US President Barack Obama accused Donald Trump of “whining before the game is over” as he lambasted the Republican nominee’s claims that the US election would be “rigged” against him.
Mr Obama said the billionaire’s recent allegations that there would be widespread voter fraud were “unprecedented” and threatened to undermine the basis of American democracy.
Speaking at the White House he said: “I have never seen in my lifetime, or in modern political history, any presidential candidate trying to discredit the election before votes have even taken place. It’s unprecedented. It’s irresponsible. And it doesn’t show the leadership and toughness you want out of a president.”
Mr Obama added: “You start whining before the game’s even over, whenever things are going badly and you start losing, you blame someone else, then you don’t have what it takes to be in this job.
“I’d advise Mr Trump to stop whining and go make his case to get votes.”
Mr Obama said the allegations of impending voter fraud were based on “no fact” and “no serious person” would make them.
He said if Mr Trump won on Nov 8 he would expect Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to give a gracious concession speech and work with him.
Mr Obama also said he himself would welcome Mr Trump and ensure a peaceful transfer of power, regardless of what the businessman had said about him.
The president also accused Mr Trump of modeling his policies on Russian President Vladimir Putin to a degree that was “unprecedented in American politics”.
His comments came on the eve of the third and final presidential debate on Wednesday night in Las Vegas, Nevada, which Mr Trump threatened to turn into the nastiest ever.
He planned to ramp up pressure on Mrs Clinton by placing the mother of an American killed in Benghazi in the front row.
Mr Trump’s campaign confirmed it had invited as a guest Pat Smith whose son Sean Smith died in the 2012 attack on a US diplomatic compound.
Mrs Smith said: “I want to look in Hillary’s eyes and have her lie to me again.”
In July she gave an emotional speech at the Republican National Convention blaming Mrs Clinton, who was US Secretary of State at the time of Benghazi, for her son’s death.
Mr Trump went into the debate trailing his Democratic rival by seven percentage points in an average of all recent polls, suggesting he could be facing a heavy defeat in the election.
Matt Mackowiak, a Republican strategist, said: “His situation is dire. This may be the single nastiest debate of the cycle.”
Mrs Clinton has been spending twice as much on television advertising as Mr Trump, and has twice as many campaign offices around the country.
Paddy Power, the bookmaker, announced it was already paying out £800,000 to customers who had backed Mrs Clinton.
It called Mrs Clinton a “nailed-on certainty to occupy the Oval Office”.
In a last ditch attempt to change the direction of the race Mr Trump also intended to hammer his opponent over the email scandal that has dogged her.
He said it was “one of the great miscarriages of justice in history” that she was not prosecuted for using a private email server while Secretary of State.
On the eve of the debate it emerged one of her aides at the State Department,
Patrick Kennedy, had asked FBI officials to downgrade the classification of one sensitive email, relating to Benghazi, so it could be archived and “never seen again”.
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