Donald 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

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

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