Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (L) and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton participate in the third and final presidential debate at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) in Las Vegas, Nevada, the United States, Oct.19, 2016.(Xinhua/Yin Bogu)
BEIJING, Oct. 21 (Xinhua) -- An unsurprising amount of time during an annual fundraiser Thursday night was dedicated to another round of personal digs between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, once again highlighting the farcical nature of U.S. presidential campaign.
The annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York is a charity event meant to raise money for impoverished kids. Instead, it witnessed a series of sharp takedowns between the two presidential nominees.
"Hillary is so corrupt she got kicked off the Watergate Commission. How corrupt do you have to be to get kicked off the Watergate Commission? Pretty corrupt," Trump told the audience, referring to the FBI's investigation into her use of a private email server as secretary of state.
"Donald looks at the Statue of Liberty and sees a 4," Clinton joked back, implying the New York real estate billionaire's controversial attitude towards females. "Maybe a 5 if she loses the torch and tablet and changes her hair."
Also, in a final round of faceoffs in Las Vegas on Wednesday, the two candidates continued their head-on clashes over a range of domestic and foreign issues from abortion, immigration, alleged Russian hacking, to scandals involving Clinton's private e-mails and Clinton Foundation operations, as well as the sexual assault accusations against Trump. However, just like the former two debates, the last put the sanctity of the debates in doubt with lengthy personal attacks.
Clinton charged that Russian President Vladimir Putin was backing Trump because "he'd rather have a puppet as president".
"No. You're the puppet. You are the puppet." Trump fought back immediately.
"I don't know Putin," he said, "He said nice things about me. If we got along well, that would be good."
Trump also repeatedly called Clinton a liar, a criminal and at one point interjected with a comment that she was "such a nasty woman," which astonished the audience.
The first orderly debate eventually escalated to a loud squabble with both debaters frequently interrupting the other. However, Trump out-interrupted Clinton 37 to 5. He even took on the moderator Fox News host Chris Wallace.
Clinton attacked Trump on her Twitter feed Friday saying, "Between the three presidential debates, Trump told roughly one lie every 50 seconds he spoke."
Trump called Clinton "Crooked" on Twitter. "Crooked Hillary promised 200k jobs in NY and FAILED. We'll create 25M jobs when I'm president, and I will DELIVER!" read one of his tweets.
Both managed to dodge questions they didn't like by stating an answer quickly before changing the topic or diverting to rambling answers.
The final debate reached 71.6 million television viewers, which is the third most-watched presidential match in U.S. history, the Nielsen company said Friday. The first time these two candidates met on stage in September set a record high of 84 million audience.
The 1980 debate between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan was seen by 80.6 million people.
People joked on the Internet that throughout the last debate, the final winner was the moderator, showing their disapproval of both nominees.
According to a Thursday NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, American voters still deeply dislike Clinton and Trump with only 40 and 29 percent of voters holding positive views of them respectively. The proportion has not been changed since January.
50 and 63 percent of voters have negative views of Clinton and Trump now respectively as the former secretary of state leads the race to the White House with the billionaire at 51 percent to 41 percent of voters.
"We're going to elect, no matter who it is, the most unpopular president in the history of polling going back to the 1930s," Jeff Horwitt, a Democratic pollster working on the Journal/NBC poll was quoted as saying.
