There was always a logical end to the Putin infatuation: that Trump would pick a fight with democracy itself. Photograph by Win McNamee / Getty

“Now we can talk about Putin,” Donald Trump said at the third Presidential debate, last night. “I don’t know Putin. He said nice things about me. If we got along well, that would be good.” He started to talk about Putin’s view of Hillary Clinton, who was standing a few feet away from him, in a college basketball arena in Las Vegas. “Look, Putin, from everything I see, has no respect for this person.”

“Well, that’s because he’d rather have a puppet as President of the United States,” Clinton said.

“No puppet,” Trump said vigorously. “No puppet.”

“And it’s pretty clear—”

“You’re the puppet!” Trump said.

“It’s pretty clear you won’t admit—”

“No. You’re the puppet.”

The rhythm of this exchange is so concise and barbed that it reads like an epigraph. Onstage, it established the theme of the night: Who was the puppet, and who the puppeteer? Later, in the evening’s major drama, Trump refused to say whether he would accept the election as legitimate if it was found that he lost. “I’ll keep you in suspense,” he said. The main characters, their ambitions and flaws, had been established long ago. But the third debate, the most substantive of the three, expertly moderated by Fox News’s Chris Wallace, revealed the true subject of the election. By the end of the night, the story was about dictators and democracies. Perhaps it always has been.

The exchange about Putin began when Clinton, a little artlessly, diverted a question about her remarks to a Brazilian bank, which have been released by WikiLeaks, into a call for Trump to acknowledge that Russian actors are behind the leaks and are attempting to meddle in our election. At first, Trump noticed that this was, basically, a diversion. “That was a great pivot off the fact that she wants open borders, O.K.?” Trump said. “How did we get onto Putin?” He might have stopped there. Instead, he insisted that neither Clinton nor anyone else could be sure that the cyberattacks had come from Russia—“She has no idea”—a position that put him in conflict with roughly the entire American intelligence community.

Then, unprovoked, he began to compare Putin to Clinton. “She doesn’t like Putin because Putin has outsmarted her at every step of the way,” Trump said. Wallace tried to cut him off—an act that, in retrospect, might have helped save the candidate from himself. “Excuse me,” Trump continued. “Putin has outsmarted her in Syria.” Trump started to name other areas in which the Russian dictator had outsmarted Clinton. “Missiles,” he said. He named a nuclear treaty. Later, when the conversation turned to Syria, Trump had similar words about Bashar al-Assad. “He turned out to be much tougher than she thought,” he said. “He’s just much tougher and much smarter than her and Obama.” Trump kept insisting that he and Putin were not acquainted. “I don’t know him,” Trump said, and, as far as anyone has been able to tell, that is true. His descriptions of Putin and Assad were not studies of individuals but projections of his self-image: intelligent, strong, and pugnaciously—and successfully—opposed to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Trump is an opportunistic political operator. Usually, you can detect the pander. His veneration of Putin, unusually, wins him no obvious constituency. What Putin does give Trump is an alternate model of political personality, premised on strength. “I am your voice,” Trump told his supporters at the Republican National Convention, full of emotion. He named problems facing the Republic and said, “I alone can fix it.” Last night, some commenters claimed that Trump’s performance had betrayed the conflicting influence of his two campaign directors. The more controlled episodes bore the stamp of Kellyanne Conway; the wilder ones reflected Steve Bannon. But, to Trump, Conway and Bannon are employees, not puppeteers. Those photographs of Trump at home with Melania and his son Barron, amid marble columns and Versailles chandeliers, offer a clearer view of him. They are evidence of peerlessly tacky taste. They also suggest a man with some interest in being king.

There was always a logical end to the Putin infatuation: that Trump would pick a fight with democracy itself. When Wallace asked him, point-blank, if he would accept the results of the election, Trump insisted that the machinery of democracy was broken. The media, he said, “is so dishonest and so corrupt.” There were “millions of people that are registered to vote that shouldn’t be registered to vote.” His opponent “shouldn’t be allowed to run. She’s guilty of a very, very serious crime.” When pressed, he refused to say whether he’d accept the results of the election. Trump said, “I’ll tell you at the time.”

“I can’t deal with every one of his conspiracy theories,” Clinton said, speaking to reporters on her campaign plane, shortly after the debate ended. (During the debate, Trump had also accused Clinton and Obama of paying the protesters who disrupted his rallies.) The chances that Trump wins the election are close to vanishing: he is behind by a margin that no one has ever returned from, and last night’s debate did not help. There is another possibility now, which is that the Trump faction will not accept a loss. So much depends upon the relationship between the candidate and his core supporters—on whether they view him as a convenient vehicle for their anger or whether they have a deeper attachment to his cult of personality. The electors, certified by the states, will meet on December 19th to pick a President. Maybe that will be the day when the darkness of the Trump campaign recedes. Maybe it will be with us even longer.

More from the third debate: John Cassidy on Trump’s "rigged" election and Amy Davidson on Trump and the "nasty woman."