The horror of Trump only gets worse.

The Guardian takes a look from the safer distance of London:

Donald Trump said on Friday that he would not necessarily accept the results of the presidential election in the event that Hillary Clinton defeated him, reversing his statement four days earlier that he would “absolutely” respect them.

After the first presidential debate on Monday, the Republican nominee told reporters “absolutely I would” honor the results of the election should he lose. In an interview with the New York Times on Friday, he backtracked: “We’re going to have to see. We’re going to see what happens. We’re going to have to see.”

Earlier that day at a rally in Detroit, Trump resurfaced fears of voter fraud and his unsubstantiated complaints of a “rigged” election. He told supporters that voter fraud is “a big, big problem in this country”, although research has found a few dozen potential incidents of in-person voter fraud in 14 years of US elections. He also urged them to “go and watch the polling places and make sure it is on the up and up”.

That is, he urged them to go and try to intimidate voters.

The Republican candidate spent much of the week defending himself against charges of sexism, mostly by attacking Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe whose story – Trump called her “Miss Piggy” and “an eating machine” – has dominated coverage of his campaign since the debate. On Friday, Trump used Twitter for a predawn rant about Machado, which Clinton called evidence that he was “temperamentally unfit” to lead.

He’s temperamentally unfit to live in adult society without supervision.

I don’t know if we’ll ever come back from this. I think it may have turned us into a sleazy tabloid version of a country.