Donald trump

The most divisive American election in living memory is almost over. By the end of the day an estimated 130 million people will have cast their ballots and we will be well on the way to knowing which candidate has done enough to win the necessary 270 electoral college votes. Here are the key things to watch today and through the night: Polling conduct – the first test will be whether or not voting is trouble free. It might be tempting to assume American democracy is the sort of well-developed exercise that has banished fraud. Not so. Democrats have complained of intimidation during early polling, both sides have filed complaints

Polite, well-heeled New Hampshire is the last place you’d expect to see a voodoo doll. But there it was, pointed out by my producer, clutched by a woman called Mavis. This being a Trump rally, it was of course a Clinton likeness, complete with pins. Residents of the granite state pride themselves on being a sophisticated lot, but the doll sent a certain shiver up the spine.  Come to think of it, I was already shivering. It was the end of a long week traipsing through four states following the Trump campaign. The Secret Service kept us waiting outside for three quarters of an hour in the pelting New England

The ‘pursuit of happiness’—an infinitely debatable formulation to describe a distinctively American activity. As Jefferson wrote the phrase as the climax to his triad of inalienable rights, ‘life’ would presumably have been a fairly non-controversial no-brainer, while the peoples of other nations had begun by 1776 to aspire to forms of quasi-democratic ‘liberty’. And then there it is in black and white quill ink: the ‘pursuit of happiness’—and a uniquely American idea is enshrined. For a large number of people, Donald J. Trump represents perhaps the ultimate incarnation of this idea. And it’s hard to argue that ‘the Donald’ is not, in his way, happy. Supremely content with himself and

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

I have never met Donald Trump, but I knew his parents. A fact that makes me feel about 100 years old. Which was actually nearer the age Fred and Mary Anne Trump were when, as a teenager, I made my first trip to New York. I remember riding backwards in their limousine on the way to lunch with the extended Trump clan and the lovely Mary Anne apologising that her son Donald would not be joining us. ‘You know about Donald?’ she inquired. I nodded, and recall her adding rather wistfully, ‘He’s always been the outgoing one.’ One of the great pleasures of life, I now realise — and a

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

Donald Trump grabbed the headlines in last night’s debate by refusing to say whether he’d accept the result in the presidential election if he lost. But who actually came out on top in the showdown between Clinton and Trump? On Coffee House, Freddy Gray says Trump failed to land the knockout punch he needed – and many others agreed. The New York Times said Trump showed a contempt for democracy in his remarks about the American electoral system. In its editorial, the paper said that the Republican candidate was ‘bullying’ throughout and offered ’another exercise in narcissism, bombast and mendacity’. Yet while the Times concluded that Hillary won, the paper

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: