Nothing seems to rattle Hillary Clinton quite so much as pointed questions about her personal finances. How much she’s made. How she made it. Where it all came from. From her miraculous adventures in the cattle futures market to the Whitewater real estate scam, many of the most venal Clinton scandals down the decades have involved Hillary’s financial entanglements and the serpentine measures she has taken to conceal them from public scrutiny.

Hillary is both driven to acquire money and emits a faint whiff of guilt about having hoarded so much of it. One might be tempted to ascribe her squeamishness about wealth to her rigid Methodism, but her friends say that Hillary’s covetousness derives from a deep obsession with feeling secure, which makes a kind of sense given Bill’s free-wheeling proclivities. She’s not, after all, a child of the Depression, but a baby boomer. Hillary was raised in comfortable circumstances in the Chicago suburbs and, unlike her husband, has never in her life felt the sting of want. More

The 2016 Republican National Convention began in the immediate shadow of a highly publicized death spiral involving police and black civilians in Dallas, Falcon Heights, and Baton Rouge. Against this backdrop, the Trump campaign seemed to choose the legacy of Richard Nixon rather than Ronald Reagan as the party’s patron saint. Indeed, 1968 has functioned as myth and symbol throughout the Trump campaign, as they have leaned on racially-charged Nixonian phrases like ‘law and order’, ‘Silent Majority’ and ‘forgotten Americans.’ It might be more accurate to say that Trump has bundled Nixon together with George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor whose independent campaign for president that year was more openly racist and confrontational, but who with Nixon defined the Republican Party’s white populist turn.

Going into the convention, top Trump campaign aide Paul Manafort shocked reporters by suggesting that the violent atmosphere of “lawlessness” surrounding the convention was welcome. Indeed, even Wallace had been more tactful in his approach. When asked by reporters about the riots that occurred in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, Wallace told a reporter, “Of course, any breakdown in law and order is going to support the position of anybody like me who is against a break-down in law and order. Now I don’t want to be helped that way. All I say is they seem to be getting worse and nobody wants to try to stop it.” More

The grubby underside of US electoral politics is on show once again as the Democratic and Republican candidates prepare to fight it out for the presidency. And it doesn’t get seamier than the battle to prove how loyal each candidate is to Israel.

New depths are being plumbed this week at the Republican convention in Cleveland, as Donald Trump is crowned the party’s nominee. His platform breaks with decades of United States policy to effectively deny the Palestinians any hope of statehood. More