Us politics

Donald Trump’s ‘Summer Meltdown’ appears to be over. The latest CNN poll puts him two points ahead of Hillary Clinton, which must come as a surprise to the many pundits who have been saying ‘it’s over’ after Clinton’s polling improved over July and August, and the Donald’s deteriorated. It’s never been over. Hillary’s ‘Autumn Horror’ could be just beginning. How could this be — when every headline about the US election screams that Trump has taken his extremism too far? Well, as I wrote in the magazine last week, never underestimate the power of Hillary Hate, which is a national pastime in America. It waxes and wanes like a tide.

To say Donald Trump ‘double-downed’ last night on his border rhetoric would be an understatement. He went full anti-illegal immigration throttle, and then some. ‘There will be no amnesty,’ he said, and he promised to deport criminal illegal aliens within one hour of his arrival in office. ‘We will build a great wall along the southern border,’ he said. ‘And Mexico will pay for the wall, 100 per cent. They don’t know it yet, but they’re going to pay for it.’ He also invited on to the stage a group of women whose children have been killed by illegal immigrants, the ‘Angel Moms’ — a typical, mawkish Trumpian touch. ‘If you don’t vote Trump,

A subscription to The Spectator buys you more than just full access to the world’s greatest magazine. It also means a ticket to our subscriber-only events and debates, and our next one is in a few weeks: a debate about Clinton vs Trump, moderated by Andrew Neil, on Tuesday 18 October. Conrad Black, formerly publisher of The Spectator, will be making the case for voting Trump along with Bob Tyrell, founder and editor-in-chief of The American Spectator. The FT’s Gideon Rachman will make the case for Hillary, joined by the playwright Bonnie Greer. It’s a pretty good line up: my hunch is that this one will sell out in a couple

When Donald Trump hired Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of the right-wing media site Breitbart, to head his campaign last week, Breitbart’s former editor Ben Shapiro declared, ‘The Breitbart alt-right just took over the GOP.’ Yet most of Trump’s supporters probably don’t even know what the alt-right is. It’s entirely plausible that Trump himself doesn’t know what it is. So what is the alt-right, and has it really taken over the GOP? Shapiro’s worry might be overstated but it’s not unwarranted. For at least a year, a small army of online right-wing trolls – who refer to themselves as the ‘alt-right’ – has attacked anyone who dared challenge Trump. They use some of the most

I was crammed into the narrow cupboard of the Alitalia Business Class lounge at John F. Kennedy airport, along with a young school teacher from Brighton, nervous almost to the point of tears, a middle-aged couple from the Midlands and a stoic model from Brooklyn. Outside, in the shadow of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner we were supposed to have boarded by now, hundreds of people thought that a terrorist gunman was on the loose. Police cars came and went at speed. One moment everyone was filing leftwards, shepherded by guards. Then there was a panic, and people sprinted the other way, out towards the dark runways in the distance. Others lay

Watch this clip of Donald Trump suggesting yesterday that gun-rights enthusiasts might kill Hillary Clinton, and tell me, seriously, that you think he is being serious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czvVbdmP0bk Now watch Hillary Clinton in 2011 joking about the death of Gaddafi, and tell me — honestly — who is more sinister? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y ‘We came, we saw, he died!’ LOL! And tell us, Hillary — what happened after that? Didn’t Libya descend into chaos? Didn’t the country become a jihadist hellpit, as well as a springboard for the refugee crisis? Yes, it did. How hilarious! Leave aside the politics for a moment: people are going to insist that Donald Trump’s awful crudeness makes him unfit

Remain calm Sir: I am sorry that the redoubtable Martha Lane Fox is still angry at the exaggerations made by the Leave campaign (Letters, 30 July). I expect that the 17 million people who voted to leave are also still pretty angry at the exaggerated claims of Remainers. House price crashes, everyone £4,500 a year worse off, a revenge budget and even a third world war. And of course, the threats from elite corporatists. Vested interests, perhaps? It’s interesting to see how many of the big corporations that  threatened Armageddon prior to the vote are now voting with their money to stay. The investment adviser Tim Price says he has

Hillary Clinton can count herself lucky to have Barack Obama cheerleading her bid for the presidency. The outgoing President is ending his time in power with high approval ratings. People still approve of him after all these years; like Hillary’s husband Bill, Barack’s presidency is ending on a high. And last night, at the Democratic Convention in Phili, he gave an absolute belter of speech supporting her claim to the White House. It was the speech progressives have been aching to hear. Mr Obama addressed the American people directly, when he said: ‘Time and again, you’ve picked me up. I hope, sometimes, I picked you up, too. Tonight, I ask you

You have to admire Bernie Sanders’s chutzpah. For almost the entirety of his over 40-year career in politics, Sanders pointedly abstained from joining the Democratic Party. He is a ‘democratic socialist’, officially registered as an independent, and has never been elected to office as a Democrat, seeing that party as insufficiently collectivist. Sanders only affiliated himself with the Democrats last year, solely for the purpose of trying to capture the party’s presidential nomination. Now that he’s lost that battle, he will return to the Senate as an independent. Given how Sanders has shown absolutely no loyalty to the Democratic Party – indeed, he has run against, and defeated, Democrats at the

You might find them abhorrent. You might think them stupid for having fallen for such a charlatan. You might be right on those counts. But you can’t pretend that Donald Trump voters are all vicious fascists, because they aren’t. Indeed, the most shocking aspect of the Trump fans I’ve met is their decency.  For all the doom peddling by people in my profession this week, there was no violence to speak of at the Cleveland Republican Convention this week — from either pro or anti Trump gangs.  Thousands of journalists roamed the city, desperate  for trouble to report. Protestors burned an American flag, and people shouted at each other. But nothing

Donald Trump’s speech tonight was not exactly poetry, but it was clear and surprisingly coherent. It was also clever, sort of. And it might just help him win the election in November. People find it disturbing, but Trump’s anti-globalism, America First and law-and order-focus plays very well in America in 2016. Americans are less and less interested in hearing platitudes about ‘freedom’ these days; they want to hear banalities about law and order instead. Because they are more worried about civil breakdown and their economic security than anything else. Freddy Gray and Scott McConnell discuss the American tragedy with Isabel Hardman: After the text leaked a few hours before the

After some confusion, it is confirmed: Donald Trump has picked Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his vice-presidential running mate. After the terrorist attack in Nice last night, the Trump campaign announced, somewhat melodramatically, that it had postponed its Veep announcement  ‘out of respect’. This led some pundits to suggest that all the reports yesterday saying that Trump had settled on Pence as his running mate had been misinformed. Well, they weren’t: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/753965070003109888 Mike Pence ticks a lot of right-wing boxes, and helps Trump appeal to old-fashioned Republican voters. Pence is a straight conservative, Reaganite figure. ‘Get government out the way’ is his core message. He is House Speaker Paul Ryan with a bit more

Last night a gunman attacked a gay club in Orlando, Florida. At present at least 50 people are confirmed dead and another 42 are confirmed injured – which would make it the worst mass shooting in American history. The gunman appears to have been a US citizen called Omar Mateen. Even the FBI is now admitting that he would appear to have had ‘leanings’ towards radical Islamic ideology. Perhaps that’s why, shortly before his murder spree, he called 911 to declare his allegiance to the Islamic State (which has since claimed responsibility for the massacre). Here’s a prediction. If the gunman from last night had proved to have been a Christian fundamentalist,