WASHINGTON—She was comfortably ahead in the polls. Conventional wisdom held that she merely needed to play it safe, avoid a catastrophic error.

Instead, Hillary Clinton went for the kill. And it worked.

Clinton, briefly a defence lawyer, used the final presidential debate Wednesday to play prosecutor. At the very least, she denied her opponent his last big chance to improve his plummeting prospects. At most, she crushed them.

The Democratic presidential candidate left Republican Donald Trump sputtering with attacks on his friendliness to Russia, his treatment of women and his hypocrisy on trade and immigration. Smiling and calm, she goaded him into a series of damaging moments that seemed likely to reinforce negative perceptions of his judgment and personality.

And Clinton twice delivered what amounted to a closing argument: the election was not about political ideology, but the country’s character.

“I hope that as we move in the last weeks of this campaign, more and more people will understand what’s at stake in this election. It really does come down to what kind of country we are going to have,” she said.

In the debate’s most striking moment, and an astonishing break from American and democratic traditions, Trump repeatedly refused to say that he would accept the result of the election.

“I will look at it at the time,” he said, adding, “I’ll keep you in suspense.”

“That’s horrifying,” Clinton responded.

Trump, as usual, told numerous brazen lies — on Iraq, on refugees, on Clinton’s record at the State Department, on taxes. In one particularly surreal moment, he denied that he had responded to the numerous sexual assault allegations against him by calling his accusers too physically unattractive for him to want to assault them. He had made such comments repeatedly, this very week, at televised rallies.

With election day less than three weeks away, Trump did not appear to do nearly enough to help himself, even if the night was not the catastrophe some pundits said it was. By the 80th minute of the 90-minute debate, he had lost the fleeting calm with which he had started, lashing out at moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News.

His frustration boiled over again in the debate’s final minutes, when he called Clinton “such a nasty woman.” All in all, Trump’s muttering fury did not seem likely to improve voters’ views of his temperament, perhaps the greatest of his many weaknesses, or his standing with the moderate women who have abandoned him in droves.

The debate, in Las Vegas, offered Trump one final prime-time opportunity to improve his standing. He has been in free fall since the first debate three weeks ago, and he has been besieged by the controversy that began with a leaked 2005 video of him boasting about groping women without their consent.

Trump’s temper first rose when Clinton pressed him on his cosiness with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Trump took the bait, furiously denying that he was close with Putin, rejecting the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia is responsible for a computer hack of the Democratic party, and calling again for closer ties with America’s strategic adversary.

“If Russia and the United States got along well and went after ISIS, that would be good. He has no respect for her. He has no respect for our president,” Trump said, referring to Putin.

“Well, that’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president,” Clinton said.

“You’re the puppet,” Trump said.

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It seemed at first that the debate might descend immediately into the personal insults that have characterized a surreal campaign. Among Trump’s guests in the debate hall were President Barack Obama’s half-brother Malik, who has endorsed Trump, and Leslie Millwee, a former Arkansas television reporter who is accusing Bill Clinton of sexual assault.

Instead, Clinton and Trump had largely substantive exchanges on immigration, abortion and foreign affairs — though they were tinged with their obvious personal acrimony, Trump’s more unrestrained than Clinton’s. Trump again made no effort to appeal to the centre, choosing once more to focus on riling up the devoted base that is not big enough to give him a victory on Nov. 8.

Their differences were particularly vivid on immigration. Trump immediately vowed deportations — a policy popular with the Republican base but unpopular with the general electorate.

“One of my first acts will be to get all of the drug lords,” he said. “We have some bad, bad people in this country that have to go out. We’ll get them out, secure the border, and once the border is secured, at a later date we’ll make a determination as to the rest. But we have some bad hombres here, and we’re going to get them out.”

Clinton, conversely, vowed to pursue in the first 100 days of her presidency a comprehensive immigration reform bill that includes a path to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants.

“As he was talking,” she said, “I was thinking about a young girl I met here in Las Vegas, Karla, who was very worried that her parents might be deported because she was born in this country but they were not. They work hard and do everything they can to give her a good life. And you’re right, 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.”

The candidates also put forth widely disparate views on abortion. Clinton defended late-term abortions, calling them “often the most heartbreaking, painful decisions for families to make” and saying it should not be the business of the government to become involved in the decision.

Trump, formerly a pro-choice Democrat, was evasive on the question of whether he wants to see the Supreme Court overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that guarantees legal abortion. But he said such procedures “rip the baby out of the womb of the mother,” and added that he would appoint pro-life justices.

Clinton had an evasive plan for Wallace’s questions about her vulnerabilities, like her speeches to Wall Street banks: simply turn the subject to Trump’s vulnerabilities. He did not seem able to resist the provocations.

His unwillingness to let slights slide was apparent from his very first response of the night. Asked in what direction he would like to take the Supreme Court, and how the court should interpret the Constitution, he began by criticizing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for criticizing him.

Debate recap

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