How much did Donald Trump hurt himself in final debate?

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both launched powerful, damaging attacks in Wednesday night’s final presidential debate. But the biggest wound may have been self-inflicted: Trump’s refusal to say he would accept the results of the Nov. 8 election as legitimate if he lost. It is unprecedented for one of the two major party presidential candidates to say this so close to an election. This is how societies lurch toward anarchy — when the leader of a political party implies or alleges the election was stolen after its outcome.

In a campaign as full of twists and turns as this one, that moment may ultimately be overshadowed — especially after a debate in which both candidates reduced each other to caricatures.

Clinton has never been more effective at raising doubt about Trump’s temperament, only starting with how “appalled” she was that he won’t necessarily accept the election results. His refusal to admit he’s wrong. His habit of saying things that don’t go his way are “rigged,” even an Emmy award that his reality TV show didn’t win. His fondness for belittling people who cross him, including the nine women who recently accused him of grossly improper behavior. The evidence that on the question of whether Russia was behind the hacks of Democrats, “he’d rather believe Vladimir Putin than the military and civilian intelligence professionals who are sworn to protect us,” as Clinton said.

Trump didn’t help himself by beginning his response to the very first question about his vision for the Supreme Court by complaining that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had criticized him. That was yet another illustration of how thin-skinned and self-centered he is.

But Trump has never been more effective in casting Clinton as duplicitous and corrupt. His contrasting of the Justice Department’s treatment of the former Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman, Gen. James E. Cartwright, who faces five years in prison for lying to the FBI, with its treatment of Clinton, who faced no charges in her email debacle even as her contractor destroyed subpoenaed evidence. His recounting of how Clinton told Goldman Sachs executives she was for “open borders” in this hemisphere even as she repeatedly said otherwise in public. His noting, after Clinton depicted the Clinton Foundation as noble and principled, that the foundation took tens of millions of dollars from nations that treat gay people and women horribly.

Clinton didn’t help herself by claiming her call for “open borders” was about a shared energy grid; that’s not how it looked to The New York Times. Nor did she help herself by simply ignoring key parts of questions posed by moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News about whether her husband’s record with women undercut her attempts to go after Trump’s behavior or whether revelations of heavy ties between her Clinton Foundation and her State Department violated her 2009 pledge in confirmation hearings to avoid such conflicts of interest.

Yet with 20 days to go, the conventional wisdom that the race is hers to lose feels accurate. Compare Clinton’s frequent overtures to female voters with Trump’s assertion that “Nobody has more respect for women than I do” and his quip that Clinton is “such a nasty woman.”

The candidates’ temperaments may swing this election more than anything. And theirs were on display for undecided voters to see last night.

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