Hillary Clinton should have been a safe bet for President. Yet now she is fighting her own shadowy reflection in Donald Trump – a spectre she and her party helped create. With just 100 days until the vote, how did we get here? What happens next? And what does this election show us about America today?

By Tim Stanley, Sunday 31 July, 2016

There are now just one hundred days left before the 2016 presidential election. The choice looks stark. Liberal statesman Hillary Clinton vs Neanderthal businessman Donald Trump. But the events of the past summer show that the contest is far closer in personality than it first seems. And that’s why the polls are close too. America faces a choice between a devil it knows and one it doesn’t. The angels are sitting this one out.

The long short campaign has started in a squalid manner. The Democrats gave a speaking slot at their convention to Khizr and Ghazala Khan, parents of a US soldier killed in the Iraq War. “You have sacrificed nothing and no one,” Mr Khan said of The Donald, slapping down his call for a partial ban on Muslim immigration. Later, Trump told an interviewer that, sure, he had sacrificed – working very hard and creating thousands of jobs. No comparison, you might say, with the loss of a son, but not the end of the rebuke either. “Look at his wife,” Trump said of Mrs Khan, plainly referring to the fact that she is Islamic, “standing there having nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say.”

We have three months of this to look forward to. A damning indictment of a political process that is exciting, unpredictable but also incredibly disappointing.

The primaries set the tone: the Democrat race was far closer than expected, while the Republican one was far more decisive. Clinton’s fight against socialist Bernie Sanders was protracted and ugly – and even after she scored a 4 million votes margin of victory, Sanders refused to concede.

Trump, by contrast, was written out of contention before the primaries had even begun. It was a joke, said critics. Free advertising for his golf courses and ties. We now know that he actually took it very seriously – running on a promise to build a wall on the Mexican border that had been carefully tested by polling experts. By June 7, Trump had won more votes in a Republican primary than anyone else in history. But he also had set a historical record for votes cast against him.

So the primaries exposed the weaknesses of both candidates. They have their fans, they have their bitter enemies. And the summer that followed showed that they both have a problem with moral credibility. That shortcoming could dominate the race to come.