I have said that I am sick of this election and can’t wait for it to be over. But who am I kidding? In the US, we are now in the stage of permanent campaign mode, where the process for the next election starts before the current one even ends. This can be traced to the fact that unlike in most countries where only the maximum duration of a person’s or government’s term is fixed and elections can be, and often are, held before the end of it often with very short notice, in America the date is pretty much written in stone and so ambitious people can plan their strategy well in advance.
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The Guardian reports that Nigel Farage, the one-time leader of Britain’s xenophobic, pro-Brexit party UKIP, may coach Donald Trump before the next debate. As usual, there have been mixed signals from the Trump camp. The message from Trump himself is that he won handily and that implies that he does not need any debating advice. But others in the party and his camp are worried that he may repeat his widely panned performance and want to try and steer him away from another poor showing.
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A couple of days ago we had yet another report of the shooting death of an unarmed black man by the police. The police say that he had been acting suspiciously. It seems like this is happening every other day and it got me thinking about how differently one assesses risks of death at the hands of the police depending on one’s ethnicity or socio-economic status.
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As we have seen, Donald Trump seems to place a great deal of importance on women’s looks. Matt Pearce writes that when he visited his properties, he would tell the managers to fire any woman on the staff that did not meet his standards and replace them with prettier women, and the managers had to scramble to find workarounds in order to save those women’s jobs.
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At the Labour Party conference held two days ago, newly–re-elected leader Jeremy Corbyn surprised observers by delivering a powerful speech that resulted in a standing ovation. It was a call for Labour to return to its socialist roots and reject the words of the doomsayers who think that neoliberalism is the way of the future and that Labour is heading to its doom. You can read the full text of his speech and here are some short excerpts.
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It is becoming increasingly clear that Donald Trump is smarting from his performance in the first debate. Initially, just after the debate, he seemed to think he had done pretty well, praising the moderator Lester Holt for doing a great job. This is not unusual for people like Trump who are so wrapped up in themselves that they do not realize how others see them until they are told, and even then dismissing any suggestion that they were less than excellent. But the fact that there was near unanimity that he was handed his hat by Hillary Clinton has sunk in and definitely got under his skin and he has started lashing out, calling the moderator biased, renewing his attacks on Alicia Machado, and even bizarrely suggesting that someone had tampered with his microphone.
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I do not mean that Donald Trump himself is overweight but that he seems to have an almost visceral dislike of people who are over the conventional norms of weight. For example, he is like an adolescent in the way he rates women’s looks but he reserves his most vicious attacks for people like Rosie O’Donnell whom he has at various times referred to as “a woman out of control,” a “true loser,” a “total train wreck,” “disgusting,” a “slob,” “fat, ugly” “.
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