Freddy Gray

The choosing of Exxon mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as America’s next Secretary of State – which is expected to be confirmed today -- seems a typical Donald Trump move: crass, profoundly annoying to the president-elect’s enemies, yet at the same time perhaps very clever.  The political class is, naturally, aghast: a corporate titan in charge of American diplomacy. The horror! Environmentalists are disturbed, too: an oil exec as Secretary of State – what about the planet? And nervous Russia watchers are appalled most of all: at Exxon, Tillerson has cultivated close ties with Vladimir Putin, which of course taps into fears that the Trump presidency will be a puppet operation for mastermind Vlad in the Kremlin.

It might be better for everyone if, in the spirit of Yuletide Fake News, we all pretended that Donald Trump’s Twitter account was a spoof, or at least an alter of the man's many egos. The President-elect, for one, doesn’t take his pronouncements on Twitter too seriously. Or does he? It’s safe to say that there is a growing disconnection between the Donald J. Trump who is putting together a reasonably normal cabinet (‘Mad Dog' Mattis, aside, perhaps) ahead of his first 100 days, and the Twitter Trump who seems to be threatening China, undermining the democratic process that just got him elected, and generally still trolling humanity.

Is Donald Trump about to do the impossible? No, I don’t mean become President of the United States. That’s in the bag. I’m asking if he is going to Make Journalism Great Again? He has, as we all know, humiliated the media. The media which created him, then tried and failed to destroy him. Thousands upon thousands of journalists are now feeling ashamed of themselves — even if they can’t yet admit it — for having got the story so wrong. But is their industry suffering? Is it heck! Trump’s decision to carry on attacking the New York Times on Twitter even after winning the election might upset the paper’s editors, but the money men at the Grey Lady must be rejoicing.

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 and the head of Breitbart news. This would have been a much more Trumpist, less Republican, choice.

 Washington DC Donald J. Trump’s long, triumphant march to the White House didn’t start on 16 June 2015, when he announced his candidacy at the Trump Tower in Manhattan. It began four years ago, on 19 November 2012. On that day, days after President Barack Obama had defeated Mitt Romney, Trump filed a trademark application for the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’. It was, like all things Trump, a bit of a rip-off. Ronald Reagan’s successful presidential campaign of 1980 had coined the phrase. But Make America Great Again was even more potent in 2015-16. After the crash, those four words spoke powerfully to the anguished spirit of America: to the nation’s nostalgia for the Reagan era, and to its insatiable longing to fix itself.

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 right is worth it.' 'We have still have not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling', she added, her metaphor for oppression of womankind.

Washington, DC Unless something crazy is happening --- and of course, 2016 is the year of crazy --- Hillary Clinton is going to win tonight. ‘Hillary’s got this,’ I heard a former White House staffer say this morning, with breezy confidence. ‘We had a fright last week, but it’s better now.' That is the shared view of experts and the pollsters here in Washington DC and abroad. From Washington, Freddy Gray and Marcus Roberts discuss whether Clinton has it in the bag The level of early voting, the huge surge in Hispanic turnout, and a late uptick in black voters all seem like good news for the Democrats.

What can you say about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton that hasn’t been said a million times? The 2016 election has been more discussed than perhaps any other, and people are disturbingly well-informed, so bluffers might regard Tuesday night with apprehension. Never fear, though, America is still the land of opportunity as far as blagging is concerned, and American politics lends itself to BS like nothing else. So here, to get you started, are ten handy phrases for bluffing your way through election night 1. I’m sorry, but Trump isn’t Brexit and Brexit isn’t Trump. At some point in a conversation about Trumpism, somebody is bound to make the Brexit comparison, so raise the stakes.

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 Brexit -- but would there not also be lingering unease? Would the alt-right not be a little disappointed that the globalist tyranny hadn't done more to stop them?

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, is quite amusing.

If Hillary Clinton does somehow lose the 2016 US presidential election, FBI director James Comey might turn into one of the most hated people on earth — hated even more, perhaps, than the incoming Commander-in-Chief, Donald J Trump. Comey’s curious intervention against Mrs Clinton – in case you missed it, the FBI has announced that it is reviewing newly discovered emails that might be related to her notorious private server – will be seen as ‘the October surprise’ which rattled the Clinton campaign and handed momentum back to the Trump Train. Comey has already enraged senior Democrats.

Hillary Clinton is infinitely wiser than Donald Trump, or so we are lead to believe. You might think, then, that she and her clever campaign team would be wary of hubris. They should know better than to take victory for granted, and that excessive pride leads to a fall.   Well, they don’t. Clinton may have a seemingly unassailable lead in the polls. And yet Hillary, her staff, and the Democrats seem to be doing their damnedest to invite nemesis —in this case, a Donald Trump presidency — by showing off too soon, and putting off millions of American voters simply by being smug. They've ignored the great Texan proverb: ‘Don’t taunt the alligator until after you've crossed the creek.

Donald Trump needed to win bigly, as he would put it, in Las Vegas. He didn’t, and his campaign is still a disaster. The major news line from the final presidential debate is Trump’s hint that he may not accept the election result – to which Clinton replied that he is ‘talking down democracy.’ But Trump’s promise to ‘keep you in suspense’ on that point is a silly sideshow. The very fact he is making a story over whether he will accept defeat suggests, ironically, that in his muddled psyche he has accepted defeat. The last presidential TV debate was, overall, the best so far, which isn't saying much. Trump didn’t go bananas, or at least not fully.

Did you think, after the second presidential TV debate last week, that democracy couldn’t sink lower? Well, think again. Tonight’s clash between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in Las Vegas — already dubbed ‘fight night’ — looks certain to mark a new low for civilised politics, and a new high for elections as trash entertainment. If you thought Trump and Clinton hurling insults about sex in the Townhall-style showdown in St Louis was grim, expect grimmer. If you thought Trump’s last pre-debate stunt of holding a press conference with the Clintons' sex victim ‘accusers’ was silly, expect sillier.

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.

The Donald Trump story and the Jeremy Corbyn story are same tale told by different countries. A political party reinvents itself in the 1990s, wins power, but then dishonestly drags its nation into a terrible war in Iraq. It becomes widely reviled. The party is still in power a few years later when the financial system collapses. The party takes desperate measures to keep the country's economy going – rescuing failed banks – but that in turn leads to more unpopularity and distrust among the public. It loses power. In opposition, the party's base – its core voters – starts to revolt. The party then loses another election. Then the party's grassroots have a chance to reject the party leadership, which they do.