Us politics

The news that Donald Trump has appointed Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee Chairman, as his Chief of Staff is shocking — shockingly conventional. In his victory speech on Tuesday night, Trump made it clear that he felt he owed Priebus a lot for his campaign’s success. ‘Reince is really a star,’ he said. ‘And he is the hardest-working guy.’ So arguably the appointment is not a surprise. As usual, however, Trump seems to be playing a cleverer game than his opponents realise. His administration team seemed happy to let the media believe that he was going to give the Chief of Staff job to Steve Bannon, his campaign manager

Even before Donald Trump takes the oath of office on 20 January next year, he has already made the history books. In the 240 years of our Republic, not one person has ever been elected to the presidency without having served in public office or as a general of the Army. On election day, the American people picked one of the best-known businessmen in the nation to become its 45th president. This news completely flummoxed the media and political establishment. On election night at about 5pm Eastern time, I received a call from one of the top political guns in the country. He told me the exit poll data and other tracking

Hillary Clinton may have been a woeful candidate, but she just delivered a classy defeat speech. She did what everybody thought Donald Trump wouldn’t do — accept defeat graciously. ‘Donald Trump is going to be our president,’ she said. ‘We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.’ ‘Our responsibility as citizens is to keep doing our part to build that better, stronger, fairer America we seek. And I know you will.’ She thanked her running mate Tim Kaine and her team, and even threw in a few good jokes. Her voice cracked at certain points, but she retained her dignity. ‘Never stop believing that fighting for what’s

Today’s reports about the confident noises coming from Hillary Clinton’s camp made me think about the reports I picked up about how confident David Cameron was about the EU referendum on voting day. We later found out, his pollster Andrew Cooper had research from his firm, Populus, predicting a ten-point victory. The MPs I spoke to, who had been out campaigning in the field, seemed to agree: after all this fuss, Brexit would all blow over. By lunchtime on polling day, the bookmakers put the odds of Leave at 15pc; they would later sink to 7pc. The noises that I picked up – that noises pretty much everyone in my trade

Since 1996, federal law has prevented non-citizen US residents, like myself, from voting in elections. We pay taxes, hold down jobs and own property, but don’t get a say in the leadership of the nation. This isn’t uncommon: in the UK, only Irish and Commonwealth citizens get to vote in the general election, on top of those already qualifying as British. But in the US, the discourse is polarised between citizens and illegal immigrants, with little discussion spared for the people caught somewhere in the middle. And with just a day left in the race, President Obama has created another small furore – in certain circles – with his ambiguous

It’s all fixed! Julian Assange, Infowars, Russia Today, millions of Internet users, and even Trump himself are convinced that ‘the powers that be’ will ensure Hillary is the next US president. The globalists will cheat democracy to maintain the status quo. Obviously. Or as Assange put it, Trump ‘won’t be allowed to win’. But what if ‘the system’ turned out not to be rigged, and we have a President Donald J Trump in January? It would come as a nasty shock to many Trump fans. The Trumpist movement would in a way be robbed of its purpose. The populist right would celebrate a victory for people power — similar to

Forget your state-by-state polling; your analysis of the voting preferences of suburban mothers in Pennsylvania; never mind your understanding of America’s shifting demographics; your breakdowns of the Latino vote in swing states, or your perception of America’s anger issues. This election, like most elections, will be decided by personality. We all know that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton score very low on the likeability front. Trump is more reviled than Clinton, but in one important way he has the edge on her: he is funny and she is not. Look at this clip of him addressing the crowd in Florida: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ciMtD45hxI Now that, no matter how much you loathe him,

It is such bad luck for Mrs Clinton that her last-minute troubles have come upon her because of the curious 21st-century men’s habit of sending pictures of their genitals to people via social media (‘Dickileaks’, is what the New York Post calls the scandal). If only Anthony Weiner, ex-congressman and recently estranged husband of Mrs Clinton’s close assistant Huma Abedin, had refrained from this pastime, and from ‘sexting’ a 15-year-old girl, it seems unlikely that the FBI would have excavated the family computers. Then Mrs Clinton would have had a clearer run at the White House. It should be a major advantage of the woman candidate in any political race

Once upon a time Republicans routinely accused Democrats of being soft on Russia. Irving Kristol, writing in Commentary in 1952, famously allowed that Joseph McCarthy was a ‘vulgar demagogue’ but emphasised that ‘there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.’ It seems likely that the grand old man of neoconservatism might well rub his eyes in disbelief were he to observe the ideological somersault that has taken place in the 2016 presidential race. Hillary Clinton, whose myrmidons hope that bashing Moscow will deflect attention from her fresh