After their hellishly long campaign, and with three weeks to go until Election Day, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump will face off for their third and final debate tonight in Las Vegas. We offer up two questions we hope will be asked by Fox’s Chris Wallace, the debate moderator Both center on Trump’s persistent but unsubstantiated allegation—when polls are going against him, that is—that the election is rigged in Clinton’s favor.
These questions are obvious, perhaps, but also vital because of the potential for violence by voters who believe him. In a speech just this week in Grand Junction, Colorado, Trump asserted that the media is “more crooked than crooked Hillary,” on his way to again claiming that reporters are colluding with Clinton to fix the election.
Our questions:
To Trump: Your nomination is arguably, in large part, the product of intense news coverage over a two-year period. Will you state precisely your evidence that the election is massively rigged, or otherwise substantiate that you are not simply a sore loser with polls going heavily against you?
To Clinton: Should you win, how will you deal with a possibly hostile and violent opposition, including a possible well of Trump supporters who do not accept the election outcome?
And that’s it. These questions likely wouldn’t give undecided voters a clearer sense of the specific policy choices the candidates would make. But Americans are entitled to know whether, after the election, they end up with their continued tradition of a peaceful transition of power, or Trump-incited warfare.
An earlier version of this post named the moderator as Mike Wallace. It is Chris Wallace.