Hillary clinton

Saturday

Tom Goodenough

The horrific truth is that Donald Trump could actually win the US presidency

Think Donald Trump is too vulgar, too crazy to actually make it to the White House? Then you probably thought he’d never make the nomination. When he stood, Arianne Huffington said she would cover his race in the “entertainment” section of her website. Now he has ended up securing enough delegates to wrap up the Republican nomination. We’ve been told by commentators doing their bit to re-assure us that there’s no way the orange maniac would win a general election. In fact, the truth is rather scarier, with the average results from recent polls putting Trump ahead with a 43.4 per cent share compared to Hillary’s 43.2 per cent. Quite a

Thursday

Rob Crilly

Donald Trump: The impossible has happened

Do you remember when they said it wasn’t possible? When the pointy-headed wonks in Washington DC and the New York journalists with their masters degrees said Donald Trump’s campaign would be hit by scandal, or come undone without the support of experienced Republican party officials who knew how to work complicated caucus states, or that the candidate would simply lose interest and go back to making money? At a little before quarter past 10 on Thursday morning, an Associated Press reporter ran the numbers through his calculator and found that Trump had proved the sceptics wrong, he had clinched the 1237 delegates he needed for the Republican Party nomination. A

Steerpike Steerpike

Trump vs Hillary? It’s a really tough choice, says Steve Hilton

With Steve Hilton in town to promote his book More Human, David Cameron’s former director of strategy is proving to be a thorn in the Prime Minister’s side. As well as coming out for Brexit, Hilton has claimed that Cameron is really a Brexiteer in denial. Now he has moved on to the topic of Donald Trump. While Cameron has described Trump as ‘divisive, stupid and wrong’, Hilton has praised him during a Mumsnet Q&A. When asked who he supports in the US election, Hilton said he would find it difficult to pick between Trump and Hillary Clinton: ‘Now we are left Trump vs Hillary, it’s a really tough choice. I think that

Wednesday

Rob Crilly

Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton will make for the Millwall of elections

If there was any doubt over how Donald Trump was going to go about his problem with women voters it was settled with his new advert. ‘I was very nervous,’ says a woman’s voice above a picture of the White House. As the black and white image fades to one of Bill Clinton, fat cigar in mouth, the message becomes clear. ‘No woman should be subjected to it,’ the voice goes on. The words are spoken by Kathleen Willey and then Juanita Broaddrick, two women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault. Mr Trump’s caption reads: ‘Is Hillary really protecting women?’ Even before the sound of Hillary Clinton’s cackling

Saturday

Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: Hillary’s America | 21 May 2016

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. What should we expect from a Hillary Clinton presidency? The Democrat frontrunner is now the firm favourite to win the White House, assuming that she can defeat her Republican rival Donald Trump. But what would her victory mean for America? In his Spectator cover piece this week, Christopher Buckley says one of Hillary’s prevailing characteristics is her ability to bore. He also argues that Clinton’s politic shapeshifting over the years may have enabled her to stand the test of time, but it’s also

Thursday

Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: Hillary’s America

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. What should we expect from a Hillary Clinton presidency? The Democrat frontrunner is now the firm favourite to win the White House, assuming that she can defeat her Republican rival Donald Trump. But what would her victory mean for America? In his Spectator cover piece this week, Christopher Buckley says one of Hillary’s prevailing characteristics is her ability to bore. He also argues that Clinton’s politic shapeshifting over the years may have enabled her to stand the test of time, but it’s also

Christopher Buckley

The age of Hillary

Predicting what might happen in a Donald Trump presidency is easy. Day 1: A fabulous, really great inaugural, the best ever, with amazing entertainment by fabulous, top people. Day 2: War with Iran. Day 3: War with North Korea. Day 4: Mexico builds a wall to keep out Americans. But let’s not go there. (Please.) Let us instead conjure what four years of a Hillary Clinton administration might bring. After all, she is, despite the media-led panic about Trump’s improving polls, still strong favourite to become the 45th President of the United States. So what would Hillary’s America look like? Well, we could start with some predictions about the legislative fate

Wednesday

Ed West

What we learnt from Piers Morgan’s interview with Donald Trump

Is Donald Trump the Leicester City of US politics, the 5,000/1 outsider who took everyone by surprise? That was Piers Morgan’s opening question to the likely Republican presidential candidate on ITV last night. The obvious response might be that the Donald is more like Chelsea – loads of money, everyone sorts of hates them, some dubious right-of-centre supporters. The Morgan interview was presumably part of a plan for softening his image, now that he’s won the GOP base and needs to get more of the centre. There was lots of personal stuff – I’m a nice person, he kept on saying, I’m a people person, I love people – but

Wednesday

Tom Goodenough

Bernie Sanders’ win in West Virginia shows why a Trump presidency is possible

Just when it looked like the US primaries couldn’t throw up any more surprises, Hillary Clinton has been defeated overnight in West Virginia. Bernie Sanders took 51.4 per cent of the vote to Hillary’s 36 per cent – handing the Vermont senator an extra 16 delegates. The result from West Virginia probably won’t be enough to change the course of the race and it still looks as though Clinton will be the Democrats’ nominee. As frontrunner, she has some 2,239 delegates backing her compared to Sanders’ 1469. But what her defeat does do is act as an unwelcome delay in the Democrat party coming together. After all, Donald Trump has

Thursday

The Spectator

The imposter

Following Tuesday night’s Indiana primaries, the race for the Republican nomination is effectively over. Talk of Donald Trump being overhauled in a contested convention in July evaporated when Ted Cruz withdrew from the race after seven successive defeats. Compromise candidates have ruled themselves out, and Trump’s former opponents are reluctantly rallying around. It really has come to this: the people of the most powerful country on earth will be asked to choose between Hillary Clinton and her former campaign donor Donald Trump. It cannot be assumed that Trump will be defeated in November. This week, for the first time, a poll put him ahead of her. The world is sooner

Marian L. Tupy

Americans are unable to resist the siren call of Clinton and Trump

Imagine, if you will, two epileptics trying to share a bowl of noodles and you will get a sense of how messy and unappetising the contest between Donald Trump, a Mussolini wannabe, and Hillary Clinton, a Nixon in a pantsuit, is going to be. (Actually, let me preemptively engage in America’s favourite pastime and apologise to both epileptics and noodles. Doubtless, both would make more congenial dinner companions.) How on earth did we get here? To start with, Trump and Clinton are not the beginning, but the continuation of the deterioration of American politics. That is not an uncommon development in mature, dare I say ‘sclerotic’, democracies. The Roman Republic gave

Wednesday

The Spectator

It’s Trump vs Hillary: a race that should terrify all conservatives

This morning, Ted Cruz bowed out of the race. Now, John Kasich has given up. As a result Donald J. Trump, the most grotesque candidate ever to have run for the Oval Office, is now the only candidate still running for the Republican Party’s  nomination. And so the most powerful country on earth, a nation teeming with talent, will this November be asked to choose between Hillary Clinton or the egregious Trump. It cannot be assumed that Trump will be defeated in the presidential election itself. This week, for the first time, a poll put him ahead of her. The bookmakers give him a 30 per cent chance: this time last year, he had

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Farewell then, Ted Cruz

Farewell then Ted Cruz, who has now accepted the inevitable and suspended his candidacy for the Republican Party Nomination. Cruz ran a brilliant campaign but was endlessly undermined by his own unattractiveness as a human being. It wasn’t just his looks, and his unfortunate physical awkwardness. He came across as a duplicitous evangelical preacher, despised by everyone but his own flock. Donald Trump, who has genius for spotting weakness in others, nailed his opponent’s greatest flaw when he called him ‘Lyin’ Ted.’ ‘Nobody likes him,’ he said, and he was right. Trump is a dishonest monster, too, of course, but in 2016 he is the right kind of dishonest monster. As for

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Donald Trump wins Republican race – will the next stop be the White House?

Donald Trump’s victory in Indiana means he’s now all but certain to be the Republican nominee. It’s a moment that many thought just couldn’t happen. As journalists, we’ve spent months writing off the Donald and ruminating on why his latest ‘gaffe’ will spell the end – he has said he wants to build a wall to keep Mexicans out, described China as ‘raping’ the US and even said he could shoot someone and wouldn’t lose votes. And do you know what? He looks as though he’s right. But now that Trump is set to take on Hillary in the race for the White House, surely where fed-up Republican voters lapped

Tuesday

Tom Goodenough

Is Indiana the end of the road for Ted Cruz?

Today’s Indiana primary is Ted Cruz’s last chance of disrupting Donald Trump in his bid to wrap up the Republican nomination. Cruz knows that if Trump wins, barring what will be seen as a Republican coup, his rival will be facing off against Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House. Whilst the results from Indiana aren’t in yet, the early signs do not look good for Ted. The polls show that Trump is the favourite to win the contest in Indiana. Real Clear Politics, which provides an average of various polls, puts the Donald on 42 points, with Cruz trailing on 32.7. Cruz has spent his time in

Wednesday

Tom Goodenough

Republican nomination within Trump’s grasp

Every time we write Donald Trump off in the race for the Republican nomination, he seems to bounce back. Last night’s huge win in five states showed him doing just that and arguably doing so in the most resounding way so far. Trump is now calling himself the ‘presumptive nominee’ having beaten his rival Ted Cruz in Conneticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. He told his supporters: ‘It’s amazing what has been happening, the crowds we have been having are record-breaking crowds. The best way to beat the system is to have evenings like this, where you get record-setting votes and delegates. I use the analogy of the boxer:

Wednesday

Tom Goodenough

Clinton and Trump triumph in New York: What happens now?

It’s no real surprise that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have both secured victory in New York overnight and the only real question was what margin they would win by. With most of the votes now counted, it looks to have been convincing in both cases: Trump got more than 60 per cent of the vote whilst Hillary Clinton got around 58 per cent. Primaries like these are the kind that both Trump and Clinton would wish could be replicated over the whole of America. The sense of belonging needed to get voters on side was there automatically for Trump in his home state and also for Hillary as New

Louis Amis

New York primary: Bernie Sanders must regret ignoring black voters

The crowd at the Bernie Sanders rally in Washington Square Park last week was white, for New York. Not very white, but white for New York – even perhaps for those particular streets, where the purple flags and drapes of NYU ripple in the breeze. This reflected Bernie’s big problem: he hasn’t excited the non-white portion (almost half, nationwide) of the Democratic electorate – particularly, he has failed to impress black voters. Whether or not he could change this was the key to last night’s primary, and probably, therefore, to the Democratic race in general. Bernie had racked up seven straight wins, in Idaho, Utah, Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming

Wednesday

Tom Goodenough

Ted Cruz defeats Donald Trump in Wisconsin Republican race

Donald Trump has been dealt a major blow in his bid to wrap up the Republican nomination after Ted Cruz’s victory overnight in Wisconsin. Cruz’s victory speech was laced with apparent providence, suggesting that he is now the man to take the Republicans forward. He said that the state has ‘lit a candle guiding the way’, before going on to proclaim the win as a key moment in the race for the GOP’s nomination: ‘Tonight is a turning point, it is a rallying cry to the people of America. We are winning because we are uniting the Republican Party.’ But although Cruz was keen to talk up the significance of

Friday

Mathieu Vaillancourt

Hillary Clinton is more responsible for Isis than Donald Trump

Have you seen the internet meme which suggests that Donald Trump’s ‘divisive’ rhetoric helps Isis gather support and grow in size? It’s been getting a lot of likes and shares, possibly because it contains an element of truth. Certainly Isis seems to buy into the idea, which is why they featured The Donald in their triumphant post-Brussels video. Trump and Isis feed each other. They both thrive on and exacerbate a sense of western decline. But the politician who has done most to help Isis grow is not Donald Trump. It may well be Hillary Clinton. At almost every stage of her career, Hillary has managed somehow to nurture and sustain the conditions