• The psychology behind Trump’s awkward handshake … and how to beat him at his own game

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T84se4fc4KU?wmode=transparent&start=0] Geoff Beattie, Edge Hill University Handshakes are meant to be relatively simple affairs, at least in terms of their signalling function. “Shake hands on it,” we are told. “Shake and make up.” They have been used as a civilised greeting for at least 2,500 years. But Donald Trump is now in the process…

  • Hillary Clinton’s concession speech – a class political act

    It’s normal for conceding presidential candidates to give their speech in the middle of the night, as their guests are still at HQ and the final results are trickling in. Hillary Clinton, however, decided not to do that after losing the 2016 election to Donald Trump. Instead her team arranged for a mid-morning speech on…

  • Barry Goldwater’s ‘paranoid style’ may yet win Trump the presidency

    The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a still widely read 1964 essay for Harper’s Magazine outlining what he called the “paranoid style” in American politics. Marked by “a sense of heated exaggeration”, suspicion, and wild fears of political conspiracy, it was, he argued, a common part of American political life. It dated back to the rise…

  • Trump’s coronation week: what does a presidential convention really achieve?

    This year’s Republican National Convention kicked off with a bizarre day. Party delegates openly fought over the convention’s rules, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered a belligerent anti-crime broadside under the banner “Make America Safe Again”, and Donald Trump’s wife Melania addressed the convention only to be accused of plagiarising a speech by Michelle…