After moderator Chris Wallace explained that the peaceful transfer of power, a hallmark of American democracy, depends on the losing candidate accepting the validity of the electoral results, Trump launched into a soliloquy about how the media has it in for him and how the overall election is rigged against his campaign. Treating American democracy as gingerly as a reality TV subplot, Trump promised Wallace and the country he would “keep you in suspense, OK?”

“That’s horrifying,” Clinton shot back, offering several examples of Trump blaming his personal setbacks and disappointments on others’ cheating or rigging of the events, including The Apprentice getting passed over for an Emmy.

“Should have gotten it,” Trump blurted back.

The Republican nominee’s stunning refusal to say he’ll accept the outcome on Nov. 8 was a jolting replay of the first GOP primary debate in which he dismayed his fellow Republicans by refusing to back the eventual nominee.

Trump entered his third and final showdown with Clinton needing a dominant performance to reshape a race that now seems out of reach — or, more realistically, to limit the down-ballot collateral damage from what’s shaping up to be a landslide loss. But his relatively more measured, focused performance ran up against a bevy of his own personal baggage that Clinton masterfully wielded against him.

Acting like a woman on the verge of clinching the presidency, Clinton swatted away Trump as a nuisance and vigorously attacked his signature policy proposals — a border wall and mass deportations of undocumented immigrants — as ideas that are “not in keeping with who we are as a nation” and ones, she said, that “would rip our country apart.”

Trump, who stands to lose Latino voters by an even larger margin than Mitt Romney four years ago, didn’t budge. “We have some bad hombres here and we’re going to get them out,” he said.

Unlike in the last showdown in St. Louis, the acrimony between the two candidates on stage took time to build. The personal guests Trump seated in the front row to psyche out Clinton, including the mother of a Navy Seal killed in the Benghazi attack, were never even mentioned. But as this debate passed the midway mark, Clinton, who’d been attempting to bait her opponent from the get-go, hammered Trump over the nine women who have come forward in the past week and accused him of sexual assault after he attempted to dismiss them as having been “debunked.”

“Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger,” Clinton said. “He goes after their dignity, their self-worth, and I don’t think there is a woman anywhere that doesn’t know what that feels like. So we now know what Donald thinks and what he says and how he acts toward women. That’s who Donald is. 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.”

Although Trump, after preparing more intensely for this final showdown, attempted to put Clinton on the defensive several times and attacked the former secretary of state, especially over Clinton Foundation donations and past votes and statements of hers that he seemed better versed on, the Democratic nominee deftly parried the attacks.

After a relatively subdued and substantive opening segment on Supreme Court appointments, Clinton began trying to provoke a more animated response from the fiery GOP nominee, pointing to Trump’s failure to discuss his wall and his promise that Mexico would pay for it when he met two months ago with the country’s president.

“He didn’t even raise it,” Clinton said. “He choked. And then he got into a Twitter war.”

Trump responded calmly, stating that his meeting with the Mexican president was “very nice” and pivoted deftly to trade, blasting Clinton for her husband’s signing of NAFTA with the United States’ continental neighbors. He even asserted that Clinton, by supporting comprehensive immigration reform plans that included stronger border security measures, actually “fought for the wall in 2006 or thereabouts,” Trump said. “Now, she never gets anything done, so naturally the wall wasn’t built. But Hillary Clinton wanted the wall.”

But as Clinton chipped away, accusing Trump of using “undocumented immigrants to build Trump Tower,” her opponent’s calm demeanor gave way to the characteristic bombast and outburst that have characterized Trump’s first two debate performances and his entire campaign.

After Wallace asked Clinton about “open border” comments she made in a private speech revealed by WikiLeaks this month, she blasted Russia for attempting to influence the election and asked Trump to “admit and condemn the Russians are doing this.”

Trump labeled Clinton’s answer “a pivot” and asserted that Putin would respect him more than he currently does President Obama or a possible President Clinton.

“That’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president,” Clinton answered.

“You’re the puppet,” Trump shot back. “You’re the puppet.”

Even as he began to interrupt and interject more frequently, Trump landed at least one relatively focused message, attacking Clinton as a long-time Washington player who’s failed to deliver results.

“You do have experience,” Trump said after Clinton attacked his apparent hypocrisy for railing against trade deals despite having his own products made in Mexico and using foreign steel to build his hotels. “I say the one thing you have over me is experience. But it is bad experience because what you’ve done has turned out badly. For 30 years you’ve been in a position to help. If you say that I used steel or I used something else, make it impossible for me to do. That I wouldn’t mind. The problem is, you talk but you don’t get anything done, Hillary. You don’t.”

Clinton followed with a long compare and contrast.

“You know, back in the 1970s, I worked for the Children’s Defense Fund and I was taking on discrimination against African-American kids in schools,” Clinton said. “He was getting sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination in his apartment buildings. In the 1980s, I was working to reform the schools in Arkansas. He was borrowing $14 million from his father to start his businesses. In the 1990s, I went to Beijing and I said women’s rights are human rights. He insulted a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, and called her an eating machine. And on the day when I was in the situation room monitoring the raid that brought Osama bin laden to justice, he was hosting ‘The Celebrity Apprentice.’ I’ll let the American people make that decision.”

Trump limped into the third and final presidential debate needing an almost unfathomable political demolition of Clinton, who now has a 90 percent chance of becoming the country’s first woman president, according to political odds-makers.

It did not happen.

In the final moments of this debate, Trump revealed the degree to which Clinton had gotten under his skin. As she outlined a proposal to raise taxes on the wealthy, noting it would affect herself and her opponent—if, she snarked, “he doesn’t get out of it”—Trump snarled back.

“Such a nasty woman,” he said.