Opinion

While Donald Trump blathers on about a rigged election — a theory downplayed by a wide range of experts and his own running mate — and urges vigilance against hordes of undocumented people casting imaginary ballots, one real problem with this year’s electoral process is the opposite of the dire scenarios the GOP nominee is conjuring up.

In a recent issue of The Economist, President Barack Obama set out four major economic issues that his successor must tackle. As he put it:

Pity the male white supremacist: he began the year hopeful that a man who made no attempts to hide his racist rhetoric would ride white resentment all the way to the highest office in the land. But now, with three weeks until the general election, the great white behemoth is sinking under the rain of harpoons launched by angry women, and no matter how they try to spin the numbers, Donald Trump cannot win the election with the sole support of white men.

The United States narrowly averted two constitutional crises in elections in which a third party won states and electoral votes. In 1948, South Carolina Governor J. Strom Thurmond won four Southern states and 39 electoral votes as the States Rights (Dixiecrats) nominee, the second best third party performance until then, only trailing Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive (Bull Moose) Party in 1912. Then, in 1968, Alabama Governor George C. Wallace won five states and 46 electoral votes as the American Independent party nominee, surpassing Thurmond’s electoral performance twenty years earlier, making his third party candidacy the second best performance in the entire scope of American history.

Which new installments — daily, hourly — of the enthralling Self-Demolition Tour of Donald Trump will emerge before the day is done?

In 1920, Rudyard Kipling (Nobel Prize in Literature 1907), published The Conundrum of the Workshops. This poem about review culture features the Devil as “first, most dread” critic who responds to human creative outputs with: “it’s pretty, but is it art?”, a review that hurls the makers into confusion, rivalry and anguish. What could be worse, for an artist, than to discover that what you were making is not art after all?

This year’s US presidential election is anything but ordinary – and anything but hopeful. You could call it a two-horse race in which both horses are behind.

Fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her, you should beat and ill-use her. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (The Prince, Chap. 25)

It would be wrong to ignore the psychological, social and political damage this poisonous election is causing. When the movement called Citizen Therapists Against Trumpism, an effort to awaken therapists to their public responsibilities, commissioned a study of 1,000 voting-age Americans, 43 percent reported emotional distress from Trump and his campaign. But 28 percent also feel distress from the Clinton campaign. As many have observed, beyond proposals for new government programs it is hard to see an inspiring vision coming from Clinton. This absence is part of a larger crisis in government-centered views of democracy. “The liberal story that has ruled our world in the past few decades … is collapsing,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in a recent New Yorker. “So far no new story has emerged to fill the vacuum.”

Donald Trump's threat to jail Hillary Clinton if he's elected just underlined why he so admires that "strong leader" Vladimir Putin. No pesky checks on executive power when you operate out of the Kremlin. Send your opponents to Siberia and no one says "boo." But here's what's even more depressing in this ugly election season —…

As an icebreaker, I ask students taking my course on American comedy and humour, “Who is the funniest person in the United States?” In July last year, the droll first response was “Donald Trump.” He was not the answer to the question this year.

I continue to hear from many people who call themselves progressives or liberals, but tell me they won’t vote for Hillary Clinton in the upcoming election.

In Donald Trump’s 2005 hot mic conversation with entertainment reporter Billy Bush, he confessed to kissing women and grabbing their genitals without their consent.