UNLV debate not Donald Trump’s best night

The election is rigged, says Donald Trump, and he will not commit to accepting the outcome until after Election Day comes.

In other words, there are two kinds of elections: The kind you win, and the kind that are somehow stolen from you by nefarious people using methods and means that are never really proven, but only hinted at.

Call it the Sharron Angle school of campaigning, after Harry Reid’s 2010 foe who has made a cottage industry out of slyly implying Reid stole the election. Despite years of requests to produce proof, Angle never has. And although Trump has said he believes the system is rigged and there are “millions” of improperly registered voters, he’s also short on proof. (He’s cited Pew Center reports, but fact checks have found his evidence wanting.)

But that didn’t stop him from refusing to say what he’d do on Election Day if he found himself the loser.

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump said, after being reminded that his running mate Mike Pence said the ticket would “absolutely” accept the results of the election. “I’m not looking at anything now. I’ll look at it at the time.”

Moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News persisted, noting that there’s a long tradition of losers conceding to winners in America. But Trump would not budge. “What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time,” Trup said. “I’ll keep you in suspense. OK?”

It wasn’t OK with rival Hillary Clinton.

“Well, Chris, let me respond to that, because that’s horrifying,” Clinton said. (Horrifying? Really? Was there a single person in all of America who was surprised in the least about what Trump said? Even Clinton went on to prove how typical it was.)

“You know, every time Donald thinks things are not going in his direction, he claims whatever it is, is rigged against him,” Clinton continued.

“The FBI conducted a year-long investigation into my e-mails. They concluded there was no case; he said the FBI was rigged. He lost the Iowa caucus. He lost the Wisconsin primary. He said the Republican primary was rigged against him. Then Trump University gets sued for fraud and racketeering; he claims the court system and the federal judge is rigged against him. There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged against him.”

Replied Trump: “Should have gotten it.” OK, that was funny.

The point is, Clinton has become the nation’s foremost Trump needler, able to provoke a reaction with just a few words, erasing what must have been weeks of attempted Manchurian Candidate-like debate preparation. In Wednesday’s debate, for example, Clinton slammed Trump in the following ways:

• She said he got a loan from his father to start his business. (She says it was $14 million; he says it was just $1 million.)

• She reminded the audience that Trump had sent jobs to Mexico and a number of other foreign locales, all while he angrily denounces jobs leaving the country.

• She claimed he’d used cheaper Chinese steel in his Trump Tower building, and used illegal immigrant labor to construct it.

• She implied he’d be a puppet of Russian President Vladmir Putin.

• She reminded the crowd that the Trump Foundation had purchased a portrait of Trump with donated dollars. “Who does that?” Clinton asked.

• And she contrasted her career with his in devastating form:

“You know, back in the 1970s, I worked for the Children’s Defense Fund,” Clinton said. “And I was taking on discrimination against African-American kids in schools. He was getting sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination in his apartment buildings.

“In the 1980s, I was working to reform the schools in Arkansas. He was borrowing $14 million from his father to start his businesses. In the 1990s, I went to Beijing and I said women’s rights are human rights. He insulted a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, called her an eating machine.

“And on the day when I was in the Situation Room, monitoring the raid that brought Osama bin Laden to justice, he was hosting the “Celebrity Apprentice.” So I’m happy to compare my 30 years of experience, what I’ve done for this country, trying to help in every way I could, especially kids and families get ahead and stay ahead, with your 30 years, and I’ll let the American people make that decision.”

No wonder Trump blurted toward the end of the debate, “She’s such a nasty woman.”

That’s not to say Trump didn’t get some good lines in, or refer to allegations against Clinton that he says should have been disqualifying, including deleting emails from her private server that Congress was seeking. “She shouldn’t be allowed to run,” Trump said. “It’s crooked — she’s — she’s guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run.”

And Trump also denounced Clinton in light of reports that people working for the Democratic National Committee appeared to encourage violence at Trump rallies. They were caught discussing the alleged scheme by a right-wing provocateur who has made a career out of embarrassing liberal groups with secretly recorded videos.

Defending himself from charges that he’d inappropriately groped women, Trump referred to the video scandal: “Just like if you look at what came out today on the clips where I was wondering what happened with my rally in Chicago and other rallies where we had such violence? She’s the one and Obama that caused the violence. They hired people — they paid them $1,500, and they’re on tape saying be violent, cause fights, do bad things.”

But Trump’s defenses to other Clinton charges were plainly unbelievable. After she alleged that he defended himself from the assault allegations by saying some of the women in question were not attractive, Trump denied having said, although he clearly did say that about at least one of them.

When Clinton reminded the crowd that Trump had once mocked a disabled New York Times reporter, he again denied he’d done so. But he clearly did that.

And when she reminded the crowd that Trump has skipped out on paying taxes, he actually replied that it was Clinton’s fault for not changing the law that allows people to write off business income or loss! “You should have changed the law. But you won’t change the law, because you take in so much money,” Trump said. (So, stop me before I carry forward massive business loss for years and years again!?)

It was, to sum, not Trump’s best debate night.