Donald trump

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

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

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

It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t have a strong opinion about Donald Trump. But it’s worth lowering the emotional temperature for a moment, taking a step back, and looking at him through the eyes of history. Has there ever been a presidential candidate like Trump? Here I’ll confine myself just to the last twenty-five elections (1916-2012), during which time the Democrats ran eighteen different candidates for president, and the Republicans seventeen. So apart from the soundbites is there anything really different about the Donald? First, Trump has never run for office. The last time a major party ran a candidate who had never entered an election was in 1952

Remain calm Sir: I am sorry that the redoubtable Martha Lane Fox is still angry at the exaggerations made by the Leave campaign (Letters, 30 July). I expect that the 17 million people who voted to leave are also still pretty angry at the exaggerated claims of Remainers. House price crashes, everyone £4,500 a year worse off, a revenge budget and even a third world war. And of course, the threats from elite corporatists. Vested interests, perhaps? It’s interesting to see how many of the big corporations that  threatened Armageddon prior to the vote are now voting with their money to stay. The investment adviser Tim Price says he has

Spy novels and James Bond movies; post-war Vienna and East Berlin; Manchurian candidates and Third Men. The pop culture of the Cold War era created a set of stereotypes about hostile foreign intelligence services, especially Russian intelligence services, and they still exist. We still imagine undercover agents, dead drops, messages left under park benches, microphones inside fountain pens. It’s time to forget all of that, because the signature Russian intelligence operation of the future, and indeed of the present, is not going to unfold in secret, but rather in public. It’s not going to involve stolen documents, but rather disinformation operations designed to influence democratic elections. It’s not going to