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Presidential debate: Trump and Clinton go head-to-head for the final time – live
Presidential debate live: Trump and Clinton go head-to-head for final time
(35 minutes later)
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Here comes Chris Wallace, the moderator. He wishes everyone a good evening. And says “be quiet.”
Trump: 'of course I condemn' any Russian interference
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Trump interrupts: She has no idea. She has no idea. Hillary you have no idea.
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“She doesn’t like Putin because Putin has outsmarted her every step of the way. Putin has outsmarted her in Syria...”
What can it mean
Wallace for Trump: “Do you condemn any interference by Russia?”
I will be handing over my Twitter account to my team of deplorables for tonight's #debate#MakeAmericaGreatAgain
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.”
Got her back? #DebateNight pic.twitter.com/GpNCJMEOGM
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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.
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Here is a live video stream of the debate hall:
Fact check: abortion and immigration
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Alan Yuhas
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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.”
Welcome to debate night
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.
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.
Trump: Clinton wants open borders
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.
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.
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.
Trump: “Obama has moved millions of people out”
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.
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.
Not on the list, once again: climate change.
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We’ll have a video live stream atop the blog once the action starts.
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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.
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.”
No TV, no problem: How to watch tonight's final presidential #debate (By @hwise) https://t.co/bVFFZTeycT
Trump: “Thank you.”
Read further debate preview coverage:
Clinton: “I was talking about energy. We trade more energy with our neighbors than we do with the rest of the world combined.”
Woman on Vegas street: "Why all the police?"Cop: "For the debate tonight."Woman: "Debate? What debate?"
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.
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.
The most important question of this evening, she says: “Finally will Donald Trump admit that Russia is doing this?” And will he reject Putin?
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.”
“That was a great pivot,” Trump says. Crowd laughs.
– Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
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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:
Spoiler alert: He was actually wrong. #Debate pic.twitter.com/EVaiJio993
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Mona Chalabi
Mona Chalabi
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.
Donald Trump has returned to a recurring theme of his candidacy - that immigrants drive up crime. It’s a false claim.
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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.
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Here’s activist Tom Moran, inside Trump at a rally at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas earlier today:
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Here’s new work by the New York-based artist Hope Gangloff:
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.”
And a worker paints a mask of Donald Trump at the Shenzhen Lanbingcai Latex Crafts Factory in Shenzhen, China (picture from Tuesday):
This is a relatively moderate Trump speaking. He sounds almost... reasonable, if you can get past any policy disagreement you might have with him.
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Clinton: “We will not have open borders... this used to be a bipartisan issue.”
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Wallace gets control, with effort.
Tough luck for whoever’s behind him:
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar gets a front row seat for #Debatenight at @UNLV pic.twitter.com/mOGyYsLCES
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Trump with a bombshell: “Hillary Clinton wanted the wall.”
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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.”
Stick around for our post-debate panel
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
Assuming we all make it through all 90 minutes of this, we have an invitation we’d like to extend.
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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:
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Moderator: Nicholas Thompson, editor of NewYorker.com
Richard Wolffe
Kai Wright, host of WNYC & the Nation’s United States of Anxiety Podcast
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.
Jessica Valenti, columnist at the Guardian
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Tanzina Vega, national reporter at CNN
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Spencer Ackerman, national security editor at The Guardian
Clinton on Trump's Mexico trip: 'He choked'
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:
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.”
Loving these buttons at this @GuardianUS / @WNYC / @tumblr debate party like the true millennial that I am pic.twitter.com/wq5qcq1GoJ
“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.”
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Mona Chalabi
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.
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Trump: "We have some bad hombres here and we are going to get 'em out"
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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.”
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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.
Who’s winning? Have your say
Pence on CNN: "The Supreme Court is literally on the ballot"
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.
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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:
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Confirmed: Wayne Newton is coming.
Our #debate2016 guests tonight include Marcus Luttrell, Pat Smith, and the legendary Wayne Newton.
Speaking of legendary Las Vegas acts... did anyone think to invite Britney?
Doesn’t matter. She’s busy in another part of town:
Tonight. #PieceOfMe is back. I. Can’t. Wait!!! Missed you, Vegas! pic.twitter.com/MQo0bDghX2
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Hope amidst ugliness: the outcry from men
Jessica Valenti
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:
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About 126.9m votes were cast in the 2012 presidential election. It’s started:
As this evening's debate approaches: at least 2.3 million people have already voted
