Donald trump

The future looks bright for Libertarians

Not long ago, America’s Libertarians—that’s capital-L, the pros—were ecstatic. Never before had their party nominated such a heavy-hitting presidential ticket. They boasted two former Governors, both credible (but not too credible) ex-Republicans, matching up against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the two least popular major-party nominees in history.   Governor Johnson seemed to be living proof that the GOP was sinking fast and the Libertarians offered the viable alternative. For Libertarian lifers who had suffered indignities like the abortive presidential run of Bob Barr (another ex-Republican), Johnson/Weld represented an unprecedented opportunity for unprecedented relevance. Instead, Libertarians have met with a familiar frustration. Despite the manifest weaknesses of Clinton and Trump, far too

Lights, camera, politics: the triumph of showbiz over argument

At the end of Sunday night’s US presidential debate, the moderators snuck in a final question from a slightly shell shocked looking member of the audience. After an hour and a half of brutal, bitter exchanges, a man asked Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump if they could think of ‘one positive thing that you respect in one another’. In the resulting pause and exhalation it felt as though the country had seen itself in a mirror and realised it looked hideous. Unlike some of our MEPs, the candidates for US president only sparred verbally in St Louis. And nobody watching politics from the continent of Europe (Beppe Grillo anyone?) should

Martin Vander Weyer

Hard Brexit, soft sterling and a glimpse of the Night Manager across the water

This column comes from Puerto Pollensa in Majorca, my favourite off-season watering-hole. The hotel is full of elderly Daily Mail readers intent on making their gin-and-tonics last longer as they contemplate the news from home. Brexit is highly likely to mean ‘hard Brexit’ — departure without residual access to the single market or meaningful new trade deals with the EU or anyone else — and HM Treasury thinks that could cost £66 billion a year in tax revenues. The FTSE’s new all-time intra-day high was consoling for those with a portfolio tucked away, but an uptick in bond yields suggests equities are due for a sharp sell-off soon. And petrol

Donald Trump’s sinister threat to jail Hillary should worry us all

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

Mary Wakefield

Hollywood A-listers should stop shrieking and admit Trump was right – when you are a star, women let you do what you want

As awful as Donald Trump is, as oafish his attitude to women, I think his celebrity haters are even worse. Since the Trump tape was leaked, and The Donald’s special way with the ladies made public, Tinseltown has started to emit a collective shriek of A-list rage. Mark Ruffalo (the Incredible Hulk) and pals have begun an anti-Trump petition: ‘Artists United Against Hate’; Cher compared Trump to Hitler; Jennifer Lawrence has said that she thinks the world might actually end if Trump won. Robert De Niro has released a video in which he simply insults Trump straight to camera: ‘He’s a punk, a dog. He’s a pig…I’d like to punch

Forget Hillary vs Trump. Here’s why I’m voting for Evan McMullin

To use Donald Trump’s own parlance, the Republican presidential nominee is getting ‘schlonged’ in the polls. Following the release of a 2005 tape in which he bragged of making unwanted sexual advances, Trump’s support has dropped to 39 per cent in Rasmussen’s latest survey, versus 44 per cent for Clinton. In South Park terms, this means the Turd Sandwich is on course to comfortably beat the Giant Douche. That still leaves 17 per cent of likely voters who aren’t behind either major-party candidate, bringing me to my own top pick for President: independent conservative Evan McMullin, whose support is surging despite most pollsters pronouncing his name ‘other’. According to Public Policy Polling

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.

Diary – 6 October 2016

Any day now, the government will make its long delayed announcement on whether a third runway should be built at Heathrow or Gatwick. Personally I am against both. During my 18 undistinguished months as an environment minister, I learned one thing about the aviation lobby: their appetite is voracious. They want more of everything. Runways, terminals, you name it. I also learned that in the end, often after initial resistance, governments always give way. Although from time to time industry representatives hint that they would be prepared to make concessions on the handful of night flights that come in over central London each morning, disturbing the sleep of several million

Syrian nightmare

‘We are used to death,’ said Ismail. He had been to the funerals of four friends in a single week, all killed by aerial bombs. ‘We’re used to bloodshed. We’re adapted to the situation and this style of life now. It’s normal. If you lose someone, then the next day you say, OK, life must go on.’ Ismail spoke to me from eastern-Aleppo, where as many as 250,000 people are under siege by the Syrian regime and ‘living on rice’, as he described it. He is in his late twenties and is one of the White Helmets, the civil defence volunteers who dig people out of the rubble after an

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

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.

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

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