As the coronavirus continues to spread across the United States, questions concerning American voters’ ability to cast their ballots safely in person on 3 November became increasingly urgent this election season. Despite his own record of voting by mail, President Trump has frequently attacked mail-in voting, making unfounded claims about the potential for fraud and playing favorites to suggest its validity only in states with Republican governors like Florida. Depicting vote by mail as a Democratic tactic to steal his re-election, Trump’s campaign even filed an ultimately dismissed suit in battleground Nevada to stop the state from sending absentee ballots out to all active voters. However, mail-in voting has historically not been such a partisan issue. Even now, Fox News …

It is slowly dawning on us all that Donald Trump was right when he said that the American election day ‘will be Brexit times 10’. In my experience, 4,000 miles across the Atlantic, people looked ten times more shocked when they saw Trump give a victory speech than when it became clear that their country had decided to leave the European Union. Much has been written about Trump’s hateful rhetoric, which has offended 282 people and places on twitter alone, and the possible ramifications of his breaking long-established domestic norms. But it is the global implications of a Trump presidency that worries people across the globe. If he makes true on his campaign promises, we would see a large-scale withdrawal …

Donald Trump is probably not a Manchurian candidate planted by Vladimir Putin to disrupt the American political landscape. That is just the latest attempt to explain how, of all people, the crude thrice-married billionaire from the outer boroughs became the Republican nominee for President of the United States. While the “Trump as Russian sleeper agent” theory is far-fetched, several well thought-out explanations have caught on. Too often, though, these fail to explain why Trump specifically became the standard-bearer of the GOP and stands a shot at winning the election. The jump from “what is happening” to “why him,” is key to understanding the Trump phenomenon. Bearing this in mind, I argue that Donald Trump is the candidate of schadenfreude. Not …