Donald trump

Thursday

Tom Goodenough

Trump vs Clinton: The verdicts on the final debate

Donald Trump grabbed the headlines in last night’s debate by refusing to say whether he’d accept the result in the presidential election if he lost. But who actually came out on top in the showdown between Clinton and Trump? On Coffee House, Freddy Gray says Trump failed to land the knockout punch he needed - and many others agreed. The New York Times said Trump showed a contempt for democracy in his remarks about the American electoral system. In its editorial, the paper said that the Republican candidate was ‘bullying’ throughout and offered ’another exercise in narcissism, bombast and mendacity’.

Johan Norberg

Donald Trump last night exposed himself as Chavez without the beret

Much has been made of Donald Trump’s character but the big problem is not that he is a bad person who might turn the Oval Office into a locker room. 'We need good principles rather than good people. We need fixed rules, not fixers', as FA Hayek pointed out. And that’s the problem with Trump, as his scary stream of consciousness during last night's debate - indeed, every debate - with Hillary Clinton has revealed. He says openly that he wants to dismantle the fixed rules, the division of powers and the rule of law which make America great. If he wins, he promises to jail his opponent. If he loses, he will not accept the outcome of the election. It’s Putin without pectoral muscles, Chávez without the beret.

Sunday

Martin Vander Weyer

Donald Trump isn’t out of the race yet

Speaking of which, who will be President Trump’s treasury secretary, and does it matter? After this week’s ‘locker-room’ revelations, the Donald’s odds of winning have clearly lengthened. But he ain’t out of the race yet — and seasoned Republicans of my acquaintance have been agonising for months over the question of whether to accept jobs in his White House team, or indeed whether to push themselves forward in the hope of influencing it towards sanity. Would that effort be worth the potential pain and embarrassment? It’s indicative of the lame-duck nature of Obama’s second term that Jack Lew, the Treasury incumbent and equivalent of our Chancellor, is all but invisible: I had to Google him to see what he looks like.

Saturday

Charles Moore

Donald Trump has truly shown his nasty side

Given all the outrageous things that Donald Trump has done and said already, why has he got into so much worse trouble for dirty remarks about women taped more than ten years ago? He gets away with dog whistle politics but not, seemingly, with wolf whistle ones. Some might say this is because of political correctness; or because his evangelical supporters, while not necessarily offended by his violent views, disapprove of his lewdness; or both. But my theory about sex scandals in politics is that they are not, strictly speaking, about morality. They are tests of how the accused man (or, much more rarely, woman) behaves when attacked. Does he seem odious or contrite, arrogant or charming? If he lies, does he do it beguilingly?

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 October 2016

Home The pound fell against the dollar and the euro, weakening by 19 per cent against the dollar from its level at the time of the EU referendum to lows last seen in 1985. The FTSE 100 index almost beat its highest-ever closing level. There was much unrooted talk about what votes Parliament should have on the Brexit process and when. A spokesman for Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said: ‘Parliament is of course going to debate and scrutinise that process as it goes on’ and would then perhaps vote on the ‘final deal’. Cuadrilla was given permission by the government to drill four shale-gas wells in Lancashire that would employ hydraulic fracturing. Wolfgang Suschitzky, the photographer, died aged 104. Some Tory MPs called for the commissioning of a new royal yacht.

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 13 October 2016

Given all the outrageous things that Donald Trump has done and said already, why has he got into so much worse trouble for dirty remarks about women taped more than ten years ago? He gets away with dog whistle politics but not, seemingly, with wolf whistle ones. Some might say this is because of political correctness; or because his evangelical supporters, while not necessarily offended by his violent views, disapprove of his lewdness; or both. But my theory about sex scandals in politics is that they are not, strictly speaking, about morality. They are tests of how the accused man (or, much more rarely, woman) behaves when attacked. Does he seem odious or contrite, arrogant or charming? If he lies, does he do it beguilingly?

James Poulos

The future looks bright for Libertarians

Not long ago, America’s Libertarians—that’s capital-L, the pros—were ecstatic. Never before had their party nominated such a heavy-hitting presidential ticket. They boasted two former Governors, both credible (but not too credible) ex-Republicans, matching up against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the two least popular major-party nominees in history.   Governor Johnson seemed to be living proof that the GOP was sinking fast and the Libertarians offered the viable alternative. For Libertarian lifers who had suffered indignities like the abortive presidential run of Bob Barr (another ex-Republican), Johnson/Weld represented an unprecedented opportunity for unprecedented relevance. Instead, Libertarians have met with a familiar frustration.

Douglas Murray

Lights, camera, politics: the triumph of showbiz over argument

At the end of Sunday night’s US presidential debate, the moderators snuck in a final question from a slightly shell shocked looking member of the audience. After an hour and a half of brutal, bitter exchanges, a man asked Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump if they could think of ‘one positive thing that you respect in one another’. In the resulting pause and exhalation it felt as though the country had seen itself in a mirror and realised it looked hideous. Unlike some of our MEPs, the candidates for US president only sparred verbally in St Louis. And nobody watching politics from the continent of Europe (Beppe Grillo anyone?) should be too sanguine that it won’t happen here. Nevertheless there is something especially noxious happening on American prime time.

Martin Vander Weyer

Hard Brexit, soft sterling and a glimpse of the Night Manager across the water

This column comes from Puerto Pollensa in Majorca, my favourite off-season watering-hole. The hotel is full of elderly Daily Mail readers intent on making their gin-and-tonics last longer as they contemplate the news from home. Brexit is highly likely to mean ‘hard Brexit’ — departure without residual access to the single market or meaningful new trade deals with the EU or anyone else — and HM Treasury thinks that could cost £66 billion a year in tax revenues. The FTSE’s new all-time intra-day high was consoling for those with a portfolio tucked away, but an uptick in bond yields suggests equities are due for a sharp sell-off soon. And petrol prices are about to jump thanks to the weak pound and a belated Opec move to limit production.

Wednesday

Kate Maltby

Donald Trump’s sinister threat to jail Hillary should worry us all

In the autumn of 2008, a gaggle of American conservatives gathered for a conference at that most godless of progressive institutions, Yale University. The mood was sombre: four days beforehand, President Obama had swept to victory; the outgoing Republican President, George Bush, was shadowed by a Middle Eastern war gone disastrously wrong. The title of the conference, ‘The Next American Conservatism’, already felt like a bad joke.  Outside, protestors gathered. Iraq was a popular theme – I spotted a few 'no blood for oil' placards, recycled from Tony Blair’s latest flying visit to campus. Eventually, a pair of students invaded the main hall, cursing and spluttering a demand for both Bush and Blair to face war crimes trials.

Mary Wakefield

Hollywood A-listers should stop shrieking and admit Trump was right – when you are a star, women let you do what you want

As awful as Donald Trump is, as oafish his attitude to women, I think his celebrity haters are even worse. Since the Trump tape was leaked, and The Donald’s special way with the ladies made public, Tinseltown has started to emit a collective shriek of A-list rage. Mark Ruffalo (the Incredible Hulk) and pals have begun an anti-Trump petition: 'Artists United Against Hate'; Cher compared Trump to Hitler; Jennifer Lawrence has said that she thinks the world might actually end if Trump won. Robert De Niro has released a video in which he simply insults Trump straight to camera: 'He’s a punk, a dog. He’s a pig…I’d like to punch him in the face.' I’d like to give them all a shake, for being such appalling hypocrites.

Anne Jolis

Forget Hillary vs Trump. Here’s why I’m voting for Evan McMullin

To use Donald Trump’s own parlance, the Republican presidential nominee is getting 'schlonged' in the polls. Following the release of a 2005 tape in which he bragged of making unwanted sexual advances, Trump’s support has dropped to 39 per cent in Rasmussen’s latest survey, versus 44 per cent for Clinton. In South Park terms, this means the Turd Sandwich is on course to comfortably beat the Giant Douche. That still leaves 17 per cent of likely voters who aren’t behind either major-party candidate, bringing me to my own top pick for President: independent conservative Evan McMullin, whose support is surging despite most pollsters pronouncing his name ‘other’.

Monday

Freddy Gray

Donald Trump did enough to win the debate, but not enough to save his campaign

Donald Trump probably won the second presidential debate tonight, overall. But overall probably doesn’t matter. The clash between him and Hillary Clinton over the lewd sex-bragging tape will be what people talk about, and he did not come out well on that score. The Donald maybe did enough to stop the Republican Party deserting him en masse, but his campaign still looks like a disaster. Trump arguably lost the night before the debate began by putting on a typically surreal, car-crash-bad press conference with Bill and Hillary's 'accusers' -- women who claim to have been sexual victims of the Clintons' iniquity -- just before the debate began. It was a ridiculous stunt, which showed that Trump had no intention of handling the accusations of sexism sensibly.

Sunday

Chris Mullin

How are we to explain the Donald Trump phenomenon?

How are we to explain the Trump phenomenon? A good friend (well to the right of me) who lived in Houston for many years went back recently to look up old friends, all wealthy and successful. He was astonished to find that many of them seemed to think they were victims of oppression, living under some sort of tyranny. ‘They’re off their rockers,’ was his considered opinion. On a couple of recent occasions I have had a little glimpse of this. On a train from London to Edinburgh the other day, I overheard a conversation between two American tourists and an academic looking Scotsman.

Daniel McCarthy

The intelligent case for voting Trump

Last week more than 130 right-wing thinkers put their names to a defiant document — a list of ‘Scholars and Writers for America’ in support of Donald Trump. It includes the editors of five of the country’s leading conservative journals of ideas: R.R. Reno of the Christian conservative First Things; Roger Kimball of the New Criterion, the right’s leading journal of the arts; Charles Kesler of the Claremont Review of Books; the American Spectator’s R. Emmett Tyrrell; and me, the editor of the American Conservative. (Notably lacking are names from America’s oldest conservative magazine, National Review, which has been as hostile to Trump as the columnists of the New York Times and Washington Post.

Saturday

Freddy Gray

Is the Trump tape really that shocking?

The funniest thing about the lewd Donald Trump tape is how unshocking it is. It’s less of an 'October surprise' more of an 'October of course'. Everybody who knows anything about Trump knows that he is, to use a Donald favoured word, braggadocious about his sexual exploits. The newly unearthed video of him boasting of his sexual misadventures is embarrassing for him, of course, but it’s not much worse than what he said in his interviews with Howard Stern, which has been extensively reported. It will hurt his chances with women voters, and of course grumpy Republicans are using the story as an excuse to try another coup against him, but I can’t really imagine many American voters will be sitting at home today thinking: ‘What? Donald Trump is vulgar and sexist?

Patrick Allitt

Hillary will beat Trump. But her presidency will be hamstrung just like Obama’s

The more you study history, the more you realise how hopeless it is to try predicting the future. Even sophisticated polling can’t prevent surprises like the two recent whoppers in the UK: the wrong prediction of a razor-thin margin for David Cameron in 2015, followed by the wrong prediction of a Brexit defeat in this summer’s referendum. I’m a history professor. If anyone knows better than to make predictions, it’s me. Nevertheless, I predict that the Democratic Party will win the presidency and the Senate in November, but will continue as minority party in the House of Representatives. Let me explain why.

Chris Mullin

What next for Barack Obama?

What is to become of Barack Obama when he retires from the US presidency at the age of 55? I have a suggestion. There is a vacancy on the US Supreme Court, which the Republican majority in Congress has blocked him from filling. Obama, a constitutional lawyer, is ideally qualified. And he might have more influence as a Supreme Court justice than he ever did as President. This is an extract from Chris Mullin's diary from this week's Spectator magazine.

Thursday

Chris Mullin

Diary – 6 October 2016

Any day now, the government will make its long delayed announcement on whether a third runway should be built at Heathrow or Gatwick. Personally I am against both. During my 18 undistinguished months as an environment minister, I learned one thing about the aviation lobby: their appetite is voracious. They want more of everything. Runways, terminals, you name it. I also learned that in the end, often after initial resistance, governments always give way. Although from time to time industry representatives hint that they would be prepared to make concessions on the handful of night flights that come in over central London each morning, disturbing the sleep of several million people, this is soon forgotten once they have got their way.

Paul Wood

Syrian nightmare

'We are used to death,’ said Ismail. He had been to the funerals of four friends in a single week, all killed by aerial bombs. ‘We’re used to bloodshed. We’re adapted to the situation and this style of life now. It’s normal. If you lose someone, then the next day you say, OK, life must go on.’ Ismail spoke to me from eastern-Aleppo, where as many as 250,000 people are under siege by the Syrian regime and ‘living on rice’, as he described it. He is in his late twenties and is one of the White Helmets, the civil defence volunteers who dig people out of the rubble after an attack. He could not endure the despair on the faces of the injured who knew they would not survive, he said.