For the first half an hour or so, Donald Trump exceeded expectations. He maintained a surprising degree of being even tempered and gave the audience fairly straightforward answers. Then the wheels came off, and once again, Trump was the rude and crude candidate we have grown tired of. I guess he does just does not have the stamina.

Hillary Clinton in some ways had her best evening. The format of the debate allowed her to show her chops on policy details. She played to her base and she used every opportunity to speak to Republican women and men from the suburbs. Hillary showed her knowledge repeatedly, and with an ever growing sense of confidence she again ignored Trump’s interruptions.

There was a genuine discussion of their differences on policy for the first part of the debate. But eventually Trump wore down and made three serious mistakes: one of which was to refer to latinos as bad hombres, second he called Hillary a nasty woman which I am sure did not endear himself to women, and lastly and most importantly he made a disqualifying statement when he basically said he would not accept the outcome of the election as being legitimate.

Let me speak to Donald Trump’s statement about keeping the American people in suspense regarding whether he would accept the verdict of the electorate on election night. We have a sacred tradition in this country of a peaceful succession and transition of power, where a candidate accepts defeat and lets the winner take power without any bitterness or complaint from the loser. Donald Trump’s statement last night was not some surprise to his followers as they had a ready excuse in the spin room and on various networks. The excuse was a lie but they had a ready excuse never the less, claiming that Al Gore contested the election of 2000. Well, yes he initially did because we did not know who won because of our electoral college system. Al Gore received 500,000 more votes and we had this little controversy about those hanging chads in Florida. Then the Trump team and Trump himself drug out an exaggeration from a Pew report to throw more confusion into the fray by claiming that 2,000,000 dead people were going to vote. The truth is that yes, there are people who died and have not been cleansed from the voter rolls, but that does not mean that somehow their votes would be counted. Like his days as a birther, Trump likes to throw doubt into our electoral process by claiming that somehow a President is not legitimate. Now even before most of the ballots have been cast he is whining about the outcome, to give himself an excuse and not a reason to claim foul that somehow the system is being rigged against him. His goal is to cast doubt on whether or not Hillary Clinton would be a legitimate winner of the election on November the 8th.He even claimed last night that Hillary Clinton should not even be allowed to run for President.  He has disqualified himself in his actions and statements to be President of the United States. He is no better than some wanna be tea pot dictator from a banana Republic who uses such claims when it comes to our having an election where all of us have a chance to have our say on who will be the next President of the United States. He is not fit to be President, we must reject his candidacy and maintain our traditions of who we are as a nation. His whole candidacy is an insult to who we are as a people.