Underrated: Mike Pence

Standpoint, April 1, 2017

TrumpPence.jpg

If the stories are accurate, Donald Trump had last-minute doubts about Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana and the person he’d just chosen as his running mate. If so, those doubts said more about Trump than Pence. The Donald would probably have preferred someone from his comfort zone: maybe Newt Gingrich, an eccentric whose glory days were decades ago, or New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a star eclipsed by scandal. He knew them reasonably well and, more importantly, understood that their last best hope of political advancement rested with him. They would know their place.

But Pence looked dangerously like his own man, an outsider foisted on Trump to reassure traditional Republicans and to bring decorum and a credible political track record to a ticket desperately short of both. To be sure, Pence faced a tough re-election fight for the governorship (which in the end he would have probably won), but he had also served six terms in Congress and had been mentioned as a potential presidential candidate for years. He had no need to jump aboard a Trump train only uncertainly connected to the rails. Worse, Pence had endorsed Ted Cruz and reportedly loathed The Donald. The Indiana governor denied that he felt that way, but it was hard to imagine a meeting of minds between a self-described “Christian . . . conservative and . . . Republican, in that order” and a chancer of no fixed party married to Ivana, Marla and Melania, in that order.

The Pence pick was enthusiastically received by GOP loyalists, and, however appalled they were by his hardline social — and not just social — conservativism, even the party’s opponents seemed somewhat soothed by the thought that, in the not-going-to-happen event of a Trump win, at least one pro would be in the new president’s vicinity. If there was a consensus, it was that Pence was a touch dull. There were mutterings too that he was not the brightest. Some of the latter can be put down to the lazy assumptions often made about religious types from flyover country, but, yes, Pence was a C student at high school and, yes, getting into law school had been something of a struggle. The vice president was not, one former associate told me, someone to get too deeply into policy details, but this former talk radio host was “good at messaging”.

That has not always been as true as it might have been. After his second (unsuccessful) attempt to make it into Congress, Pence apologised for running a campaign so negative that it backfired (that was then). A quarter of a century later, there was that looming re-election fight for the governorship. It looked trickier than it should have been, thanks partly to a battle over legislation designed to protect “religious freedom” (but seen by its critics as allowing discrimination against gays). Pence had annoyed both sides, initially by signing the law, then by agreeing to water it down.

That was unusual: Pence’s determination to stick to his principles, even if it meant defying a Republican president, had served him well in Washington after he won election to Congress in 2000. Grasping all the “legs” — fiscal, social and hawkish — of what Ronald Reagan famously described as conservatism’s “three-legged stool”, it wasn’t too long before he was on his way up.  The hardening attitudes on the Right that accompanied the financial crisis (Pence voted against the TARP bailout) and Obama’s election did him no harm either. He became a Tea Party favourite, largely without alienating more mainstream colleagues — no mean achievement. Chatter about a bid for the White House grew louder, but Pence opted to take aim first at the governor’s mansion, a shrewd choice for an ambitious legislator looking for the executive experience that could, if the opportunity arose, bolster a run for the presidency.

Four years later, an unexpected and rather different opportunity presented itself. Pence — more flexible than his reputation suggested — took it. There are dignified rationalisations, of course (patriotic duty, saw something good in Trump) for that decision, but it looks a lot like a brilliant contrarian bet. It would have been made easier to take by the prospect of that re-election fight at home and the thought that, if Trump lost, there was always 2020 and, in the interim, lucrative gigs on the conservative media and lecture circuit — a stint as a Palin, but with gravitas and a future.

Now Pence is a heartbeat, a scandal, or even a tweet away from the presidency. Quite how power is distributed in the Trump administration is opaque, but Pence is clearly much more than a state funerals’ veep, cold-shouldered onto the sidelines. He is out and about too, an ambassador for the administration: to Congress say, or attending the Munich Security Conference in February. He is professional, respectable, calming — no Spiro Agnew he, and, for that matter, no Trump either — and yet, a wise fellow, demonstratively loyal to his boss.

And if in the depths of the night, thoughts that are not quite so loyal come into this still sometimes underrated man’s head, I’m sure they are banished without more ado.

Donald Trump’s inauguration: Darkness at noon?

In his first inaugural address Ronald Reagan described how “idle industries” had “cast workers into unemployment, human misery, and personal indignity,” and in his Barack Obama lamented “[h]omes…lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered.” With the US in the grip of the Great Depression, Franklin D Roosevelt lamented the “dark realities of the moment” and lashed out at “unscrupulous money changers.” Donald Trump’s talk of “American carnage” may have been startling—if less so to many of those who had voted for him—but there is no rule that a new president’s debut has to be sweetness, light and harmony.

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British libel laws: No model for the United States

Daily News, November 3, 2016

Union Station, Washington DC, August 2016 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

Union Station, Washington DC, August 2016 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

Even though Princess Diana is no longer with us, there is still quite a lot that Donald Trump appreciates from across the pond. There's that Scottish golf course of his, there's Brexit, and, judging by a recent interview he gave to Miami's CBS 4, there are England's libel laws.

Trump, claiming to be a "tremendous believer (in) the freedom of the press," is significantly less enthusiastic about the news media's ability, as he sees it, to get away with "terrible, terrible mistakes," mistakes made "on purpose" and intended to "injure people." If he's been wronged, he said, he should be able to sue and so should "anyone else."

In England, maintained Trump, "they have a system where you can actually sue if someone says something wrong." And: "You have a good chance of winning. And deals are made and apologies are made," deals (with Trump it's always deals) and apologies that the U.S. media do not have to make.

I'm British-born and usually pretty chuffed when I hear my native land praised for the way that it manages its affairs, but this time not so much. To be clear about one thing first: Trump is not really talking about "anyone" being able to win damages for defamation by the media. What's bugging him is that in America it's very difficult for a "public figure" (and, trust me, Donald Trump counts as a public figure) to do so.

Under U.S. law and well-established precedent affirmed by the Supreme Court, where public figures are concerned, it's not enough to show carelessness, inaccuracy and damage.

Public figures also have to prove that "actual malice" was involved. That means that the statement was either published by someone who knew it was false or, assuming it turned out to be false, didn't care one way or the other. That can be tough to prove.

Over in England, public figures have it quite a bit easier, although not quite as much easier as Trump, not always known for keeping up with what goes on in the world, may think. In fact, a year or so back, English defamation law, which can be rougher on the press than on those complaining about it, was modified in ways that will make it harder for plaintiffs to use litigation or the threat of litigation to muzzle the media.

Changes included adding the requirement that a statement is not defamatory unless plaintiffs can show "serious harm" (or the danger of serious harm) to their reputations. For businesses, that now means demonstrating that they have suffered, or face the prospect of, "serious financial loss." Additionally, most cases will now be decided by a judge rather than a jury, which ought to reduce costs and, probably, damages.

The press should also benefit from the fact that a still somewhat hazy "public interest" defense has been given statutory force (thereby reinforcing the principle that it's OK to publish something that is — or might reasonably be thought to be — a matter of public interest). But a public interest defense would be far less of an obstacle to litigation by public figures in England than they could, to Trump's obvious irritation, expect to face in the U.S.

Despite these reforms, England's new law retains one key difference with American practice that will appeal to The Donald. In the U.S., it's the plaintiff who has to demonstrate that he or she has been defamed. But in England, it's the defendant who has to prove that what was published isn't defamatory, an obligation that comes with a degree of risk that some editors, journalists and publishers won't relish taking, a risk that helps explain, to take one notorious example, why the sex crimes — crimes that stretched over decades — of the disk jockey Jimmy Savile, a major celebrity in the U.K., went unreported until after his death in 2011.

This chilling effect on what will be published has, as a more recent controversy over a book on Vladimir Putin's finances shows, survived the new law, at least to a certain extent. It's an effect that, I suspect, Trump would be delighted to see spread to the U.S., a country blessed — up to now — with far greater protections for free speech than my homeland.

That mustn't happen. The case can be made that public figures in the U.S. are forced to climb too high a hurdle to defend their reputations, but that is a part of the price that preserving free expression demands.


Donald Trump: always crashing in the same car

Prospect, October 20, 2016

Trump Tower, New York City, September 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

Trump Tower, New York City, September 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

Hillary and Donald didn’t shake hands. And nor did Melania and Bill. Expectations of a mudfight had been whipped up by Team Trump’s decision to bring along a number of guests designed to spook Team Clinton. These included four mothers of people killed by illegal aliens, the former fiancée (from the 1990s) of the US ambassador butchered in Libya, the (allegedly estranged) mother of another of the Benghazi victims, the wholly estranged half-brother of the current president of the United States, and a former TV reporter from Arkansas who has emerged in recent days to assert that she was sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton in the 1980s. Adding to the goodwill in the air, Trump had suggested last weekend that the two candidates should submit to a drug test beforehand. Hillary, he maintained, had been “all pumped up” at the beginning of the previous debate, but had appeared curiously drained by the end of it (“She could barely reach her car”).

But (slightly) less mud flew than anticipated last night and it was The Donald who did not seem quite himself. And this was not just because he came across as somewhat more prepared than usual. Uncharacteristically sotto, he gave an impression of being gently sedated, or at least of having listened to his more sensible advisers, except, of course, when he didn’t. He made the moderator (Fox News’ Chris Wallace, unquestionably the most accomplished performer of the evening) look like an accomplice by thanking him for asking Clinton a tough question. He probably irritated yet more of the female voters he desperately needs—against all the odds—to win over by referring to his opponent as “such a nasty woman.” He won’t have made a lot of new friends with his remark that there were “some bad hombres” among the illegal alien population. Mathematically (“some”) that must, I suppose, be an accurate enough observation, but, in just the latest of countless own goals, Trump managed to phrase it in a way that hinted at a racial animus not only disturbing to Latinos (like just about every minority group a largely lost constituency by now) but to many whites too. On some calculations, Trump will need the support of nearly two-thirds of white voters to win (compared with Romney’s 59 per cent in 2012). Good luck with that.

And then there was the way he dealt with questioning over his willingness to accept the result in November. Lest we forget, he has been complaining that the election is being rigged. After some toing and froing with Trump on this topic, Wallace asked this:

“There is a tradition in this country—in fact, one of the prides of this country—is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard-fought a campaign…that at [its] end… the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying that you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?”

Trump: “What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense. OK?”

That answer (“horrifying”, declared Clinton) became the talking point of the night among the commentariat, and, I suspect, not just among the commentariat. It was, to put it mildly, a remarkable thing for a major party nominee to say ahead of the election. Voting fraud is not exactly unknown in the US, and some grumbling by the unsuccessful candidate—even after a presidential vote— about dodgy doings at the polls, sometimes legitimately (Nixon in 1960), sometimes rather less so (Kerry and those Ohio voting machines in 2004) is another American tradition, but a formal challenge by the loser to the result is not: The Florida debacle in 2000 was a genuinely exceptional state of affairs.

Clinton: “You know, President Obama said the other day when you’re whining before the game is even finished…”

Looked at one way, Trump’s allegation that the election might be rigged (a term he has defined in different ways: it has, for example, included his argument that media bias has distorted the process) against him fits neatly into his outsider narrative and adds to his outsider appeal. Looked at another way, it will have reinforced the impression of many Americans that (as Clinton was not slow to argue) Trump is “not up to doing the job.” It also sounded like the prexcuse of a man who cannot cope with defeat. As Clinton jeered, “There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged.”

Trump couldn’t contain himself: “Should have gotten it!”

“Always crashing in the same car,” as someone once sang.

To be fair, Trump acquitted himself better in this debate than in the first two—low bar—but he did little to avert what looks like a clobbering next month. According to a CNN/ORC poll, 52 per cent of viewers thought that Clinton prevailed, as opposed to the 39 per cent who judged Trump the victor. It says something for the debating skills of a man who prides himself on his ability to close a deal that that was his highest score so far. The best that he can hope for is that his performance will not have cost him too many votes. Best guess: It didn’t. Between them, both Trump and Clinton said enough last night on a wide range of issues including immigration, gun rights, trade, terrorism and abortion to assure Trump’s core supporters that they were in the right place. His problem is that those core supporters are not numerous enough to propel him to the White House.

To attract additional voters last night, Trump needed either to clean up his own image or to make more of a mess of Hillary’s. He didn’t try too hard at the former. Judging by the laughter that greeted his claim that “nobody has more respect for women,” that was, in all probability, wise. Instead he concentrated on trying to drag Clinton down, something that would be very much easier were he not Trump. He attacked the Clinton Foundation (“a criminal enterprise”). She countered with the Trump Foundation (“bought a six-foot portrait of Donald”). He raised sleaze. She talked about his taxes. He complained about the foreign policy fiascoes of recent years. She brought up Putin. He threw in Bill Clinton. She threw back Donald Trump. Yes, Trump landed some blows (those errant emails, allegedly evidence of dirty tricks) but not enough, judging by that poll, to make much of a difference.

And so today Trump tweeted this: “Why didn’t Hillary Clinton announce that she was inappropriately given the debate questions—she secretly used them! Crooked Hillary.”

Always crashing in the same car.

Trump has maxed out—but he will plug on nonetheless

Prospect, October 10, 2016

New York City, September 2016 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

New York City, September 2016 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

The most significant words in last night’s US presidential debate came right towards the end, and they will have ended any hopes in what passes for the Republican leadership that Donald Trump might somehow magically, marvellously just go away.

The two candidates were asked to pick out something that they respected about the other. Hillary Clinton replied that the talents of Trump’s “incredibly able and devoted” children “[say] a lot about Donald” (implication: there was nothing she respected about The Donald himself). Trump framed his response as a compliment to Clinton, but, as usual, he was really talking about himself:

“I will say this about Hillary… she does fight hard and she doesn’t quit and she doesn’t give up and I consider that to be a very good trait.”

It was never likely that Trump, a man unable to contemplate losing at anything, would stand down and it was never certain what would happen if he did, but with that observation he made it clear that, despite the worst week or so that any Republican or Democratic nominee for the presidency has ever endured, The Donald will plug on.

Following as it did a press conference (of sorts) that Trump had arranged for a number of women who had allegedly been seriously wronged by one Clinton or the other, expectations were that the debate would be a roughhouse. And, from the moment that the two contestants declined to shake hands at the bout’s beginning, expectations were not disappointed. The commentariat, a prim lot in America, were duly appalled. I, on the other hand, enjoyed it immensely. Titus Andronicus beats Hamlet any day.

Neither candidate made any attempt to conceal their mutual disdain, but in case any viewers hadn’t got the message, Trump described Clinton as incompetent, the devil, married to a bad man, in hock to special interests and as someone with “tremendous hate in her heart,” someone—his inner authoritarian never far away—he appeared to believe should be jailed over those errant emails. And, oh yes, Clinton is a liar.

For her part, Clinton hit out at the contempt Trump has shown for women “and the very brutal kinds of comments he has made about not just women, but all Americans, all kinds of Americans.” The Donald, she said, is not fit to be president (except, we were left to assume, in the eyes of Vladimir Putin). Not only that, he was responsible for an increase in bullying in schools (“teachers and parents are calling it the Trump Effect”), a hard to verify accusation that will resonate most helpfully—and at several levels—with the distaff side of the electorate. And, oh yes, Donald is a liar.

Even the duo’s behaviour on stage showed the depth of their loathing. His jaw busily doing the Mussolini, Trump prowled around, sometimes looming up behind his opponent in a vaguely menacing manner that, along with an occasionally badgering style, won’t have done him many favours with female voters, especially with his videotaped talk (exaggerated “locker-room” bragging or otherwise) of grabbing women “by the p***y” undoubtedly still fresh on their minds. Meanwhile as The Donald spoke, the look on Clinton’s face shifted between anger, unconvincing impassivity, icy amusement and the condescension that explains why so many Americans find it impossible to warm to her. To lose to Hillary will take some doing, but in selecting Donald Trump as their champion, Republican primary voters appear to have found the right man for the job.

Last night did nothing to change that fact. Prior to the first debate on 26th September, Trump was enjoying an unexpected surge, and the first “what ifs” could be heard in the land. Then came the second self-destructive half of the first debate and, after that, a few days dominated by Miss Universe kamikaze. Clinton pulled back into a comfortable lead and that was according to polls taken before the release of one of the most politically destructive tapes since Richard Nixon’s effort way back when, a tape that was, interestingly, no less destructive for being all too predictable. Last night Clinton described the Trump campaign as “exploding.” That was a stretch, but not by too much.

Trump needed to reverse that slump, but failed. To be fair, when it came to the substance of the debate, such as it was (not much), he did better than anticipated, admittedly a low bar after the debacle first time round. The advantage of mounting an outsider challenge is that little is expected in the way of detailed policy. And indeed when it came to proposing an alternative to, say, Obamacare or the fight against ISIS, very little was all that Trump had to offer. But that won’t matter, at least to his supporters. What they want most now is an echo and an amplifier of their (not always unjustified) resentment and in Trump that is what they’ve got.

However incongruous it may be coming from the man in the penthouse apartment, Trump knows how to play the outsider very well:

“[Hillary] used the power of her office to make a lot of money… [W]hy aren’t you putting money into your own campaign? Just curious.”

Just curious. Just brilliant.

Then, of course, there are those emails. Using a private server in the way that Secretary Clinton did was irresponsible—and possibly sinister—enough, but the signs of a cover-up may prove more damaging, and, in an anti-establishment year (Trump took care to throw in a few references to Bernie Sanders), the suggestion that Clinton benefited from favourable treatment is political poison:

“33,000 e-mails deleted and now she’s saying there wasn’t anything wrong. And more importantly, that was after getting a subpoena. That wasn’t before. That was after. She got it from the United States Congress, and I will be honest. I am so disappointed in congressmen, including Republicans, for allowing this to happen. Our Justice Department where her husband goes on to the back of an airplane for 39 minutes, talks to the Attorney General days before a ruling has to be made on her case… if a member of the private sector did that, they’d be in jail. Let alone, after getting a subpoena from the United States Congress.”

It’s right to feel queasy about the seeming relish with which Trump, a vindictive man and, as I mentioned earlier, someone with obvious authoritarian tendencies, talks about Hillary in jail, but it’s also understandable why so many Americans might be angered by the notion (albeit still disputed) that this ultimate insider has benefited from far more favourable treatment from the authorities than they could ever hope for.

But Trump’s problem is that he has already riled up just about anyone he can. In delivering his best lines last night he was singing to a choir too small to take him to victory, and he didn’t make it any larger. According to a CNN poll, 57 per cent of viewers thought that Hillary won the debate. With November drawing close, the election remains hers to lose.

Race To The White House Through The Looking Glass

Standpoint, October 1, 2016

standpoint.jpg

East Anglia is not, perhaps, an obvious place to assess the American vote this autumn, but back in the UK on a brief trip, I noticed that the small section in a Norwich bookshop dedicated to the US presidential election featured almost nothing on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump was represented by a series of biographies, exposés, comics and even colouring books. Few, if any, were admiring, but they crowded the Clintonware out. As so often, Hillary had been reduced to a grey blur (to borrow one Menshevik’s unwise description of Stalin), barely visible against the madcap backdrop of Trump’s trickster parade.

An election to decide who becomes the world’s most powerful man (or woman) is inevitably intensely focused on the character of the contenders. Even their running-mates, appointed amid brief, synthetic excitement, are speedily hauled away from the limelight, demoted to surrogates deployed to savage the opposing team in a manner that a presidential candidate cannot, or, more positively, to throw a sprinkling of low-wattage stardust over small crowds in small states.

That’s in a normal year. It’s symbolic of this campaign, dominated by the personality of one man, that few running-mates have been pushed quite so quickly into the background as Trump’s choice, Indiana governor Mike Pence. Adding respectability and good hair to a campaign with little of either, Pence is a stolid reminder that the GOP is traditionally the “daddy party”, a quality that risks being drowned out by the playground taunts of its presidential nominee.

From the tweets of Donald Trump: “@SenJohnMcCain should be defeated in the primaries. Graduated last in his class at Annapolis — dummy!”

For the record, McCain, a bright but truculent student, came not last but 894th out of 899, not quite ignominious enough for The Donald. Reducing the senator still further in the rankings was an example of Trump’s use of “truthful hyperbole,” a clever term (dreamt up by his ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal) for a clever idea. It goes a long way to explaining Trump’s success as a salesman of buildings, of stories, of conspiracies and of himself. What matters is not what is true, but what is remembered, and how.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”


Many voters seem less disturbed by Trump’s abusive relationship with fact than they should be. They understand that Trump is true to himself if not to the truth, a proof of his authenticity even when based on lies.

But back to Mike Pence. He has been married for decades to one woman and has a surname with one syllable (something Trump reportedly believes “conveys strength”). Earlier this year, he endorsed Ted Cruz and had been said to “loathe” Trump. Trump’s Hoosier is, it turns out, not only respectable, but flexible, helpful given his role as a kind of “ambassador” to sceptical elements in the Republican establishment.

The Pence pick was muttered rather than proclaimed. He was introduced from a podium on which the Trump name was present, but the Pence name was not. The same could, for the most part, be said about the speech by Trump that followed, a typically Trump talk about Trump — with added terrorism, law and order, industrial decline, “crooked Hillary”, taxes, over-regulation, the Nafta disaster, that wall, Brexit, the building of a hotel in Washington DC (“under budget and ahead of schedule”), and triumph over the Republican party hierarchy.

From time to time, Trump remembered why he was meant to be there, and dragged his speech “back to Mike Pence” with a shout-out or two to the Indianan’s achievements, before reverting again to Donald J. Trump. 

Pence had been chosen partly for reasons of “party unity”, but The Donald’s signal was clear: this was still his campaign. And so it has proved. The election has been dominated by this most unexpected candidate, a shape-shifting, eccentric reminder of America’s infinite capacity to surprise, a narcissistic, poorly-informed, sometimes tin-eared, sometimes astoundingly intuitive post-political politician, a fantasist, a chancer who looks in the mirror and sees the future. His opponent — dull, exhausted Hillary — has been reduced to a supporting role, with the twist that is she who will limp off with the prize.

Trump’s most interesting observation in that speech was that he was “a messenger”, a humblebrag but accurate enough. His startling ascendancy in the Republican primaries, even if helped by the fact that he was taking on a divided field of rivals far weaker than the GOP leadership has ever been prepared to admit, sent a message about unhappiness on the Right.

The fact that Trump is, as I write, for all his flaws and gaffes, still very much in contention for the top job sends a broader, even gloomier message: America is not at ease with itself, a message echoed by those millions of Democrats who voted for Bernie Sanders, a grouchy Marxist lost in ancient delusion.

But it’s Trump who appears to be the messenger of those who are unhappiest of all. Early analyses of his rise emphasised the support he was winning among the embattled white working class, left behind by globalisation, job-destroying automation and sweeping demographic change (support swollen by the more traditional politics of racial resentment in his Southern and Appalachian redoubts) and reinforced by feelings of voicelessness and the suspicion that the country no longer had much room for them. It’s not only the poorest that feel this way. Read enough elite exultation, particularly in the media, at the prospect of an older, whiter America on its way to the grave, and it’s not hard to understand why some whites fear they are, in the sinister old Soviet phrase, “former people” in the making. 


Trump’s tax-cutting agenda (the numbers don’t add up, but Trump is hardly alone in being guilty of that) will only be of limited appeal to many of these voters. But they do appreciate much of the rest of what their champion has to say, both for its specifics, however implausible, and, no less, for how it feels. “Make America great again” is more than patriotic swagger. It’s a reproach and a promise, a wild, exhilarating swing against contemporary orthodoxy — on immigration, on free trade, on multiculturalism, on bearing too great a burden abroad and on much, much more besides. The Wall Street bashing, however incongruous from a millionaire/billionaire/whatever in his tower, plays well with this crowd too.

Whatever some alarmists might say, this is not fascism (as that term is properly construed) or anything like it. Despite Trump’s fondness for jutting his jaw like Il Duce, his rise is better understood by looking not at the Europe of nearly a century ago but at its current populist surge — of Left, Right and something of both: Syriza, UKIP, the Finns Party and all the rest. It was no coincidence that Nigel Farage shared a platform with Trump in Mississippi in August. Trumpism (yes, it’s a word, even if no one, including Trump, quite knows what it means) is part of a wider revolt against ruling establishments, on either side of the Atlantic, affluent, post-national and condescending, and not as competent as they like to assume.

While the Trump campaign is defined and often overwhelmed by the man at its centre (thus its chaos), the personality cult on which it is, if only partly, built comes with a wink. For all the towers, hotels, casinos, headlines, women and bankruptcies, Trump would not be where he is today without his decade (and more) in reality TV, something that has propelled him to the rostrum while subtly undermining his place there. He takes himself seriously — very seriously — and yet there is more than a trace of self-parody about his performance, which the fans and followers (in Trump’s case, often interchangeable categories) who have watched the evolution of his media image over the years, understand very well. It helps explain why they hold him to a lower standard than they would a more mainstream candidate. As Trump draws closer to the White House, that’s not a comforting thought. There are good reasons to believe that this thin-skinned, occasionally vindictive man might attempt to abuse the powers of the presidency to an even greater extent than some of his predecessors.

But if Trump tried to overreach, he would almost certainly be stopped. Whatever else can be forecast about this election (full disclosure: my predictions have not proved exactly infallible so far), we can be sure Trump is not going to win by a landslide. The electoral twists that might take him to victory would also secure a GOP-controlled Congress, but one where many of the Republicans who sat there disapproved of their man in the White House. Many more would be profoundly worried by what Trumpgate could mean for their political future. The elections that followed Nixon’s disgrace were not kind to his party. Historical memories in America are short, but not that short.

Much of the electorate, including a good percentage of those who had voted, noses held tight, for Trump, would be watchful and on edge, the financial markets — already nervous about what Trumpenomics might mean — would be twitchy, the judiciary would be on its guard and business would be suspicious. The bureaucracy would be uncooperative and, often, outright hostile. America’s defence chiefs would fret about what Trump could mean for the country’s security, their apprehensions fuelled by the useful idiocy of Trump’s footsie with Putin, his undermining of Nato and those fabled tiny fingers coming too close to the nuclear button. As for the media, well, what do you think?

One prominent conservative journalist, no never-Trumper, told me that impeachment proceedings against a President Trump would be a matter not of if, but when. It wouldn’t altogether surprise me. And in that respect, not only Trump’s future conduct, but also his past could possibly make for difficulty. He has, after all, spent years making and losing money in construction and casinos, two businesses not known for their spotless reputation. And he still has to contend with litigation over Trump University, an institution that allegedly preyed on just the sort of regular folks he has pledged to defend. Then there’s the matter of what might be lurking in Trump’s still mysterious tax returns. Meanwhile, doing his bit for the cause, New York’s (Democratic) attorney general has announced an investigation into Trump’s charitable foundation. If there are any skeletons to be dragged out of Trump Cupboard, they will be.

On the other hand, there are legitimate questions about the extent to which the checks and balances (explicit and implicit) built into the American system would act as a brake on President Hillary Clinton, an authoritarian herself and dogged by questions about her integrity that stretch all the way back to her improbably successful cattle futures trading as first lady of Arkansas.

She’s an establishment figure and the establishment would be more inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, not least out of gratitude that it had dodged the Trump fusillade. There’s also a decent chance that the Senate, if not the House, would be under Democratic control in the event of a Clinton win. What’s more, the behaviour of the civil service in recent years suggests it wouldn’t be too keen to push back against misbehaviour by a Democratic president. Writing in USA Today, University of Tennessee law professor and influential blogger Glenn (“Instapundit”) Reynolds argued that “Federal employees overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, donate to Democrats, and, by all appearances, cover for Democrats as a routine part of doing their job.” That’s not so much of an exaggeration as it should be.

As for scrutiny by the media, well, what do you think? Whining by the Washington Post, the paper of Watergate no less, that “the Hillary Clinton email story is out of control” signals what lies ahead.

As a reminder, that story revolves round Clinton’s decision, while Secretary of State, to use a private email server on official business. This was against the rules and had potentially (and quite possibly not just potentially: was the server hacked?) damaging security implications: The FBI grumbled about “extreme carelessness” in the “handling of very sensitive, highly classified information”, but found no criminal intent. Other Clinton critics asked whether she had arranged matters in this way because — this did not take a major imaginative leap — she had something to hide, questions not made any easier to answer by the fact that thousands of “private” emails had been erased. The affair, which has contributed — and continues to contribute — to Clinton’s perceived lack of trustworthiness with voters, rumbles on, but even the Justice Department’s eventual decision not to pursue criminal charges against her has come at a cost: it bolstered the impression that the Clintons are above the law, not a reputation to celebrate in an anti-establishment year.

Nevertheless, for all Clinton’s stumbles, both literal (we’ll come to that) and figurative, barring a major extraneous event (a massive terrorist attack, say, or some suitably embarrassing leaks via interestingly connected hackers) the best bet is, to repeat myself, that, despite some turbulence in the polls, she will be taking the oath of office in January. Trump’s core problem is that there simply are not enough white working-class voters (a group that amounted to some two-thirds of the electorate in 1980, but barely more than a third today), a problem reinforced by the fact that the rhetoric that wins them over to his side alienates their more upmarket counterparts. Mitt Romney won the support of 59 per cent of white voters in 2012, but he still lost the election. Continuing demographic change (whites are forecast to cast around 69 per cent of the votes this year) and Trump’s even greater unpopularity with minorities will mean that he would have to beat Romney’s 59 per cent by some margin to have any realistic chance of victory (on some estimates he would need to reach 65 per cent). That would involve scoring very well indeed with college-educated whites, but an early September poll showed that Clinton was beating Trump among such voters in 31 states.

This was, I suspect, the constituency at which Clinton was aiming when, in during a speech at a fundraiser in Manhattan in early September she divided Trump’s voters into two “baskets” of roughly equal sizes. The first “contained people who feel that government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them . . . They are just desperate for change . . . they don’t buy everything [Trump] says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different.” The second was a “basket of deplorables . . . Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.” They were, she said, “irredeemable”, an unsettling choice of adjective.

Clinton sometimes says what she believes and on this occasion that’s what she did, although in a later sorry-not-sorry comment she conceded that she had dumped too high a percentage of Trump supporters into the deplorables basket. But the message she wanted to deliver will have survived. Voting for Trump was the mark either of a loser or, worse still, of a racist/sexist/homophobe/xenophobe/Islamophobe. By contrast, ran the subtext, a vote for Hillary was proof of being none of those things, an attractive pitch to some suburbanites, not least because of the way it chimes with the misgivings that they already have about those who have jumped onto the Trump train. Clinton’s comment was widely seen as a gaffe — insulting voters is not normally seen as a good idea — and angered many, but it may play well with the decisive few at whom, I reckon, it was really directed.

It was widely assumed that, once Trump won the Republican nomination, he would — to use the fashionable term — pivot. He would, it was thought, reach out to centrists and minorities and, more generally, just make an effort to come across as rather more presidential, all shifts likely to appeal to those college-educated whites. Occasionally that’s what happened, even if some of those pivots have, in the words of Republican Senator Jeff Flake (who has, at the time of writing, refused to endorse Trump) been “360-degree pivots”: “He pivots and then pivots right back.”

Nevertheless, there have been signs of a more sophisticated and even conciliatory approach, especially since Trump’s appointment of Kellyanne Conway, a veteran pollster well-known in Republican circles, as his latest campaign manager. It could be seen in Trump’s nuanced and clever response to Clinton’s baskets. He picked up on its unmistakably authoritarian tone (“She divided people into baskets as though they were objects not human beings”) and the sneer that accompanied it (“You can’t lead this nation if you have such a low opinion for its citizens”), while deftly playing his class card (Hillary “mocks and demeans hard-working Americans” while living a “sequestered life behind gates and walls and guards”), a reflection of his ability to, so to speak, descend from his penthouse. Trump’s wealth is a badge of success, spent without pretension. It’s Clinton’s, a grandee of a governing class that disdains money while somehow managing to amass it, that is resented. Shortly after Clinton’s remarks, Trump announced a, by Republican standards, generous maternity leave plan. Populists of the Right know when to lean left, and when to appeal to women, a constituency that needs some convincing to vote for Trump.

Trump also made a well-received visit to Louisiana, hit by massive flooding and (strangely, given Hurricane Katrina) neglected by Clinton and, initially, President Obama. He flew to meet Mexico’s president and has appeared (it’s complicated) to refine his immigration agenda: more emphasis on enforcement and border security (complete with that wall), less talk of mass deportation of those already in the country, a notion that makes many Americans very uneasy. Trump also showed up in Detroit to visit his “brothers and sisters” in an African-American church, a gesture that will be unlikely to win him many black recruits (most polls show him scoring in the low single digits with black voters, although there have been some intriguing outliers), but may play well with whites understandably turned off by some of the rougher edges of Trump’s rhetoric and, for that matter, support.

Trump will score somewhat better among other minorities (it would be hard to do much worse), but dismal polling, as at the time of writing, among Latinos (19 per cent, according to an early-September poll: Romney managed 27 per cent at the last presidential election) hint at the immensity of the challenge that faces him, a challenge reinforced by the suspicion that prejudice against one is a prejudice against all. Shortly after Trump had — on essentially ethnic grounds — attacked the impartiality of a Mexican-American judge presiding over some of the Trump University litigation, a Chinese-American acquaintance, no leftist, told me that this was the last straw — another vote lost. One April poll found that 40 per cent of registered Asian-American voters would not vote for a candidate “with strongly anti-immigrant views” even if “they agreed with him or her on other issues”.

If this emphasis on ethnicity rather than policy as a basis for voting for one party or another sounds ominous, so it should. Over the last half-century, America has combined acceptance of mass immigration from all over the world with a rejection of its earlier assimilationist approach to new arrivals. The insistence on assimilation had worked very well. It has been replaced with a multiculturalism that works nowhere. The result is Balkanising the nation, changing unum into pluribus, a transformation that, if history is any judge, or the divisive identity politics of the country’s universities any foretaste, leads nowhere that America should want to go.

American attitudes to immigration are complex and conflicted and made more so by the way that, in often unacknowledged ways, they overlap with attitudes to race and, now, multi-culturalism. That said, when Trump looked at the challenge he faced in the primaries, he saw the opportunity presented by the failure of his Republican rivals, for the most part products of a lazily (or in Jeb Bush’s case, enthusiastically) immigration-friendly GOP establishment, to respond to the unease felt by many of their voters over this topic. In his own crude fashion, Trump then made immigration his issue, a brilliant — and calculated — move that took him to the head of the pack. The paradox, however, is that The Donald’s aggressive and often obnoxious stance on this question will buttress the Democrats’ gains from the demographic changes that mass immigration has brought in its wake. As a result, they will be even more determined to persevere with the immigration policies and identity politics that could, in the worst case, eventually culminate in some sort of Yugoslavia.

Turning to the more immediate future, Republicans will be (quietly) hoping that, without Obama at the top of the Democratic ticket, minority turnout will be down. It might, and that would be troubling for Clinton, but the Democrats and the media will hype the dangers of a Republican candidate, who can even now be relied upon to help the hype with suitably incendiary gaffes. His handlers can only do so much. As Trump could discover to his cost, casting a vote against can be almost as good a reason to show up at the polls as a vote for.

Then again, voting against crooked Hillary will be a pleasant task for many on the Right (and for quite a few, far easier than voting for Trump). But Clinton, who was first lady before some of today’s voters were born, has been on the political scene for a long time. Some of the fury she used to attract has subsided. Even the conspiracy theorists have seemed weary (how many murders was it, anyway?), at least until persistent rumours about her health began to gather pace, a worrying development for a candidate for a job on which so much rests on one pair of shoulders.

In early September the National Enquirer, a disreputable if enjoyable supermarket scandal-sheet and one of the few publications to have endorsed Trump, “revealed” that the 68-year-old Hillary, “frail” and “overweight” is “infected with a crippling killer virus, suffers from alcoholism, has been devastated by three strokes and is battling severe mental disorders”, as well as, possibly — Job in a trouser suit — multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy. Were that to be true, it would be testimony to Hillary’s resilience that she was so quickly back on her feet after her fainting episode (first blamed on the heat, then on pneumonia) at New York’s 9/11 memorial, the incident that took speculation about her health away from the checkout lane and into the headlines.

Her return to the campaign trail may have been speeded along by comments by former Ohio governor Ted Strickland (a Democrat now running for the Senate) just two days later. Clinton’s running-mate, Virginia senator Tim Kaine, was, noted Strickland, “a wonderfully prepared person to be . . . the president if that ever became necessary”. Strickland knows what many people know: Senator Kaine, a mainstream Democrat and a former governor of his state, would run better against Trump than Clinton does.

Making matters worse, Clinton’s perceived evasiveness over what was ailing her sharpened questions about her honesty. According to one poll roughly half of all voters believed that she had “given the public false information about her health”. To David Axelrod, a former senior Obama adviser, this was an own goal. “Antibiotics,” he tweeted “can take care of pneumonia. What’s the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?” Unnecessary? I wonder.  But voters’ familiarity with the Clinton style has bred complacency: The email mess has hurt Hillary, but it has not proved to be the cancer on her candidacy that it once might have been, and the genuinely disturbing murk that surrounds yet another source of controversy, the Clinton Foundation — a nest of actual and potential conflicts of interest with a stink of pay-to-play about it — has yet to seriously disturb an electorate too jaded to care overmuch.

It’s not all gloom for Trump — far from it. Traditional loyalties, a widening gulf between the parties, the belief that The Donald is the lesser of two evils, and the manner in which the election process has “normalised” the idea of a Trump candidacy have all led to a far larger proportion of Republican-leaning voters rallying behind their party’s nominee than once was thought possible (the same is not true of the divided right-wing commentariat). Even so, in a contest where Trump will need to haul in every voter who could conceivably be his, quite a few will make their excuses and leave.

Some will defect to Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico now running as the Libertarian candidate with another former Republican governor as his running mate. By repositioning the Libertarian party in an unaccustomed role as a “sane” (to use, as Johnson does, that infuriatingly smug term for centrist) alternative to Trump and Clinton, Johnson will take votes (in greater numbers probably than any third party for two decades) from both, perhaps more from Clinton than Trump, but it is unlikely to be so many as to make a difference, although his seeming appeal to young voters may be a sign that Hillary is not doing so well with this key Obama constituency as she should. On a more reassuring note for the Democrats, it doesn’t look as if Clinton need worry greatly about the threat to her left from Jill Stein’s Greens, a party in no hurry to re-label itself as sane.

Put everything together, add in the way that the maths of the electoral college favours the Democrats and then throw in her campaign’s superior organisation, and the odds, despite some wobbles, still favour Clinton, a candidate described by a possibly demob-happy Barack Obama as the “most qualified” candidate ever to run for the presidency — leaving, therefore, predecessors such as Thomas Jefferson (principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Governor of Virginia, ambassador to France and, ahem, Secretary of State) behind in the dust.

The defining achievement of Clinton’s time as First Lady — other than sticking with Bill and polarising the nation — was a failed healthcare reform. Despite courageous efforts to tackle the video game menace, she achieved very little in her eight years as senator, and her time as Secretary of State is remembered mainly for the unsuccessful “reset” with Russia and the slaughter of four Americans in Benghazi, including the US ambassador to Libya. She also, it’s noted on Wikipedia, “greatly expanded the State Department’s use of social media, including Facebook and Twitter”.

There is very little excitement over Clinton’s candidacy. At the end of August Trump was recording extraordinarily high (63 per cent) unfavourables in the polls, but so was Hillary (56 per cent). It took something to pick a candidate who could actually lose to Clinton, but that’s what the GOP’s primary voters did. That said, Trump’s core supporters seem more passionate, more involved, and more likely to vote. In a thought-provoking reprise of the Sanders campaign, he has been attracting impressive amounts of money from an impressive number of small donors, a phenomenon worth watching if it continues. The GOP’s voter registration drive has being going surprisingly well in some key states.

By contrast, efforts to whip up some enthusiasm over the prospect of the election to the presidency of a rich, entitled grande dame as a feminist milestone are falling, like her speeches, just a little bit flat. With her metallic voice and weirdly forced facial expressions, there is something robotic about Clinton. Trump’s wild talk is often alarming, but rarely dull. To watch Hillary is to be left with a vague sense that a mechanic will need to be called in.

To be fair, it’s not easy to generate a lot of excitement when running for what will inevitably be seen as the third term (always a political challenge) of a sitting administration, and, to a degree, of a past one — her husband’s — too. And that’s what she’s doing. Broadly speaking, a Hillary presidency will build on the status quo, with additional shifts to the left on regulation, tax, climate change bossiness, immigration and (albeit in a move likely to find considerable bipartisan support) trade: The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the EU will, to steal a phrase from Obama, go “to the back of the queue”. After Trump and Sanders, the votes for a further extension of free trade are not there. On the other hand, she is likely to be more assertive than Obama — a low bar — internationally, and, unlike what Trump appears to have in mind, no dangerous games will be played with Nato.

Her freedom to act will be constrained if the Republicans manage to hang on to the Congress. At the time of writing, earlier fears that Trump would cost the GOP its majorities appear overdone. The Republicans seem well-placed to hang on to the House and they are still in with a chance of retaining the Senate. But however well or badly they do, the questions posed by the rise of Trump, a candidate who seems set to cost them a presidential election that they should have won, are not going away. Trump himself is a one-off, 70 years old, and, if some recent Senate primaries are any indication, not yet in a position to remake the GOP in his own image. But the changes to which his rise is a response, changes which are only going to accelerate, will have to be confronted by a party that has no clue how to do so.

Seen from 2020, 2016 may look pretty good.

Turning Trump

Prospect, May 23, 2016

New York City, June 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

New York City, June 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

In July last year, former Texas governor Rick Perry, then running for the Republican presidential nomination, took aim at Donald Trump, then—as now—amazing just about everyone (full disclosure: including me) by how well he was doing.

Trump, warned Perry, offered “a barking carnival act…a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued.” Trump’s candidacy was, he added, a “cancer on conservatism.”

That was then. Last week Perry said that he would be prepared to serve as vice-tumour. If Trump needed somebody with his experience then Perry would not say, “Aw shucks sir, I’m gonna go fishing.” No sir, he would do his duty by his country.

Leading figures in the Republican Party are coming round to the political reality that Trump’s success represents. For some that’s a matter of personal ambition (absolute power may corrupt absolutely, but the whiff of power does a pretty good job too). For others it’s the product of hard-eyed, if bleak, calculation. They are unlikely—despite recent polling suggesting a swing in Trump’s direction—to think that the Donald can win the presidency (or to agree with what he stands for), but they may well have concluded that losing as a relatively united party would be less harmful than any of the alternatives.

Ordinary Republican voters are finding it easier to rally behind Trump. Those who, just a month or two ago, were telling pollsters they would not vote for him in November are falling into line. And fewer are holding their noses as they do so. In April, Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling showed that around 40 per cent of GOP voters regarded Trump negatively. That’s now dropped to 25 per cent. Politics are tribal. With the primary fight over, most will unite behind their leader despite earlier misgivings.

It helps that Hillary Clinton, the presumed chieftain of the other tribe, has been a bogeywoman to the Right for decades (and she’s not too popular with anyone else: her unfavourables—astoundingly high for a candidate in her position—are only exceeded, if by a narrowing margin, by Trump’s). It helps too that Clinton’s standing with the wider electorate is being hurt by the brawl with Bernie Sanders. In some recent polls, Trump has pulled ahead of Clinton. I doubt that lead will endure once the Democrats reunite, but to the degree that it does, it will induce even more Republicans into the Trump camp. After all, if he has a chance….

There’s something else. Trump’s mood music (it would be an exaggeration to describe his programme as much more than that) sounds sweeter to many Republicans than their leadership might like. Tough on immigration: Check. Tough on trade: Check. Rejecting Bush-style interventionism abroad: Check. Preserving Medicare (health care for the over-65s) and Social Security (pensions): Check. Trump’s voters may revere Reagan the man, but they are unconvinced by Reagan the mantra. Trump achieved lift-off with the help of a white working class that believes, not without reason, that it has been “left behind” (the parallels with today’s UKIP are obvious), struggling to prosper in a rapidly transforming America in which it no longer feels at home. It has had quite enough creative destruction, thank you very much.

But in an age of insecurity it is not only blue collars that are being felt. Trump’s campaign may owe its launch to working class Republicans, but it was boosted into orbit by supporters from far beyond the Appalachian hollows and Rustbelt towns of reassuring caricature. The collateral damage of globalization and automation is spreading ever higher up the social scale. Trump’s coalition of the anxious is considerably broader than the GOP’s high-ups seem willing to acknowledge, and, tellingly, was not soothed away by the social conservatism peddled by the Donald’s rivals. To say Trump makes an unexpected standard-bearer for a party that includes a prominent (if often misunderstood) religious right is an understatement, but that’s what he will be. Priorities change.

To be sure, Trump threw the Reaganite wing of the party a bone in the form of a supply-side-on-steroids tax plan of such absurdity that the kindest way to look at it is as a statement of intent (welcome enough from someone who has supported higher taxation in the past) that he won’t increase taxes. In another conciliatory gesture, Trump has released a list of potential Supreme Court nominees designed to appeal to the Right. If he were to abide by this promise, wrote Jim Geraghty of the conservative, Trumpsceptic National Review (of which I am a contributing editor), “justices like these would make autocracy, a likely nuclear exchange, the collapse of the dollar and the dissolution of NATO easier to bear.”

Jim was not, I think, being entirely serious, but, there’s no mistaking his underlying concern that Trump simply cannot be trusted with the presidency. To the extent that Trump has an ideology (he has changed his party affiliation five times since 1987), it’s best described as a mutation of early Twentieth Century American Progressivism—something that’s a long way from contemporary GOP orthodoxy—but ultimately Trump is about Trump. Being Trump has enabled him to get to where he is now, but being Trump will ensure that, however horrified Republican voters might be at the prospect of another Clinton presidency, there will be a number of them who will not vote for their party’s candidate.

Some will worry that a Trump victory in November would be even worse for the future of the GOP than defeat. For others, the fears may run deeper still. A month or so back, a Midwestern Republican told me that Trump would, for the most part, be a better president than Clinton. But the worst of Trump could, he fretted, be far worse than the worst of Hillary: “He could blow the country up.” That was not a risk he would take. He hasn’t changed his mind since.

That’s just one voter, but I suspect he’s not alone.

What did “Super Tuesday” tell us about the Presidential election?

Prospect, March 2, 2016

New York City, March 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

New York City, March 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. Hillary Clinton had a good night, stumbling in places where she was expected to stumble: Colorado, and also Vermont, where Sanders is the junior senator. But benefiting from solid African-American support in the south and snatching a significant victory over Sanders in Massachusetts, just across the Vermont border. Senator Sanders is not going to give up his quest any time soon, but, in the absence of an indictment arising out of Clinton’s email adventures, Hillary looks well set to take the Democratic nomination in due course. That there has been any doubt about that, and that America’s Corbyn was the source of that doubt, says something about the unsettled mood of the American electorate.

And that brings me to the Republicans. There was no fresh earthquake, but the aftershocks of what had already hit the GOP were only marginally less devastating. Trump romped home in a series of victories that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago. But the Republican establishment can take a few crumbs of comfort from the fact that The Donald’s triumph was not quite as complete as some were beginning to anticipate. Averaged across the twelve states, percentage-wise he scored in the mid-thirties. Impressive, but far below the 49 percent he took in a recent CNN poll of Republican voters. His delegate haul—less than half those up for grabs on Tuesday—fell short too: Trump’s path to the magic 1,237 (the number of delegates required to secure the nomination) is not clear yet.

Building on earlier success in Iowa, Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, prevailed in his state, in Oklahoma next door and Alaska. Cruz is a hardliner, clever, abrasive and don’t-you-forget-it devout. He has craftily reinvented himself as an outsider despite Princeton, Harvard, an impressive legal career, a seat in the senate and a wife who works at Goldman Sachs. But he is only the junior outsider, outranked in the wilderness by a billionaire, and, currently running second to Trump in the delegate count, he may end up the insider candidate who leads the last stand against Trump—who runs him closest at the end.

But most of the Republican establishment would rather work with the more emollient Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida and and the Republican most likely to beat Hillary. Once again, Rubio failed to live up to his advance billing, but he managed to win in Minnesota and—an achievement these days—ran Trump close in Virginia. Overall, however, he was outscored on Tuesday by Cruz and a loss to Trump in the Florida primary on 15th March would be a blow from which he would probably not recover. But for now he’s very much in the race. His problem is that so is Cruz.

If we ignore (as we should) retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, plugging on despite poor results for self-promotional reasons of his own, that leaves Ohio governor John Kasich, now positioning himself as a moderate of sorts and (although he denies it) as someone’s vice presidential pick. His results did not amount to a great deal, but he only fell a few percentage points behind Trump in Vermont and he came close to respectability in Massachusetts. That was enough. He’s not pulling out yet.

So what’s next? Trump, who has long since transcended what were thought to be the rules of the American political game, will sweep on through outrage and gaffes, the strong favourite to win the GOP nomination and the strong favourite to lose against Hillary. Republicans who oppose Trump are focusing on his failure (to date) to win over more than half of their voters. Their best hope is that the non-Trump forces can coalesce behind one credible champion—Rubio, preferably, or Cruz—in sufficient numbers to put to a stop to a momentum driven by forces much greater than any of the candidates in this race. Failing that, they have to pray that, between them, Rubio, Cruz, Kasich and the good doctor can amass sufficient delegates to take the fight against Trump all the way to the Republican convention in July. Yes, these are long shots, very long shots.

Meanwhile, Hillary is measuring the drapes for the White House.

Donald Trump's Genius

Prospect, December 20, 2015

Greenwich Village, NYC, February 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

Greenwich Village, NYC, February 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

At a lunchtime meeting in Manhattan a month or so ago, a prominent member of America’s conservative commentariat—it wouldn’t be fair to name him—was invited to give his predictions for the 2016 election. He laughed and said that, as he had been forecasting the imminent bursting of the Trump bubble for months, he might not be the best person to ask.

But no one, not even, I suspect, the Donald, had expected that his campaign would do as well as it has. Within days of announcing his bid for the Republican nomination back in June, Trump was running at 11 per cent, sharing the top ranking with two senators. And that was just the beginning.

At the time of that lunch meeting, Trump was leading in the polls, followed by Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon, in second place and Carly Fiorina, a businesswoman, in third. What these three had in common was that they had never held elective office, which, our speaker suggested, showed that Republicans were very unhappy with the politicians they had. And so they were. And so they are.

Trump’s genius lay in spotting one of the issues that made Republicans unhappiest—immigration—and making it his own. The reluctance of the Republican establishment to respond to the anxiety on the right—and not just the right—on this topic had opened up a gap in American politics. And in politics, if there’s a gap that is big enough, and promising enough, someone will come along to fill it. Trump, never previously known as an immigration hawk, swooped on the issue that, more than any other, has made his campaign what it is, basing a good portion of it on something that is easy to understand, if difficult to build: a wall along the southern border of the United States. Message sent. Message received. According to an August survey by Rasmussen Reports (admittedly a Republican-leaning polling group) some 70 per cent of likely Republican voters supported Trump’s wall, as, incidentally, did 51 per cent of all likely voters.

The Republican establishment only has itself to blame. It ignored the warning signals sent by the collapse of George W Bush’s proposed immigration legislation in 2007 (it was scuppered by a revolt on the right) and by the failure of an immigration reform plan cobbled together by a bipartisan “Gang of Eight” senators in 2013.

Reasonable people can disagree over immigration, but it says something that none of the career politicians running for the Republican nomination had the sort of track record that immigration hardliners were looking for. Some of the candidates for the Republican nomination have since developed a tougher stance on immigration, not least Marco Rubio, the young senator from Florida, but they were never going to be enough to please a constituency riled by Trump and inclined to distrust anyone who is, like Rubio, from within the Beltway. The fact that Trump has taken more moderate positions on this question in the past hasn’t mattered. Outsiders get a pass, it seems.

Viewed in this context, proposing a “total and complete” and whatever else you might think about it, clearly unworkable ban on Muslims entering the US “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on” was good, if brass-knuckled, politics. It linked the immigration controversy to security concerns sharpened by the Paris killings and a pervasive sense of a government that is not up to the job. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 59 per cent of Republicans (and 36 per cent of Americans) would support such a ban.

So what now? With (considerable) effort Trump can be found a place within the existing American political taxonomy. In his own way, he’s very New York, so much so that it has been claimed that he would do better to run against Gotham’s unpopular mayor, Bill de Blasio. Stretch a bit—no a lot—and Trump can be seen as an uncontrolled, un-PC and rather less intelligent version of former mayor Bloomberg, another authoritarian billionaire with just a hint (in Trump’s case in his pre-presidential political musings) of an early 20th Century Progressive about him.  Quite a few Republicans have complained that Trump is not really a Republican, and not without reason. But then again nor was Bloomberg, yet he won his first two mayoral elections under that label.

Yes, Trump is, as the late Lord Charteris would have put it, “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar”, a hard-edged huckster with more than a suspicion of the bully and the charlatan about him. But his brash, opulent and narcissistic excess, sprinkled with the stardust of show business, and the gold dust of however many billions he has (characteristically, it’s disputed) plays in America in a way still unthinkable in Britain.

If I had to guess (and a guess is all it is, believe me), Trump has reached some sort of peak in the polls: When the serious business of the primaries begins, his appeal will start to fade. What I don’t have to guess is that Hillary is already very pleased indeed.