All of the media reaction to Wednesday night’s third and final presidential debate focused on one surreal and disturbing moment. Within minutes of the close, the Associated Press moved a story with this extraordinary lede:

Threatening to upend a fundamental pillar of American democracy, Donald Trump refused to say in debate that he will accept the results of next month’s election if he loses to Hillary Clinton. The Democratic nominee declared Trump's resistance “horrifying.”

The homepage newspaper headlines this morning amplify on that theme. The New York Times: “Trump Won’t Say if He Will Accept Election Results.” The Washington Post: “Trump refuses to say whether he’ll accept election results.” The Wall Street Journal: “Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Vote if He Loses.”

I want to offer a couple of points about Trump’s deeply transgressive act.

First, as if to prove there is nothing spinners won’t spin, Trump’s few remaining defenders are pretending that Al Gore did the same thing in 2000. Speaking with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani leapt to the analogy.

The problem, needless to say, is that Gore was put in the awkward position of having to retract his concession to George W. Bush when it became clear there was no way of knowing who had won Florida. Gore graciously conceded the moment that the Supreme Court—acting on a lawsuit brought by Bush, not Gore—stopped the Florida recount and awarded the election to Bush. Matt Shuham explains it at Talking Points Memo.

Second, there’s a context to Trump’s comments—and the context is that he’s been whipping his crowds into a frenzy by claiming that the election results will be “rigged,” raising the specter of post-election violence. (No, the exposure of two Democratic dirty tricksters by right-wing media activist James O’Keefe does not mean that Clinton is going to steal the election. As Journalist’s Resource points out, studies show that actual voter fraud is rare.)

Last weekend, the Boston Globe published a harrowing account of a Trump rally in Cincinnati at which the Orange Menace fed his followers’ paranoid fantasies. As Matt Viser and Tracy Jan wrote, “At a time when trust in government is at a low point, Trump is actively stoking fears that a core tenet of American democracy is also in peril: that you can trust what happens at the ballot box.” Here is the key paragraph:

“If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it,” Dan Bowman, a 50-year-old contractor, said of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. “We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take.... I would do whatever I can for my country.”

Now, as the campaign winds down to its final weeks, we need to ponder what kind of country Clinton will be leading if—as expected—she is elected president on November 8.

On the one hand, she couldn’t have asked for a weaker opponent than Trump. Given the realities of 2016 demographics, she probably would have had a good chance of beating any Republican, regardless of her own shortcomings as a candidate. But it’s pretty obvious that a contest between Clinton and, say, Mitt Romney would be a lot closer.

On the other hand, Trump’s scorched-earth campaign has done considerable harm to her image at a time when she badly needed to reintroduce herself to the electorate. Clinton has been criticized for failing to make a positive case for herself in the three debates, but I don’t see how she could have. All three have been psychodramas with Trump in the lead role and “Crooked Hillary” as his foil.

Trump kept swinging wildly at Clinton on Wednesday, telling viewers—as always, on the basis of no evidence—that Clinton was a criminal, and that the FBI and its (Republican) director were in on the conspiracy not to charge her for her use of a private email server.

Trump also said something so grotesquely irresponsible that if this were another year and another candidate, it would be the talk of the debate. He actually charged that the timing of the current offensive by Iraqi and American troops to retake Mosul was aimed at helping Clinton win the election. Here’s Trump:

So we’re now fighting for Mosul, that we had, all she had to do was stay there and now we’re going in to get it, but you know the big winner in Mosul is going to be after we eventually get it and the only reason they got it is because she’s running for the office of president.

Trump managed to interject “Such a nasty woman” when Clinton quipped that he would probably try to find a way out of paying the higher Social Security taxes she’s proposed. And yes, it is worth clicking on the Twitter hashtag #suchanastywoman today.

Then again, Trump has a problem with women, doesn’t he? In answering the very first question—about how he would handle nominations to the Supreme Court—he felt the need to let us know that he’d been stewing about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ever since she criticized him earlier this year.

There was one pleasant surprise this fall: All of the moderators—Lester Holt, Anderson Cooper, Martha Raddatz, and Chris Wallace—were excellent. (Vice presidential debate moderator Elaine Quijano: not so much.) There was a lot of talk before the first debate about how difficult the job is, but they made it look easy. I especially liked Holt’s willingness to be quiet and let them go at it for long stretches, but all four set a standard to which future moderators can aspire.

The larger issue, though, is whether Trump is going to leave Clinton with a governable country. Just as he tried to delegitimize Barack Obama’s presidency with his racist birther nonsense, so too is he trying to delegitimize a Hillary Clinton victory in advance of the election. Jamelle Bouie of Slate writes that “it’s possible that two years into Hillary Clinton’s presidency, large numbers of Republicans—maybe even a majority—will believe that she wasn’t actually elected. That the game was rigged in her favor.”

That’s why I would like to see House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell call a joint news conference—today—in which they repudiate Trump’s remarks and affirm that the electoral process isn’t “rigged.” But I’m not holding my breath.