Donald Trump speaks as Hillary Clinton looks on during the final presidential debate on the campus of the University of Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nevada on Oct. 19, 2016.
Donald Trump speaks as Hillary Clinton looks on during the final presidential debate on the campus of the University of Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nevada on Oct. 19, 2016. (Mark Ralston / AFP/Getty Images)

Despite all the shrieking and hair-pulling over whether Donald Trump has threatened the very foundations of the republic for which we stand, please understand this:

A revolution doesn't begin in a presidential debate. And Donald Trump isn't the man to lead one.


He'd lose all of his hotels and the penthouse perks, his golden powder-room faucets and golf courses. He'd lose everything.

So despite the frenzied breathlessness of a media that by and large hates the man and doesn't mind showing it, don't expect Trump to be in the forefront — with the staves and the torches — of a march of his deplorables on Washington.

What did Trump accomplish in his final debate with Hillary Clinton the other night?

Clinton supporters might say he changed the subject from whether he's a serial groper of women to whether he's a sore loser because he refused to say whether he'd concede if he doesn't get the votes.

If you're a Clinton loather, you might say he changed the subject from groping to how the American political system is rigged.

That is the real threat Trump poses to the established order, his insistence on shouting that the whole thing is rigged, not the vote counting so much as the political system and who defines the terms.

So he'll campaign against the media. He hates the media now, and sees them as the Praetorian Guard of the establishment. How fickle he's become.

Trump loved the media when he was a reality TV star and bragged to a TV host that women let him grab them in the crotch. And he loved the media when he became a presidential candidate. He especially loved the media when broadcast news, led by Fox, helped him suck up all the oxygen in the Republican primaries.

But Trump hates the media now, and he's determined to expose the whole system with this mantra of the "rigged game."

Nobody wants to bet on a football game if they think it's fixed. But the politics of an empire is a business. And telling the customers that the business is rigged is not good for business.

That said, Trump did better than expected in his final debate with Clinton. It was his best performance.

But he remains a rank amateur as a debater, witless and clumsy and unable to take advantage of her many vulnerabilities. These include the saga of Clinton Foundation cash, the Obama Justice Department running interference for her in the investigation of her home-brew email server, her foreign policy failures and all those horrid open lesions from the WikiLeaks fiasco.

Fox News debate moderator Chris Wallace asked a simple question: Would Trump concede if he loses the election?

"What I'm saying is that I will tell you at the time," said Trump, as if hosting a game show. "I'll keep you in suspense. OK?"


And that was the takeaway. That was the story. All the rest was ignored, and Clinton could see it.

Her eyes widened, and she began to beat him as if he were some varmint hanging in a burlap sack and she had a big stick.

"Well, Chris, let me respond to that, because that's horrifying," Clinton said. "You know, every time Donald thinks things are not going in his direction, he claims whatever it is, is rigged against him."

The Associated Press began its debate story this way:


And there you go, Trump becomes evil Samson chained to the temple of political commerce, breaking the pillars that hold the delicate edifice upright.

It all works just fine if you're a simpleton, or if you pretend not to remember the 2000 presidential election between Al Gore and eventual President George W. Bush.

Gore was on the point of conceding when Chicago's Bill Daley, Gore's campaign boss, did what was necessary. Daley took a two-by-four, lashed it to Gore's backbone to serve as a spine, and then took the country into weeks of uncertainty and hand-wringing and political chaos with those dangling Florida chads.

Gore finally conceded when the Supreme Court decided for Bush.

With journalists already suffering from the vapors and collapsing on their fainting couches, Trump pulled their chain again Thursday, saying in Ohio that he would accept the election results "if I win."

So what about the precious fundamental pillars of our republic that supporters of Hillary Clinton are so worried about?

The pillars weaken when a Republican president sells Americans on a needless war in Iraq and thousands upon thousands are killed. Or, when a Democratic president, his mouth full of pizza and his intern otherwise engaged, talks to a congressman over the phone about sending Americans into harm's way in the Balkans.

The pillars weaken when people who send their children to those wars see their jobs shipped out of the country. When they complain, they're mocked like Honey Boo Boo, or dismissed by a future president as a tribe of sad, bitter clingers holding on to their guns and religion.

If they join organizations in protest, the Internal Revenue Service comes to visit. They see two standards of justice, one for presidential candidates, one for them.

They're lied to by Republicans and they're written off by Democrats as deplorables in some creepy basket of broken toys.

The pillars of the republic don't weaken because of one debate in Las Vegas. It takes a village. And it happens over time.

Twitter @John_Kass