RUTHFULLY YOURS

WEDNESDAY, 10am: So it’s President Trump, who should end up with around 300 Electoral College votes.

As I type, Hillary Clinton is preparing to make her belated concession speech. The TV footage of her walk to the waiting limo, Bill by her side, showed a woman wearing a fawn pant suit* and a supercilious smile. It is the same grin one sees on public figures who find themselves in court, where the defeated presidential candidate may well find herself.

Yes, she has been “cleared” of the email scandal, sort of, by the Eastern District investigators based in Brooklyn. But there is another probe being conducted across the East River by the Southern District, where the focus is on pay-to-play allegations involving the Clinton Foundation. This office is run and staffed by people who were hired by Rudy Giuliani, a Trump surrogate and hot tip to become Attorney General. The Brooklyn operation, by contrast, is run and staffed by people hired for the most part by Loretta Lynch, who was appointed to that post under Bill Clinton and subsequently elevated to Attorney General by Obama.

Does one need to be terminally suspicious to see why the foot-dragging email probe took so long and why, having identified a rash of violations, the Brooklynites deemed them unworthy of prosecution?

Now the Manhattan crew will be able to get the co-operation they have been requesting from across the river. Expect a grand jury to be convened and, if the leaks and whispers are correct, charges brought.

Should that happen there will be both justice and poetic justice in the wind. Throughout their public lives the Clintons have used and discarded those who might and did help them — Whitewater associates, the future trader who made Hillary a small fortune in the cattle market by assigning profitable trades to her account after the market closed.

Now, denied the White House, the Clintons aren’t of much use to anyone.

This is going to be marvelous theatre, count on it.

*rather than do a McGeough, let it be admitted that the footage of Hillary and Bill just screened on CNN was, as it turns out, from the archives. The colour of her pant suit is not yet known, but she will be wearing that felon’s smile. It is all she has left to hide behind

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WASHINGTON DC, 7.30pm: Once upon a time, in a more innocent age, Americans liked to crow that their electoral system was the fairest, best and most reliable in the world. Mind you, they said much the same about the cars that poured out of Detroit as well, only to be disabused of such ill-founded confidence by the plagues of Toyotas, VWs and other imports that, with the help of a bloody-minded United Auto Workers, humbled Ford and General Motors while seeing Chrysler sold off to Fiat.

Democracy might prove more vigorous, though no less prone to breakdowns, if today’s 170-mile tour of Pennsylvania and its polling places is any indication.

Unlike many other states, Pennsylvania obliges its citizens to vote on Election Day and not a second earlier. Today, in Philadelphia, that heavily black city was queueing with a patience that would have put a Londoner to shame. The City of Brotherly Love, it need hardly to said, always go Democrat, although you have to wonder why. Time after time, mayors and City Hall pols, hangers-on, judges, police, state legislators, local officials and union leaders have traded their offices first for monetary gain and later, in the case of the less careful, for jail cells. Corruption in Philly is as much a part of the local culture as the cheesesteak and it has been that way for quite some time, at least since the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens observed that the city was corrupt and content to stay that way. That was back in 1903 and the contentment yesterday was palpable.

Ask those black voters, many herded to the polls by local political warlords and ward heelers, what they thought of Trump and the answer, as provided by a young man in baggy trousers and a puffy parka the warm didn’t didn’t warrant, was an observation that the tycoon enjoyed an unnatural carnal relationship with his mother. At his rallies, Trump would note that black Americans of the inner cities have to survive with shocking schools, crime rates no white community would tolerate, drugs, decrepit housing and few employment opportunities. “Why not support me me?” he would ask. “You have nothing, absolutely nothing, to lose.”

Nothing to lose except, maybe, a menial city job handed out for electoral loyalty by one of the City Hall corruptocrats.

Pennsylvania is a big state, however, one that is as divided by race as once was Berlin by a wall. My friend and driver, a retired military man, swung the wheel toward the countryside and here, the further we left Philly behind us, the more Trump signs we saw. Indeed, for every, say, twenty Trump roadside placards there was but one advocating his opponent. That is a rule-of-thumb appraisal, but accurate enough.

What doesn’t appear to have been accurate, according to a spate of initial reports, is the voting machines that the American propensity to make the simple complex insists on using (consult the rule book for the American version football – gridiron as Australians persist in calling it; a term Americans haven’t used with any regularity for decades). Votes cast for Trump, the reports relate, are being magically turned into votes for Clinton.

God forbid there is any truth to these reports or, if there is, that Providence limits the anomalies to a few irrelevant electorates. Trump has declined to say he will he accept a negative verdict if there is any reason to believe infernal fiddling has doctored the result.

This is an angry electorate. If his supporters feel they have been gyped, the extended fracas that followed Al Gore’s refusal to accept the 2000 result will seem mild by comparison.