Hillary clinton

Last night I sat at a dinner gala in New York and listened as Andrew Roberts—not only a distinguished historian but also a faithful friend of the US—asked the audience if 1776 wasn’t starting to look like a mistake. Politely as he could, he pointed out that our vaunted system had produced a corrupt, amoral drone queen to run against a bully and buffoon. Not having a musket ready to hand, I reached for my butter knife. As a red-blooded American, I would defend Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, any Yankee Doodle scoundrel you can name against a critic with a posh accent and a Savile suit. Today, though, it looks

If, on the night of Monday September 26, a US presidential election had been held instead of a televised debate, Donald Trump would likely now be America’s president-elect. That morning the reliable on-line poll analyst Nate Silver, sympathetic to Clinton, had tweeted, ‘It’s a dead heat,’ and then, a few minutes later, ‘State firewall breaking up. Trend lines awful.’ In retrospect, one simple task stood between Trump and the presidency: he had to look like some version of a rational human being. He failed. As Conrad Black has put it, the office of the presidency has been seeking Donald Trump. That night, Trump essentially picked up the phone and told

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.’  Listen

Evan McMullin is running for president of the United States. A Mormon from Utah, a former CIA undercover agent, he represents what the Republican Party ought to look like this year but does not. Convinced, like many of his co-religionists, that Donald Trump is a disgrace, he speaks with quiet confidence about restoring dignity and respect to American conservatism. So far he’s on the ballot in just eleven states, and showing most strongly in the Rocky Mountains. He may actually win in the Mormon stronghold of Utah. He’s just forty years old and his running mate, Mindy Finn, a Jewish high-tech entrepreneur and conservative feminist, is only 36. They won’t

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. Trump appears to have all but given up on becoming president —

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:

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