Donald Trump’s contempt for women—and the lack of discipline it seemed to induce in him—was a leitmotif of the debate. Photograph by Mark Ralston-Pool / Getty

“She shouldn’t be allowed to run,” Donald Trump said, of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, who was standing next to him on the debate stage in Las Vegas on Wednesday night. “It’s crooked—she’s—she’s guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run. And just in that respect I say it’s rigged.” Trump’s tone was heated; to make this point, he had talked over the interjections of the moderator, Chris Wallace, and he kept on doing so, making clear how little he cares for decorum or democracy. This person—this woman—shouldn’t be allowed to contend, let alone win. Wallace’s question had been about whether Trump would accept the results of the election; Trump wouldn’t even accept the premise.

When Lester Holt asked the same question in the first debate, Trump replied, at first, by making insinuations about immigrants and voter fraud. But, when Holt pressed him, he finally said that he would “absolutely” accept the results. That was not the case when Wallace put it to him. “I will look at it at the time,” Trump said. “I’m not looking at anything now. I’ll look at it at the time.” This was a radical statement for a Presidential candidate to make on the debate stage. (My colleague John Cassidy has more on what it says about the state of the race.) It is not, unfortunately, a real break with what Trump has been saying at his rallies for months. What is the “it” that he would be looking at, other than the electoral-vote totals? If he’d be looking for fraud, then, well, he has been saying that he sees “it” for months. There is no evidence that the election is being stolen, as much as Trump may mutter about “millions” of fraudulent voter registrations. But, then, he regards the absence of stories about his glorious march to victory as proof enough that something is deeply amiss. (Melania Trump argued as much in her interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday night.) Indeed, this was the first reason he gave, in his answer to Wallace, for declining to affirm his support for the electoral process. The media—“so dishonest and so corrupt”—had, he said, “poisoned the mind of the voters.” Apparently, he regarded ballots duly cast by these “poisoned” citizens as unworthy of his respect—as votes that he might, if he felt like it on the night of the election, ignore. (This is very different from Al Gore, in 2000, asking that all the votes be counted.)

Perhaps what Trump is having trouble gauging now is how he might feel when he looks at a television on Election Day and sees the smiling face of Hillary Clinton as she is announced as the President-elect. He might react as he did when, late in the debate, she delivered a strong answer about Social Security that referred to the taxes he’s avoided paying. His features receded into a pool of curdled dust. “Such a nasty woman,” he said. In 2016, a major-party nominee for President seems to have mistaken misogyny for an argument against democratic legitimacy.

Trump’s contempt for women—and the lack of discipline it seemed to induce in him—was a leitmotif of the debate. Chris Wallace’s first question was about the kind of Supreme Court Justices each candidate would nominate. There will be at least one opening, unless the Senate does its job and acts on the nomination of Merrick Garland, and, Wallace noted, “likely or possibly two or three appointments.” This should have been an easy one for Trump—a warmup question covered in any decent debate prep. There are voters with reservations about his character who might vote for him anyway, just to make sure that there’s no liberal in Antonin Scalia’s seat. But Trump began, and wasted a good part of his time, by rambling on about how Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had insulted him (“very, very inappropriate statements”). On reproductive rights, Clinton talked about the pain of women who, for health reasons, had to contemplate a late abortion; Trump portrayed them as incipient infanticidal brutes who, if not checked, might “rip the baby out of the womb” at the last minute. He also said that he assumed his judicial appointees would overturn Roe v. Wade. When Wallace, who controlled the situation better than any moderator so far, asked why “so many different women from so many different circumstances over so many different years” would say that Trump had groped or kissed them against their will, Trump first claimed that the stories had been “debunked” (they have not), then jumped into theories that “it was her campaign that did it,” and then let the audience know, as if it were exculpatory, that “I didn’t even apologize to my wife, who’s sitting right here, because I didn’t do anything.” And if it wasn’t a campaign plot, he said, then it was just women trying to get “their ten minutes of fame.”

Clinton, in reply, said that Trump had tried to discredit the women by saying that they were “not attractive enough for them to be assaulted.”

“I did not say that,” Trump said, as Wallace tried to keep him from interrupting. “I did not say that. I did not say that.” But he did say that—at rallies, in front of thousands of people. And Clinton was ready with the exact quotes. (“Look at her—I don’t think so”; “That wouldn’t be my first choice.”) At a debate in which his main strategic goal might have been to make her seem untrustworthy, he blatantly tossed reality away. Trump seems incapable of talking about women without lying.

Clinton did have some weak moments, particularly with an answer about the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation that left open the matter of possible conflicts of interest, and one about her paid speeches. Wallace had posed the question about Trump and women in a way that might have been challenging for Clinton, too, by bringing up similar allegations against her husband. She ignored that aspect (and Trump let her; he was so busy calling women dishonest that he seemed to have forgotten about the women he says were telling the truth about Bill Clinton). Instead, she took the question as an opportunity to tie the larger themes of her campaign together.

“Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger. He goes after their dignity, their self-worth, and I don’t think there is a woman anywhere who doesn’t know what that feels like,” Clinton said. That was who he was. But she was not only talking about women. “I think it’s really up to all of us to demonstrate who we are and who our country is, and to stand up and be very clear about what we expect from our next President, how we want to bring our country together, where we don’t want to have the kind of pitting of people one against the other, where instead we celebrate our diversity, we lift people up, and we make our country even greater.” “Saturday Night Live,” in its debate skits, sometimes depicts Clinton sitting back and watching Trump self-destruct, and, indeed, she couldn’t help herself—smiling, whether with dismay or disdain, when he began attacking the American electoral system. (A moment later, with a more sombre expression, she came up with the right phrase: “That’s horrifying.”) But she earned her victory Wednesday night on her own terms. She beat Trump.