President Trump’s angry insistence in the last minutes of Tuesday’s debate that there was no way the presidential election could be conducted without fraud amounted to an extraordinary declaration by a sitting American president that he would try to throw any outcome into the courts, Congress or the streets if he was not re-elected. … [Trump’s comments] were a stark reminder that the most direct threat to the electoral process now comes from the president of the United States himself.

– David E. Sanger in a “News Analysis” as in not an editorial for The New York Times.