Pat Buchanan writes:

Pressed by moderator Chris Wallace as to whether he would accept defeat should Hillary Clinton win the election, Donald Trump replied, "I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense."

"That's horrifying," said Clinton, setting off a chain reaction on the post-debate panels with talking heads falling all over one another in purple-faced anger, outrage and disbelief.

"Disqualifying!" was the cry on Clinton cable.

"Trump Won’t Say If He Will Accept Election Results," wailed the New York Times. "Trump Won’t Vow to Honor Results," ran the banner in the Washington Post.

"But what do these chattering classes and establishment bulletin boards think the Donald is going to do if he falls short of 270 electoral votes?" Buchanan asks.

"Lead a Coxey’s Army on Washington and burn it down as British Gen. Robert Ross did in August 1814, while “Little Jemmy" Madison fled on horseback out the Brookville Road? What explains the hysteria of the establishment?

"In a word, fear."

As Buchanan sees it, "The establishment is horrified at the Donald's defiance because, deep within its soul, it fears that the people for whom Trump speaks no longer accept its political legitimacy or moral authority.

"It may rule and run the country, and may rig the system through mass immigration and a mammoth welfare state so that Middle America is never again able to elect one of its own. But that establishment, disconnected from the people it rules, senses, rightly, that it is unloved and even detested."

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