Americans must not put a maverick in White House

DONALD Trump must not win the US presidential election. The United States owes this much to the rest of the world - and, indeed, to itself.

The stakes are unnervingly high in an election in which the US is faced with an existential choice between the best and the worst in its chequered contemporary history. The choice is not between Republican and Democratic America. The choice is between America as it is, and the memory of its passing.

There is an America which, for all its faults, represents the ability of fallible humans to fashion a domestic and international system in which the economic energies released by free trade create new political and social possibilities. Ever since the end of World War II - …