Hillary clinton

Donald Trump did enough to win the debate, but not enough to save his campaign

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

How are we to explain the Donald Trump phenomenon?

How are we to explain the Trump phenomenon? A good friend (well to the right of me) who lived in Houston for many years went back recently to look up old friends, all wealthy and successful. He was astonished to find that many of them seemed to think they were victims of oppression, living under some sort of tyranny. ‘They’re off their rockers,’ was his considered opinion. On a couple of recent occasions I have had a little glimpse of this. On a train from London to Edinburgh the other day, I overheard a conversation between two American tourists and an academic looking Scotsman. One of the Americans was calmly

The intelligent case for voting Trump

Last week more than 130 right-wing thinkers put their names to a defiant document — a list of ‘Scholars and Writers for America’ in support of Donald Trump. It includes the editors of five of the country’s leading conservative journals of ideas: R.R. Reno of the Christian conservative First Things; Roger Kimball of the New Criterion, the right’s leading journal of the arts; Charles Kesler of the Claremont Review of Books; the American Spectator’s R. Emmett Tyrrell; and me, the editor of the American Conservative. (Notably lacking are names from America’s oldest conservative magazine, National Review, which has been as hostile to Trump as the columnists of the New York

Is the Trump tape really that shocking?

The funniest thing about the lewd Donald Trump tape is how unshocking it is. It’s less of an ‘October surprise’ more of an ‘October of course’. Everybody who knows anything about Trump knows that he is, to use a Donald favoured word, braggadocious about his sexual exploits. The newly unearthed video of him boasting of his sexual misadventures is embarrassing for him, of course, but it’s not much worse than what he said in his interviews with Howard Stern, which has been extensively reported. It will hurt his chances with women voters, and of course grumpy Republicans are using the story as an excuse to try another coup against him,

Hillary will beat Trump. But her presidency will be hamstrung just like Obama’s

The more you study history, the more you realise how hopeless it is to try predicting the future. Even sophisticated polling can’t prevent surprises like the two recent whoppers in the UK: the wrong prediction of a razor-thin margin for David Cameron in 2015, followed by the wrong prediction of a Brexit defeat in this summer’s referendum. I’m a history professor. If anyone knows better than to make predictions, it’s me. Nevertheless, I predict that the Democratic Party will win the presidency and the Senate in November, but will continue as minority party in the House of Representatives. Let me explain why. Every fourth year, presidential elections bring out plenty

What next for Barack Obama?

What is to become of Barack Obama when he retires from the US presidency at the age of 55? I have a suggestion. There is a vacancy on the US Supreme Court, which the Republican majority in Congress has blocked him from filling. Obama, a constitutional lawyer, is ideally qualified. And he might have more influence as a Supreme Court justice than he ever did as President. This is an extract from Chris Mullin’s diary from this week’s Spectator magazine.

Obama’s sky high approval rating spells good news for Clinton

Did you see the news? Hillary Clinton is a shoo-in to win the election. OK. No-one is saying it quite yet. Certainly not the TV channels in the US, which have their eye on Super Bowl-esque viewing figures for this Sunday’s presidential election debate. Calling it now would put a bit of a dampener on the final month of campaigning for everyone. But a poll released by CNN this week gives the clearest indication yet that Clinton has it in the bag. It is not a survey of voter intentions. It is not a question asking Americans who they want as their president. Instead, it is a poll showing Barack Obama’s approval ratings hitting a record

Freddy Gray

Introducing The Spectator’s US Election 2016 site

Welcome to The Spectator’s US Election 2016 site, brought to you in association with City Index. This will be home to the best British coverage of the biggest, maddest and baddest political event of the year. There has been no shortage of British coverage of the race to the White House in recent months; the world is gripped by the Donald Trump phenomenon. What’s been lacking, however, is shrewd, detailed analysis of what is actually happening in the American body politic — apart from, that is, on the pages on The Spectator. We’ve been the only British magazine to cover both Trump and Clinton intelligently and humorously. As far back as August

High life | 6 October 2016

New York Back in the Big Bagel once again preparing for the greatest debate ever, one that will decide the fate of the western world once and for all. In the meantime, the mother of my children is doing all the heavy lifting back in Gstaad, moving to my last address ever, that of my new farm, La Renarde. One of those American feminists remonstrated with me not long ago for making some chauvinist remark — on purpose, I might add —just to get her goat. My, my, how easy it has become to get that goat. In a 1939 film, Dodge City, Errol Flynn plays a Kansas marshal circa

Brains for Trump

Last week more than 130 right-wing thinkers put their names to a defiant document — a list of ‘Scholars and Writers for America’ in support of Donald Trump. It includes the editors of five of the country’s leading conservative journals of ideas: R.R. Reno of the Christian conservative First Things; Roger Kimball of the New Criterion, the right’s leading journal of the arts; Charles Kesler of the Claremont Review of Books; the American Spectator’s R. Emmett Tyrrell; and me, the editor of the American Conservative. (Notably lacking are names from America’s oldest conservative magazine, National Review, which has been as hostile to Trump as the columnists of the New York

It’s hard to #followthemoney if Trump won’t release his tax returns

Even Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s normally ebullient campaign manager, must be thinking it’s been an awful week. There was his horrendous debate performance on Monday, then the ridiculous week-long row over beauty queen Alicia Machado, and now the New York Times has splashed the story that Trump may have avoided paying federal tax for 18 years. Of these three, the Times story is probably the least damaging. Nobody thinks Donald Trump a dedicated socialist; he certainly isn’t ashamed of ducking his fiscal responsibilities. As he put it in the debate when Clinton accused him of avoiding tax, ‘that makes me smart’. The Machado spat — and his extraordinary 3am outburst

Diary – 29 September 2016

Monday night’s US presidential debate should convince a majority of American voters that Hillary Clinton is their only credible choice for the White House. Yet it may well fail to do so, in the new era of ‘post-truth politics’. The historian Sir Michael Howard suggests that on both sides of the Atlantic, we are witnessing a retreat from reason, an attempt to reverse the onset of the 18th-century Age of the Enlightenment, which banished superstition and religious faith as a basis for reaching conclusions. The progress of Donald Trump supports his thesis. I have just spent a fortnight in southern California, researching a book on the Vietnam war, and saw

New York Notebook | 29 September 2016

The first presidential debate was a disappointment. Half an hour into the big Trump-Clinton show on Long Island, many among the audience must have asked themselves why they weren’t watching The Real Housewives of Orange County instead. The strangest exchange concerned how to defeat Isis. Donald Trump said, ‘They’re beating us at our own game with the internet’ and Hillary Clinton agreed that winning requires ‘going after them online’. Hillary won by speaking in complete sentences, albeit brimming with bromides, while Trump lapsed into incoherence, apparently advised to sound calmer and more presidential. But Trump without his insults — of Mexicans, women and Muslims — just isn’t as much fun.

Last night’s debate was Donald Trump vs Himself. And Trump lost

As a general rule, presidential debates don’t change much. The winning and the losing matters much less than you think. Besides, most of the time partisans on either side can make a semi-decent case their candidate did what he had to do. The debates tend to reinforce existing notions more than they create new impressions. Last night’s debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton might have been different. Because it wasn’t a debate in the normal, accepted, sense of the term. There were two candidates on the stage at Hofstra University but only one plausible president of the United States. It wasn’t so much Trump vs Clinton as Trump vs Himself.

Six things to expect from tonight’s Trump vs Clinton TV debate

Tonight’s first televised debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, on Long Island, New York, is expected to generate a ‘Super-Bowlesque’ audience. Analysts say that up to 112 million viewers could tune in, a figure that Donald Trump will interpret as an indication of his immense popularity. Even on this side of the Atlantic, a large number of people will stay up to the early hours (2am – 3.30am) to see the Donald versus Mrs C, such is the excitement surrounding the presidential election. So what can we expect? Here are six things to look out for: 1) Clinton will try so hard to appear healthy that she will end

Trump fans should be proud to call themselves ‘the Deplorables’

Hillary Clinton hazarded that half of Donald Trump’s supporters are a ‘basket of deplorables’. The Kaiser called the BEF a ‘contemptible little army’, Aneurin Bevan called the Tories ‘lower than vermin’ — and in both cases, those so named took up the insult as a badge of pride: the Old Contemptibles, the Vermin Club. I hope the Deplorables will organise as such, and march on Washington in their millions. This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Notes. The full article is available here. 

Donald Trump’s chances of winning have never been higher

There are 46 days to go until the US presidential election and the race is still tighter than anyone imagined it would be. Donald Trump is just 1.7 points behind Hillary Clinton nationally and you have to ask yourself: are these polls likely to understate, or overstate Trump’s support? In the swing states, it’s pretty even. In Ohio, Trump is five points ahead of Clinton and enjoys healthy support amongst working class whites, who back him by 26 points over Clinton. As Romney found, this is an unreliable base in an America with such rapidly-changing demographics but Hillary isn’t enthusing the groups she had expected to woo. She is only

The women who paved the way for Hillary’s bid for the White House

If Hillary Clinton wins she will be the first female president of the United States, taking over from the first black president. But who were her predecessors, paving the way to women’s full participation in national politics? Votes for American women began in the Wyoming Territory in 1869. Wyoming, amid the Rocky Mountains, is remote, cold, and high. Its population was tiny in the 1860s; men outnumbered women six to one. The advocates of female suffrage hoped they could create a little favourable publicity, encouraging more single women to head their way. When Wyoming became a state, in 1890, its women’s right to vote was written into the new state

Why is Sadiq Khan giving Americans his views on the US election?

‘It’s important for those of us who are foreigners to stay out of the US elections.’ So said the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, with due propriety during his visit to America last week. Unfortunately he then added: ‘I hope that the best candidate wins and I hope she does win with a stomping majority.’ Given the febrile state of US politics, I’m sure that this cringe-worthy endorsement is precisely the sort of intervention that Clinton needs in order to get her faltering campaign back on track. And perhaps the lord mayor of, say, Wandsworth could polish his chain of office and head to Paris to advise the French on

Trump’s people: The Donald and white nationalism

The fit, or fugue, that Hillary Clinton suffered during a 9/11 memorial service in Manhattan on Sunday left mysteries in its wake. One concerns Mrs Clinton’s apparently serious medical problem. Another concerns her opponent Donald Trump, who appears eager to run her campaign for her while she convalesces. When felled, Mrs Clinton was two weeks into a public-relations blitz designed to tar Trump as a bigot. In August, she accused him of making the Republican party a vehicle for racism and the ‘hardline right-wing nationalism’ of Vladimir Putin and Nigel Farage. At an open-to-the-press dinner for gay donors two days before her incident, she used vivid and memorable language. ‘To