Trump to Hillary: ‘You’re the Puppet’

During Wednesday’s third presidential debate, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump accused each other of being “puppets.”

Partial transcript as follows:

TRUMP: Just to finish on the borders, she wants open borders. People are going to pour into our country. People will come in from Syria. She wants 550% more people than Barack Obama. And he has thousands and thousands of people. They have no idea where they come from. And you see, we are going to stop radical Islamic terrorism in this country. She won’t even mention the words and neither will President Obama. So I just want to tell you. She wants open borders. Now we can talk about Putin. I don’t know Putin. He said nice things about me. If we got along well, that would be good. If Russia and the United States got along well and went after ISIS, that would be good. He has no respect for her. He has no respect for our president. And I’ll tell you what. We’re in very serious trouble. Because we have a country that has tremendous numbers of nuclear warheads, 1,800, by the way. Where they expanded and we didn’t. 1,800 nuclear warheads. And she is playing chicken. Look.

WALLACE: Wait.

TRUMP: Putin, from everything I see, has no respect for this person.

CLINTON: Well, that’s because he would rather have a puppet as president of the United States.

TRUMP: No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet. You’re the puppet.

CLINTON: It is pretty clear you won’t admit the Russians have engaged in cyber attacks against the United States of America. That you encouraged espionage against our people. That you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do. And that you continue to get help from him because he has a very clear favorite in this race. So I think that this is such an unprecedented situation. We’ve never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17, 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin. And they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing. and I think it is time.

TRUMP:  She has no idea whether it is Russia, China or anybody else.

CLINTON: I am not quoting myself. I am quoting 17, 17 — do you doubt?

TRUMP: Our country has no idea.

CLINTON: He would rather believe Vladimir Putin than the military and civilian intelligence professionals who are sworn to protect us. I find that just absolutely —

TRUMP: She doesn’t like Putin because Putin has outsmarted her at every step of the way. Excuse me. Putin has outsmarted her in Syria.

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