’s invited to the debate.

Trump says that Clinton emails released by Wikileaks show she is part of an international cabal, with banks and the media, to destroy the country and enrich and empower themselves. He has contended that the state department offered the FBI a quid pro quo for declassifying certain Clinton emails just as they were to come in for public scrutiny. Any of these would-be scandals might be expected to come up.

Clinton, for her part, may want to discuss the attack by Trump on his Republican colleagues; Trump’s increasingly wild talk about voter fraud; or the astounding outpouring since the last debate of women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct or assault. (He denies all the claims.) Here is a video telling their stories:

Nine women who accused Trump of sexual misconduct

Updated

Confirmed: Wayne Newton is coming.

Speaking of legendary Las Vegas acts... did anyone think to invite Britney?

Doesn’t matter. She’s busy in another part of town:

Hope amidst ugliness: the outcry from men

Every day it becomes clearer that Hillary Clinton is going to make history and win the presidential election. It’s hard to feel excited or even relieved, though, when her road to victory is so slick with the odium of Donald Trump.

Between the video of Trump bragging about sexual assault and woman after woman coming forward to claim he did just that, it’s hard to stave off that sick-to-your-stomach feeling Michelle Obama described so powerfully last week. For those of us who have endured a lifetime of unwanted leers and touches, this last leg of the campaign has been painful. And as Trump surrogates and supporters –even his wife – continue to shrug off the offenses as “locker room talk” or outright lies, we’re reminded of just how easily women are disbelieved.

There is one thing, though, that’s giving me hope in the midst of this ugliness: the outcry from men who refuse to characterize sexual harassment and abuse as normal male behavior. Too often, discussions about sexual assault center only on women – our victimization and perceived culpability. Since the tape’s release, though, the national conversation has shifted: men are coming forward en masse to reject the idea that “real men” talk about abusing women – that this is normal language to use in a locker room or anywhere else.

Read further:

About 126.9m votes were cast in the 2012 presidential election. It’s started:

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway is proud to be joined at the debate by Malik Obama, the president’s half-brother:

Washington Post editor and Obama biographer David Maraniss has more on Malik Obama:

3) He has gone by 32 names during his life. Roy, Bobby, and finally Malik.

8) By the time Barack Obama reached global fame, Malik wanted to be his Kenyan spokesman, setting up shop in Kisumu and Kogelo.

9) At one point, and I’m sure Trump would love thi about his newfound friend, Malik tried to build a mosque on the Obama compound in Kogelo.

10) By the time I reached Kenya to research biography, Malik wanted to control all interviews and get paid for them.

A new Pew research survey finds that “more than seven in ten (72%) white evangelical Protestants say an elected official can behave ethically even if they have committed transgressions in their personal life—a 42-point jump from 2011, when only 30 % of white evangelical Protestants said the same.”

What changed? And does this even count as a voting bloc anymore, if the whole “family values” thing has been jettisoned?

The Cleveland Indians (that’s baseball) have just won the pennant and are headed to the World Series. The governor noticed:

You’ll recall that the Cleveland Cavaliers (basketball) are the current NBA champions, and when they won the city did this:

Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James, left in yellow cap, celebrates during the NBA championship parade in downtown Cleveland in June.
Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James, left in yellow cap, celebrates during the NBA championship parade in downtown Cleveland in June. Photograph: David Richard/USA Today Sports

Other awesome things to have occurred this year in Cleveland:

Kiss miss.
Kiss miss. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP

We know what you’re all thinking. Where’s the vacuuming picture? When are we going to post the pre-debate vacuuming picture?

A worker cleans the stage prior to the start of the third U.S. presidential debate at the Thomas & Mack Center on October 19, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
A worker cleans the stage prior to the start of the third U.S. presidential debate at the Thomas & Mack Center on October 19, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Additional photojournalism from the scene:

A warm Nevada welcome.
A warm Nevada welcome. Photograph: Daniel Slim/AFP/Getty Images
Members of the Culinary Union, workers rights groups and other immigrant rights groups protested Donald Trump at his hotel.
Members of the Culinary Union, workers rights groups and other immigrant rights groups protested Donald Trump at his hotel. Photograph: UPI / Barcroft Images
Truth.
Truth. Photograph: Jim Urquhart/Reuters

Fun fact – Trump is entirely out of the casino business, and he has never owned a Las Vegas casino, although he’s in talks to build one, the Wall Street Journal reported in February:

Mr. Trump owned casinos in Atlantic City for decades but never had any gambling interests in Nevada. The casinos he developed and owned in Atlantic City went through bankruptcy four times. He no longer has any interest them.

The Trump hotel in Las Vegas is near the northern end of the Las Vegas Strip. It is across from the Wynn Las Vegas, but the rest of the surrounding area is largely underdeveloped because several large-scale projects stopped when they were only partially built during the recession. Now with the casino market in Las Vegas improving, some of the projects have new owners and may be moving forward. Gambling revenue on the Las Vegas Strip was flat last year, but revenue from hotel room rates improved.

She’s with her.

Palin to attend debate - report

Former vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin, also a former governor of Alaska and former Fox News contractor, will attend tonight’s debate as a guest of Donald Trump, CNN reports.

Is this a great opportunity to revisit Palin’s historic on-camera endorsement of Trump in January? Can I get a hallelujah?

Sarah Palin’s weird and wonderful endorsement of Donald Trump

Trump also has invited Malik Obama, an estranged half-brother of the president with possible Hamas ties; Pat Smith, the mother of a state department IT technician killed in the 2012 attacks in Benghazi; Leslie Millwee, a former TV reporter from Arkansas who has accused former president Bill Clinton of sexually assaulting her; and somebody even at some point said Wayne Newton was coming?

Hillary Clinton’s guests are by comparison topical and boring. She has invited Meg Whitman, Hewlett-Packard CEO and erstwhile Republican; Astrid Silva, the immigration activist; Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Kareem Abdul Jabbar; and Mark Cuban, billionaire owner of Dallas Mavericks-slash-bee in Trump’s bonnet. Oh and Le-yawn Panetta.

Also all these people, attending with Clinton:

  • Donna Brazile, Interim Chair of the Democratic National Committee
  • Representative Judy Chu, Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus
  • Lily Eskelsen-Garcia, President of the National Education Association
  • Cindy Guerra, Former Broward County Republican Chair
  • Reverend Jesse Jackson
  • Senator Harry Reid, Senate Democratic Leader
  • Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood Action Fund

Updated

Reminder: As ugly as things get onstage tonight, tomorrow night these people have to eat next to one another.

Trump and Clinton have both said they’ll attend the annual Al Smith dinner Thursday night, “the white-tie Manhattan ritual that drops like an Alka Seltzer every four years, as the race for the White House enters a stage of maximum partisan discomfort,” we said in 2012.

The candidates don formal attire and sit with the archbishop between them, and each must rise and deliver a comedic monologue. Awkward!

Hosted by the archbishop of New York, the dinner promotes itself as a light-hearted break from the campaign trail. In fact it’s a duty to which presidential nominees have docilely submitted since 1960, except when the whiff of controversy, usually over abortion, has made it politically inconvenient for the Catholic Church to invite them.

Here are 2012 highlights:

Obama and Romney joke and jest at Al Smith dinner

Can Trump win without New Hampshire?

A new University of New Hampshire poll has Trump down 15 (fifteen) points in the state, where he notched a 20-point victory in February in a solid six-way primary contest. The National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar notes that the poll squares with reports earlier this week that internal Republican polling had Trump down 14 points in the state.

Does Trump even have a path to victory any longer? “No,” thinks Stuart Rothenberg, author of the eponymous politics report.

Let’s take a quick look at why. Here’s a picture of what was thought to be Trump’s path of least resistance to the presidency, involving a scenario that gets him right to 270, barely, with victory in Maine’s second district and in four or five states where Clinton currently holds solid polling leads.

Take New Hampshire out of this picture, and how does Trump win? A new Monmouth poll today had Clinton up seven points in Wisconsin. Trump claims to be in the lead in Colorado, where polling averages have him down five. Etc, etc.

Updated

Mike Pence is “wheels down in Las Vegas!” and steps off the plane looking very vice presidential. That’s his wife, Karen, beside him.

The band Le Tigre has reassembled and released a track called “I’m with her” in support of Hillary Clinton:

I’m with her

For the sake of balance here also is a Donald Trump song discovered quickly and at random on YouTube:

Have you ever thought you could come up with a better campaign slogan than “Stronger together” or “Make America great again”?

Here are 85 tries by the Clinton campaign to come up with a slogan, if this purported John Podesta email released by Wikileaks is genuine. Can you do better?

Barack Obama reflects on presidency at final White House state dinner

Barack Obama hosted his final state dinner last night, welcoming the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi to the White House and spurring nostalgia for the Obamas’ final months on Pennsylvania Avenue.

State dinners are a longstanding presidential tradition to host international heads of state in the US. Renzi and his wife, Agnese Landini, were treated to a night featuring Italian-influenced food, decor and fashion. Michelle Obama dazzled quite literally in an Atelier Versace gown. The rose-gold, chain mail dress elicited instant reactions online, as well as several look backs at the first lady’s fashion over the years.

The president made brief remarks at the dinner, toasting the relationship between the two countries and touting Italy’s influence on American culture.

“Some days our presidential campaign can seem like Dante’s ‘Inferno,’” he quipped.

The first lady tapped Babbo chef and Food Network regular Mario Batali to prepare the multi-course meal, featuring vegetables from the White House garden. As usual, the chef donned his familiar orange Crocs while preparing and serving the meal.

Donald Trump in 2008: Hillary Clinton will 'go down down at a minimum as a great senator'

Donald Trump’s flip-flopping on issues relating to trade, borders, abortion, gay marriage, the proposed ban on Muslim immigration, the minimum wage, taxation, the Iraq War, the Libyan intervention, gun control, climate change and the Republican Party have been well documented, but CNN just uncovered past statements by the real estate tycoon that even Trump might have a hard time explaining: flattering Hillary Clinton.

“I think she’s a wonderful woman,” Trump said in 2008 in an interview with NY1, according to CNN. “I think that she’s a little bit misunderstood. Hillary’s a very smart woman, very tough women, that’s fine. She’s also a very nice person. I think she’s gonna go down at a minimum as a great senator.”

“I think she is a great wife to a president and I think Bill Clinton was a great president,” Trump continued. “Lot of people hated him because they were jealous as hell. Bill Clinton was a great president. Hillary Clinton is a great woman and a good woman.”

Ivanka Trump: My father will accept the outcome of the election

Joining campaign manager Kellyanne Conway in undercutting her father’s baseless accusation that the impending general election will be stolen due to voter fraud, Ivanka Trump told Time Magazine editor Nancy Gibbs that her father will concede the election to Democratic rival Hillary Clinton if he loses.

“Well, look, my father is in this to win it and, you know, I’m not interested in talking about alternative outcomes and, of course, I think my father will always do the right thing,” Trump said. “That’s the type of person he is.”

Speaking at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, Trump highlighted what she characterized as “vicious” behavior on behalf of the political press, before assuring Gibbs that her father will accept the outcome of the election.

“When you asked me before, do I think it’s rigged, I think from a media perspective, it’s very hard to get an accurate portrayal of who he is as a person or the business he’s built, his professional accomplishments,” Trump said. “It’s borderline impossible. In large part, we’ve stopped even trying with a lot of the mainstream publications because they just don’t - you know, I was going crazy around a year ago calling these reporters, trying to get them to at least hear our perspective and it’s just a waste of time. You fall down such a rabbit hole with this and it doesn’t yield a result.”

“But to your point, if - he’ll either win or he won’t win,” Trump said, “and I believe he’ll accept the outcome either way.”

Election causing uptick in Twitter abuse for Jews and journalists

The 2016 presidential election is causing a “significant uptick” in antisemitism on Twitter, and journalists – particularly Jewish journalists – are especially targeted, according to a new study by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Looking between August 2015 and July 2016, the ADL found 2.6m tweets containing antisemitic language.

A tweet depicting Hillary Clinton and a six-sided star that Trump deleted from his account followed by its replacement, which uses a circle.
A tweet depicting Hillary Clinton and a six-sided star that Trump deleted from his account followed by its replacement, which uses a circle. Photograph: Screengrab

The study focused on 19,253 overtly antisemitic tweets aimed at 800 journalists, 68% of which were sent by just 1,600 Twitter users, which the study said confirms a persistent attack on journalists by a small cohort of Twitter users.

Just 10 journalists received of 83% of these 19,253 tweets; Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart News editor and outspoken critic of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, received 7,400 of the antisemitic tweets, including one calling him a “Christ-Killer”.

Another example picked out by the study is Julia Ioffe, whose profile of Melania Trump for GQ magazine caused a storm of antisemitic responses on Twitter, including a tweet calling her a “filthy Russian kike” and another that includedphotos from Nazi concentration camps, the study described.

Shapiro told the ADL that it was “amazing what’s been unleashed. I honestly didn’t realize they were out there. It’s every day, every single day.” He said that his wife and infant son had also been targeted. “When my child was born there were lots of antisemitic responses talking about cockroaches,” he said.

“I think this is a first-of-a-kind study that we’ve put out, that we think is instructive in terms of understanding how antisemitism is spread in the modern age through social media,” said Oren Segal, the director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism. “It reinforces the work that the ADL does in terms of needing to find ways to mitigate antisemitism, threats of antisemitism, no matter where they are.”

From the press pool: Donald Trump skipped his walk-through at the debate venue in Las Vegas, which had been scheduled for 11:00 am.

The pool had not been informed of the walk through plans.

“He didn’t do the walk through,” a campaign aide told the pool.

When pressed about why, and whether a stand-in participated, the aide said “his debate team is taking care of it.”

59% of Americans say Donald Trump has no sense of decency

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

The fifties are back, according to the latest survey from Quinnipiac University, which found that nearly three in five likely voters believe that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump does not have a sense of decency. Nearly the same number say that Trump is not fit to be president.

A full 59% of likely voters surveyed by Quinnipiac said that Trump has no sense of decency, while 36% said that he does. Hillary Clinton, according to the surveys, does have a sense of decency, 55% to 42% .

In a four-way race, the poll finds that Clinton leads Trump by 7 points among likely voters, 47% to Trump’s 40% among likely voters, with 7% of likely voters supporting Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and 1% supporting Green candidate Jill Stein.

The tabloid of record.

Poll: Paul Ryan's support among Republicans collapses following Trump feud

If you lay down with dogs, you get up with an approval rating that collapses on itself like a dying star.

Buried in new poll results from YouGov that show Hillary Clinton with a commanding lead over Republican rival Donald Trump with less than three weeks to go before the general election are data showing that House speaker Paul Ryan’s favorability rating among Republicans has cratered. Last week, he had a net positivity of 23%.

This week: -5%.

And that’s not even counting Ryan’s popularity (or lack thereof) among Trump supporters. Last week, Ryan had a net 8% positivity rating, which has dropped to a negative 36% disapproval in the week since.

Amy Schumer has written an open letter to fans who walked out of her Sunday standup show in Tampa, Florida, after she made jokes about Donald Trump.

The actor and writer read the letter aloud during her Tuesday show at New York’s Madison Square Garden, according to People.

Amy Schumer booed for mocking Donald Trump on stage in Florida

“I’ve written an open letter to Tampa and I’d like to read it tonight,” she began. “Dearest Tampa, I’m sorry you didn’t want me, a comedian who talks about what she believes in, to mention the biggest thing going on in our country right now. How could I think it was OK to spend five minutes having a peaceful conversation with someone with different views?

“After the show, I want you to know that I will go straight to a rehab facility that will teach me how to make all people happy. Both the rich, entitled, white people who are gonna vote for him and the very poor people – who’ve been tricked into it.”

Donald Trump has a “five-point plan to defeat Islam,” according to his campaign manager.

Bernie Sanders: Being chair of the Senate Budget Committee 'sounds like a very good idea'

In an email to supporters - addressed as “Sisters and Brothers” - Vermont senator and former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said that House speaker Paul Ryan’s threat that Sanders could become the chair of the Senate Budget Committee sounded like “a very good idea to me.”

“I heard what Paul Ryan said about me: that if the Republicans lose the Senate, I will be the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee,” Sanders wrote. “That sounds like a very good idea to me.”

Such a promotion, Sanders continued, “means that we can establish priorities for working people, and not just the billionaire class.”

“What would be equally exciting is if the Democrats took back the House, and Congressman Ryan was no longer Speaker. That would mean the clearest possible path to enact our agenda – the most progressive agenda of any party in American history.”

The message was followed by a fundraising message for congressional Democrats.

Madonna has made a very, erm, unique promise to fans who vote for Hillary Clinton in the upcoming presidential election.

“If you vote for Hillary Clinton,” Madonna told audience members at Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden, “I will give you a blow job.”

“And I’m good,” she elaborated, as the audience laughed and hooted. “I’m not a tool. I take my time.”

Muslim women's group inundated with hate mail after endorsing Hillary Clinton

A post on the aggregator site Drudge Report sparked a cascade of hate mail and phone calls to the American Muslim Women political action committee (Pac) on Tuesday.

Mirriam Seddiq, a criminal defense attorney and the founder of the group, woke up to an email with a link to a site that sold ammunition covered in pork.

“It’s bullets made to kill Muslims,” said Seddiq.

After showing the email to her Pac colleagues, she realized that Drudge Report had highlighted their seven-week-old Pac at the top of its site. A link that read “Hijab for Hillary” referred to a press release of the group endorsing Hillary Clinton last week.

While the link meant their site received a wave in traffic, the press release also contained Seddiq and her colleagues’ names and phone numbers.

“We’ve gotten dozens of hate mail to the website. And then our [communications director] said she had gotten about a dozen if not more hate emails,” Seddiq told the Guardian. “And then the phone calls started.”

Throughout the day, Seddiq and the Pac’s other board members received phone calls telling them to go back to their country, referred to them as towel heads, and some became threatening, Seddiq said.

The American Muslim Women Pac was founded by Seddiq shortly after the Democratic and Republican conventions. The Pac aims to get Muslim women more involved in the election cycle, partly by ensuring more of them register to vote.

Ididn’t give much thought to Canada for the first 18 years of my life. Many Americans would not see this as a problem – Americans who think of Canada as ‘America’s hat’. But when I found myself in a bar with hundreds of Canadian strangers on my first night at university in Montreal (a city where I could legally go to a bar at 18), I realized that this had been a tremendous oversight.

“Who’s the prime minister of Canada?” someone asked me, when I confessed my American-ness. I had no idea, and it hit me like a hockey puck smashed into an unguarded net: my ignorance of Canada was an awful oversight. For my whole life all of these Canadians had been living in Canada, not wanting to be American, drinking milk from bags.

Perhaps that’s why I was particularly moved by the sympathetic message sent south this week by some lovely northern neighbors: America, they say, you guys are already great. Designed by a Toronto-based creative agency, the video and accompanying social media campaign aims to help Canadians to “make a positive contribution to an election season that has been downright depressing”.

Like an ignored younger sibling reaching out to give a gentle squeeze of the hand to a pompous, bullying older one in a time of sudden vulnerability, it’s a most Canadian acknowledgment of our current predicament. Polite. Sensitive. Cheerful. Gently overlooking the fact that Canada rarely crosses the mind of many Americans unless they’re looking for a way to easily emigrate if national leadership is passed into the hands of a despotic, racist egomaniac by a bonkers electorate.

Americans often speak as if “moving to Canada” to escape the worst of the United States is a decision that can be made casually. We discuss the idea as though we believe that Canada is but a giant, pleasant, snowy backyard that we can wander into when we feel like it.

Trump campaign manager: 'I do not believe' there will be widespread voter fraud

In a break from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told MSNBC this morning that she does not think that the upcoming presidential election will be the target of widespread voter fraud, despite her charge’s baseless claims that the election is on the verge of being stolen.

“No, I do not believe that,” Conway told MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle when asked about the (im)possibility of wide-scale fraud at the polls.

“Absent overwhelming evidence that there is, it would not be for me to say that there is,” Conway continued. “We know in the past we know that people who are dead are still on the voter rolls. We know that people are voting a couple different times in places, so you do hear reports here and there.”

On Monday, Trump specifically said that 1.8 million dead people would vote – and for “somebody else”. The statement was apparently a reference to the fact that one 2012 study found up to 1.8 million active voter registrations from deceased voters. In reality the study it found no evidence of fraud or that any illegitimate ballots were cast – it simply meant state voter databases were out of date.

“I think Donald Trump’s point is a larger one,” Conway continued, dismissing Trump’s claims that the election is “rigged” as a criticism of journalists. “She has so many advantages,” Conway said of Hillary Clinton. “She has endless money, she has a lot of the media. She has a very popular president and first lady out there campaigning for her.”

How do you one-up bringing Bill Clinton’s accusers to the second presidential debate? By bringing President Barack Obama’s Kenyan half-brother to the third presidential debate.

Malik Obama, the president’s half-brother, reportedly stopped supporting the Democratic Party - a moot point since he’s not a US citizen and cannot vote, as it happens - when Obama (the president) came out in support of same-sex marriage rights.

If Trump plays his cards right, Obama will be out of the White House by January!

In an interview with Breitbart News, a former local news reporter has accused former president Bill Clinton of sexually assaulting her.

Leslie Millwee told the far-right website that Clinton, then the governor of Arkansas, groped her on three occasions while she was a reporter for a local news station in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

“He followed me into an editing room,” Millwee said. “The first time I remember. That it was very small. There was a chair. I was sitting in a chair. He came up behind me and started rubbing my shoulders and running his hands down toward my breasts. And I was just stunned. I froze. I asked him to stop. He laughed.”

Millwee had previously told the story in a 2011 paperback titled You Can’t Make This Stuff Up!

Milwaukee is one of the most politically polarized and racially segregated cities in America. Paul Lewis and Tom Silverstone discover a mix of alienation and hope in the city’s African American community:

America’s most segregated city: the young black voters of Milwaukee

With less than three weeks until the election, President Barack Obama is keeping his eyes on the down-ballot races - particularly the Democratic pickup opportunity for a party desperate to unseat Florida senator Marco Rubio.

Congressman Patrick Murphy, the newly minted winner of the Miami Herald’s endorsement, has released a new Spanish-language ad featuring the president addressing Spanish-speaking Florida voters.

“Patrick will fight for immigration reform, better education, and higher wages. Working each day to improve our lives,” Obama says in the ad, according to a translation. “Go out and vote for Patrick. Your vote is very important.”

Tonight's debate: Who, what, where, when?

Debate officials are seen on stage inside the Thomas and Mack Center prior to tonight’s debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Debate officials are seen on stage inside the Thomas and Mack Center prior to tonight’s debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Photograph: UPI / Barcroft Images

When is the debate? Like the previous two presidential debates, tonight’s debate starts at 9pm ET and is scheduled to run for 90 minutes without commercial interruption. (Other interruptions, however, are inevitable.)

Who is participating? Aside from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, you mean? Fox News anchor Chris Wallace - the first anchor from that network to host a presidential debate - will moderate tonight’s engagement. For a network that has been embroiled in scandal that brought down its chief executive, Wallace’s position is an opportunity to hit the reset button on a miserable year - although Trump’s willingness to feud with Fox News personalities means that Wallace will not be protected from onstage criticism from the candidate just because he’s besties with Sean Hannity.

What is the format? The debate will consist of six 15-minute segments, following the same format as the first presidential debate. Each segment will be approximately 15 minutes long. Wallace will open each segment with a question, after which each candidate will have two minutes to respond. Clinton and Trump will then have an opportunity to respond to each other. Wallace may use the balance of the time in the segment for a deeper discussion of the topic. Those topics, as revealed by the Commission on Presidential Debates, are as follows:

  • Debt and entitlements
  • Immigration
  • The economy
  • Supreme Court
  • Foreign hot spots
  • Fitness to be president

Where is the debate being held? The debate is being held at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which means that the journalists covering the debate are going to come home broke and hung over (they’ve earned it, trust me).

How do I watch the misery? That’s the easy part! The debate will be broadcast on the three major networks, as well as the cable news networks and C-SPAN. For those watching on their phones at the gym or on their laptops in their fallout shelters, Facebook will stream ABC News’s coverage and Twitter will stream the debates in partnership with Bloomberg.

The increasingly bitter presidential campaign and Donald Trump’s refusal to follow protocol has claimed another victim, this time in the form of the pre-debate handshake between candidates’ spouses.

According to the New York Times, the ritual of Bill Clinton and Melania Trump crossing the stage and shaking hands before the debate’s beginning was likely scuttled after the Clinton campaign responded to Trump’s attempts in the second presidential debate to seat three women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual impropriety in his family box, which would mean the former president of the United States shaking hands with women who have accused him of sexual assault on national television.

This time, the Clintons aren’t horsing around:

But the Clinton side is not taking any chances at the final presidential debate, on Wednesday night in Las Vegas, and has apparently gained approval of a different protocol for the entry of the candidates’ spouses and families into the debate hall.

Hillary for America is making a bid for national unity in the campaign’s latest advertisement, A Place for Everyone - part of what the campaign is characterizing as its “closing argument.”

Narrated by Hillary Clinton, the ad splices together footage of diverse Americans performing everyday tasks while the former secretary of state intones that her “vision of America is an America where everyone has a place.”

Donald Trump may be a nightmare for fans of logic, justice and the English language. But he’s a godsend for any writer out to capture a character you can’t ignore.

Small wonder so many songwriters signed on to 30 Days, 30 Songs, a kind of sonic pop-up project that has been delivering a new message of protest every 24 hours for the entire month leading up to the election. Each piece means to offer a different view of the mother of all reality show stunts: the Trump campaign.

Nine have been released so far, together swirling a cocktail of wit, vitriol and apoplexy. Not every participant in this project wrote a song to order. Josh Ritter’s The Temptation of Adam first turned up on an album nearly a decade ago, while Jim James’s Same Old Lies already served as the first single off his forthcoming solo album. For yesterday’s release, REM retro-fitted a song from nearly 20 years ago. It’s a live version of World Leader Pretend, a song whose megalomaniacal, wall-building narrator originally served as a metaphor for a self-involved lover. Subbing in Trump proves not that big a leap.

Siren: A new poll from the Arizona Republic shows Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton leading in the Grand Canyon state by five points - yes, you read that correctly.

Clinton has won the support of 39% of likely Arizona voters, according to the poll, while Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is supported by a dismal (for a Republican in Arizona) 33.9%. An additional 20% of Arizona voters are undecided.

This latest poll only adds more credit to the theory that Arizona’s shifting demographics may put the state in play, considered a fantasy for most of the 2016 campaign. The idea that blood-red Arizona’s 11 electoral votes could be up for grabs has inspired a flurry of campaign spending and surrogate placement by the Clinton campaign this week, with more than $2m in advertisements purchased and first lady Michelle Obama set to address a Phoenix campaign rally tomorrow afternoon.

For more on Arizona’s purple-ish possibilities, The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino reported from Phoenix:

Updated

Debate notifications: reactions and fact-checks straight to your phone

During the third and final US presidential debate tonight, the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab will send experimental notifications with real-time reactions and live fact-checks from Guardian US reporters and editors.

These notifications are separate from the breaking news alerts sent through the Guardian mobile app, and you don’t have to be an app user to take part in this experiment.

Please take the follow-up survey we’ll send out following the experiment. Your feedback is important to us, and will inform our future work.

Looks like Donald Trump is getting his wall after all.

In anticipation of tonight’s final presidential debate, the Culinary Workers Union is building a wall of taco trucks outside Trump International Hotel, miles away from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s campus – the setting for the showdown between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

The rally aims to have at least five taco trucks as well as a giant banner designed as a wall where members, organizers and participants will be able to write messages and sign their names. While approximately 400 people are expected to rally in the morning on the Las Vegas strip, the trucks will be handing out free tacos in order to support the protest. The union has been using Twitter and other social media platforms as they promote their #WallOfTacos and #TacosOnEveryCorner event, hoping to make some noise before the debate.

They will be joined by representatives from Plan Action, Latino Victory Project, iAmerica, Center for Community Change Action, For Our Future, and 50 immigrant advocacy activists from Los Angeles. The Democrat Ruben Kihuen – who is running to represent the fourth congressional district in the House – will also speak at the rally.

“We’re protesting Donald Trump’s hotel here in Vegas, where a majority of workers voted to unionize,” said Kihuen. “Trump has failed to sit down at the table with them.”

In an “exclusive” interview with The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert, “Melania Trump” - who suspiciously looks like Broadway star Laura Benanti - appeared via satellite to clear the air around Donald Trump’s most recent controversies.

Marco Rubio has declared that, unlike many other members of his party, he will not answer any questions relating to emails hacked by the Russian government and released by WikiLeaks:

I will not discuss any issue that has become public solely on the basis of WikiLeaks. As our intelligence agencies have said, these leaks are an effort by a foreign government to interfere with our electoral process and I will not indulge it. Further, I want to warn my fellow Republicans who may want to capitalize politically on these leaks: Today it is the Democrats. tomorrow it could be us.

Looks like somebody took the Miami Herald editorial calling him “a disappointment” to heart.

What to expect at tonight's debate

Good morning, and welcome to the Guardian’s campaign liveblog.

Donald Trump’s plane idles near Hillary Clinton’s plane in Las Vegas.
Donald Trump’s plane idles near Hillary Clinton’s plane in Las Vegas. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

With a mere 20 days until election day, the bleary eyes of a campaign-weary nation are aimed squarely at Las Vegas, where the third and final presidential debate between Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican rival Donald Trump is set to begin in 12 hours.

In the nine days since the two candidates last met, the polling gap between Clinton and Trump has yawned ever wider, after 10 women came forward with allegations that Trump had sexually assaulted them in incidents stretching back decades. Trump’s response - that the accusers were Clinton plants with the goal of “rigging” the upcoming election - may have appeased some of his supporters, but a late-breaking survey from Fox News last night shows just how far the Republican presidential nominee’s chances of victory in November have fallen:

  • Clinton has a 6-point national lead over Trump, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg ...
  • The poll, one of the first to be conducted entirely after the full slate of Trump’s accusers came forward, shows Clinton leading among women by 7 points.
  • Whites with a college degree, long a Republican bloc, favor Clinton by 9 points.
  • Voters believe, by a two-to-one margin, that Trump committed at least some of the sexual assaults of which he has been accused.
  • Clinton leads on every single issue, minus the economy, as well as on qualifying attributes like temperament, judgment and making decisions about the use of nuclear weapons.

So how does this affect tonight?

Tonight’s debate may be Trump’s last opportunity to salvage the dwindling support that in recent weeks has seemingly placed the election increasingly out of the Republican nominee’s reach - and if we’ve learned anything about Trump over the past 16 months, it’s that he’s at his most vicious when backed into a corner. Repetitions of his baseless claims of voter fraud to assert that the election is “rigged”, as well as continued references to Bill Clinton’s past personal scandals, are a given.

Clinton, unflappable in the second debate even as Trump invited women who have accused her husband of sexually predatory behavior, is unlikely to take the bait.

“We understand the strategy that he is trying to do to explain his loss and also to try to deter voters,” said Jenn Palmieri, the Clinton campaign’s communications director, “[but] we believe that it’s going to be easier to vote than ever before.”

Updated

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