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Trump hatred has been with us since he announced his candidacy five years ago. But we can all feel the escalating fever pitch of fury that has marked the weeks leading up to the election. In social settings, friends of otherwise sound temperament seem uncharacteristically uncontrolled in their visceral rage when referring to the President. Just mention his name and you'll be interrupted with 'Oh I hate him, he's a sociopath' or the requisite 'If he wins, I swear I'm moving out of the country!'The question, I always wonder, is why this intense level of revulsion? It is so deep, so impervious to reasoned discussion. Policy differences can’t account for this level of skin crawling. The conversation is really never about SALT deductions or fracking. Even abortion is of secondary concern.

Suburban women are understood to be one of the most crucial demographic groups in the presidential election on November 3. Many pollsters currently predict that President Donald Trump will lose due to his unpopularity with that category of voters. But have the Democrats really reclaimed the suburbs? Or are there more likely Republican voters than the polls suggest? The Spectator tracked down a series of so-called ‘closet Trump’ voters, women from the suburbs who would never publicly voice their support for the President for fear of recrimination in their social circles. These are their stories. Columbus, Ohio I am a conservative Republican woman and my Christian faith is the foundation of my family. My faith is constantly under attack by Democrats.

Long before her Senate confirmation hearings, we knew Judge Amy Coney Barrett was smart. A Supreme Court clerkship and prolific career in the legal academy added up to someone uncommonly capable of hard work. That she is Catholic with seven kids — the ‘dogma lives loudly in her’, to borrow Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s immortal slur — is well known. What we didn’t expect was the hearing’s greatest surprise: Judge Barrett is normal.That is no minor relief in an America that increasingly seems a little unhinged. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse came to the Senate floor bearing an incomprehensible series of partially hand-scrawled charts, like a conspiracy theorist storming a town hall.

This year’s presidential election may see a new pattern that may prove disastrous for the GOP. Former vice president Joe Biden appears on track to win an impressive share of the oldest voters, without losing support among the young.The relationship between age and political party preference is not linear, but for many election cycles older voters have been, on average, more Republican than younger voters. According to exit polls, in 2016 voters age 65 and older gave Donald Trump 52 percent of their votes. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 56 percent of this cohort.The correlation between age and vote choice gives the Democrats a compelling narrative.

Res ipse loquitur. What a card Joe Biden is. Here he is to Fox News a year ago: 'I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.' Ha, ha, ha. Peter Schweizer exploded that bald faced lie in his film Riding the Dragon and elsewhere. And just today the New York Post prints an email captured from Hunter Biden’s computer. It’s from a Ukrainian businessman named Vadym Pozharskyi, who in 2015 was an adviser to Burisma, the shady Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter sat. Hunter had no experience in the energy sector. But his dad was vice president of the United States and apparently that was worth the $50,000 per month that Hunter collected in fees.

White House coronavirus task force member Dr Scott Atlas said during a Tuesday interview with The Spectator there was 'no fair basis' for canceling this week's presidential debate between President Trump and Joe Biden following the President's coronavirus diagnosis. 'The debate absolutely should have been able to continue. Honestly, I think there is no fair basis for canceling that debate — none,' Atlas said. Trump and Biden were scheduled to meet for the second time on the debate stage on Thursday in a town-hall style event moderated by Steve Scully. The Commission on Presidential Debates announced last week, without agreement between the two campaigns, that the debate would be conducted virtually due to health concerns raised by the President contracting the virus.

Suburban women are understood to be one of the most crucial demographic groups in the presidential election on November 3. Many pollsters currently predict that President Donald Trump will lose due to his unpopularity with that category of voters. But have the Democrats really reclaimed the suburbs? Or are there more likely Republican voters than the polls suggest? The Spectator tracked down a series of so-called ‘closet Trump’ voters, women from the suburbs who would never publicly voice their support for the President for fear of recrimination in their social circles. These are their stories.ArizonaI voted for Trump in 2016, and I absolutely cannot wait to vote for him again in 2020. The President has lived up to every expectation I had of him.

The droplets had barely settled after Wednesday’s vice presidential debate when next week’s head-to-head between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was thrown into doubt.The Commission on Presidential Debates announced a change in format this morning, switching the October 15 debate to a virtual event ‘in order to protect the health and safety of all involved’. Trump currently has COVID-19 and no one on his campaign will tell us when his last negative test was before his diagnosis. The Commission’s concern is understandable.But not so fast. Reacting to the Commission’s change during an appearance on Fox Business, the President declared he would no longer participate. ‘I’m not gonna waste my time on a personal debate.

The vice presidential debate was a predictable clash between two solid professionals, each with plenty of debate experience. Both said what they came to say, and not one jot more. Both evaded several hard questions, such as how they would handle changes in abortion laws, if the Supreme Court rules force some changes. 'I'm glad you asked about baseball, Susan, because the American people love sports. And the sport they really love is football. That's what's on their mind now.' That's how they answered questions. If they had a prepared answer about football, that's the answer they gave. That meant Pence never explained how a second Trump term would handle pre-existing medical conditions and Harris never renounced a court-packing scheme.

Too many pundits are ready to call the 2020 presidential race with a month to go. Four weeks is a lifetime in politics, especially in the age of technology where news travels faster than the facts. With both candidates in their seventies, health issues are always going to cause things to shift quickly. A couple of weeks ago, Joe Biden offered further evidence that all is not well upstairs when he claimed that ‘it’s estimated 200 million people have died of COVID’.Sure, the debate last week appeared to be a debacle for Donald Trump who then ended the week by coming down with COVID — though Hispanic Telemundo viewers thought Trump won the debate soundly.

'Please tell me you’re Republicans,' President Ronald Reagan joked with his doctors as he headed into surgery after an assassination attempt against him in 1981. The joke worked in part because it was obviously absurd to think any doctor would alter their standard of care based on the politics of their patient. In 2020, can anyone be so sure? In the age of COVID, medical opinion has often become indistinguishable from politics. Laypeople cherrypick statements and studies that seem to confirm their biases, and when all else fails, glob on to anecdotal evidence from a friend, family member, or celebrity who got the virus. Sadly, too many doctors are no better.

Late on June 23, 1953, Winston Churchill had a stroke. As the great bulldog recovered, his advisers made the bold decision to keep his illness a secret. Officially, the prime minister was resting because of an arduous schedule. His doctors’ diagnosis of a ‘disturbance of the cerebral circulation which has resulted in attacks and giddiness’ was struck from the records.In public, John F. Kennedy shone with youthful health and vigor. Behind closed doors, he was a mess. As Robert Dallek has written for the Atlantic, JFK suffered from ‘ulcers and colitis as well as Addison’s disease...terrific back trouble...urinary-tract infections and depression.

The media is ablaze with worry. Thanks to COVID, Americans, especially Democrats, are voting early and absentee in record numbers. The press is convinced that states will be swamped by this flood of votes. As a result, the theory goes, Donald Trump will be ahead on the night of November 3, only to see his lead erode over the coming days and even weeks, fueling skepticism of the electoral process. The uncertainty will motivate street violence and a constitutional crisis. While there are some reasons for concern, these worries are overblown. States will do a better job tabulating votes than the received wisdom holds and, if past elections set the precedent, Americans will behave themselves.