With the result of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries being so decisive, Australians, and indeed most of the world, need to broaden their minds, and their sources of information when it comes to Donald J. Trump, 45th, and perhaps 47th, president of the United States of America.
Otherwise, they risk their own, and the world’s, security.
Misreading President Trump, and the forces that drive him, seems to be a developed world pastime.
Even if President Trump doesn’t win the next presidential election, the stresses that have shaped his rise to power will not disappear, and as long as the United States is the Western world’s dominant power, misunderstanding and/or maligning them is not good for anyone.
Even before he was elected, I was told by any number of earnest people that he was a Hitler, a misogynist, and would start World War III, racist, xenophobic, and extreme right-wing.
Now you can add “election denialist” and “insurrectionist” to the list.
When he was elected, I was told it was because of Russian election interference.
Then, I was told he had committed high crimes and misdemeanours because of a phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, asking him a question related to an allegation of corruption about former Vice-President Joe Biden.
That led to President Trump’s impeachment.
Australian Media Follow the Lead of US Media
The drumbeat is relentless Democrat propaganda, and is generally based on the most outlandish slurs that survive only because the coverage of U.S. politics in Australia is so one-sided.It appears that most Australians get their U.S. news indirectly from CNN and The New York Times, barely filtered by the local media, or directly, via the internet.
They seem not to realise that CNN is not to be taken seriously at all, and that The New York Times has caught dementia in its old age.
Rather than the source of all the news that’s fit to print, the Times has veered off the beaten track, hired a ton of fabulists as its staff, and allowed them to run its operations.
Three examples of the Grey Lady’s dottiness.
The 1619 project, by Nikole Hanna-Jones (for which she received a Pulitzer in 2020, thus demonstrating that media dementia is catching) seeks to recast the founding of the United States as the date when slaves first arrived.
Great for supporters of the myths of systemic racism, but not so much for accurate history.
Then there was the resignation of the opinion page editor, James Bennet, in 2020 because he had published an op-ed by a sitting U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), which, amongst other things, suggested the use of the National Guard to suppress the riots that were engulfing U.S. cities at the time.
This unremarkable observation gave rise to a mutiny amongst the staff, so obviously the editor had to go! (If only they’d hired Elon Musk as an HR consultant they might have taken it as an opportunity to shed the 70 percent of staff that don’t produce anything worthwhile).
Last, there was the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in the final days of the 2020 election campaign.
The legitimacy of the laptop has since been confirmed, not least by Mr. Biden, and it was obvious at the time it was genuine.
Again, the Times was not alone, it was in the majority, but that shows how damaged journalism in the U.S. has become.
And the Hunter Biden laptop led to the impeachment over the call to Mr. Zelenskyy as its contents prove beyond doubt that President Biden was so enmeshed in corruption that he was the one who should have been impeached.
The Democrat drumbeat is so strong that in the run-up to the mid-term U.S. elections, we had Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese swaying along, and singing a Democrat tune that “Democracy was on the ballot paper.”
This is a line that parses as, “If the Republicans win, we will become a dictatorship.”
Some Facts on What Trump Has Done
So here’s what Australians need to understand about Donald Trump—he’s outspoken, but he implements his policies, and by and large those policies are good ones.
That’s not just my opinion, but that of an increasing number of Americans.
“He’s kind of right about NATO. Kind of right about immigration. He grew the economy quite well … Tax reform worked. He was right about some of China … he wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues.”
And the money quote is:
“Democrats have done a pretty good job with the “deplorables,” hugging their bibles and their beer and their guns. I mean, really? Can we stop that stuff and actually grow up and treat other people respectfully and listen to them a little bit?”
Which is what we Australians need to do as well. President Trump’s success is a revolt against elite internationalist opinion which eschews middle-class mores and morality, and the high-handed way these elites demean the middle and lower classes.
This enrages those classes even more because it is not only a mark of a lack of respect towards them, but a clear sign that the views of the elite cannot withstand scrutiny if the only way to defend them is collective ad hominem attacks.
President Trump is not a Nazi. I’ve read Mein Kampf and he doesn’t hate Jews—his son-in-law is one and the Abrahamic Accords are the biggest step forward in that part of the world.
He’s not in favour of some sort of state-corporate marriage either.
He slashed red tape and regulations when he was in power.
It’s his opponents who use the regulatory state to manage and muzzle their opponents through arguably unconstitutional control of media and social media.
He certainly seems like a womaniser. Does that make him a misogynist? Or does he just have poor impulse control, like Bill Clinton? And that question means he’s really just level-pegging with the Democratic establishment who’ve tolerated President Clinton’s peccadilloes for decades.
World War III? Well, it didn’t start in his last term, and if it does in his next it will be inherited through mistakes made in the last four years.
Racism? Interestingly he gets more support from black Americans than any previous Republican and does even better amongst Latinos.
Is he Xenophobic? If wanting to secure your border against illegal immigration is xenophobic, then he’s on a par with the average Australian who’s voted time and again for strong borders.
And all of this makes him extreme right-wing? Who knows what words are supposed to mean anymore?
The charges that seem to stick in many Australians’ minds are that he is an “election denier” and an “insurrectionist.”
Well if he is, so is Hillary Clinton, who spent money to have the “Steele dossier” written—a fabrication of Russian influence in the 2016 election, since completely demolished, and which formed the basis for the first impeachment of him by the Congress.
I don’t think Ms. Clinton has yet recanted from the view that the election was stolen.
So he was on the right track, even if the quantum of fraud to overturn the election was never detected. He’s on firmer ground than Ms. Clinton.
The Australian electoral system is completely fair. What Australians need to realise is that Australia isn’t America.
Insurrectionist, Really?
The most ludicrous charge is that of “insurrectionist.” Rather than Jan. 6 being an insurrection, it was a riot that got out of control.To accuse President Trump of using this to overturn the election is an insult to the man who, in his late 20s, with no experience building high rises, set about amalgamating the site for what would become Trump Tower, the tallest building in New York.
A person precocious enough to do that in their 20s is a pretty sophisticated thinker who would understand that sending a cohort of unarmed naifs into the Capitol building without having the army onside would achieve nothing apart from some broken windows.
They also wouldn’t have offered the house speaker the use of the National Guard, just in case, a few days earlier.
We can assume President Trump got some satisfaction out of the riot, particularly as two years earlier, he’d been threatened by a crowd at the White House that burned down a church and threatened his life.
Schadenfreude was probably the reason he took some time before calling for the Jan. 6 crowd to disperse.
What About the Outrageousness?
One charge I think President Trump is guilty of is being outrageous.In his book, “The Art of the Deal,” President Trump boasts about his “Truthful Hyperbole.” In Australia, we would call it “harmless BS.”
He asks rhetorically why he would pay for an ad in The New York Times when he can say something outrageous and get there for free.
He’s still doing it, and it works a treat.
He beat Ms. Clinton, spending a fraction of her campaign spend, and he demonstrated the same pecuniary prowess in the Iowa primary, spending about a 10th per vote what his two major opponents did.
People who aren’t narky about President Trump know what he’s about, so don’t hunt down every word for infidelity.
He actually comes through on the big things, so should we worry about the small ones?
After his election, President Trump had a list of promises that he did his best to tick off—closed borders; lower taxes; less regulation; withdrawing from the Paris Agreement; redoing trade deals and returning business to America; boosting gas and oil production; making NATO stand on its own feet; ensuring lawyers who supported the constitution were appointed to courts, including the Supreme Court; and pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal.
Australian Politicians Take Note
Unfortunately, most of our Australian leaders have either never been as explicit when in opposition, or if they have, have failed to carry through in government.I’d personally like to see more exaggerators like President Trump with a knack for achieving things, than the exaggerators who put their name to media releases with no chance of their aims being achieved.
“Electricity prices will be $250 cheaper under Labor?” Anyone?
So where is the danger to our security?
If President Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, and our national reflex is to accept the demonisation of him by his political enemies as true, then it becomes significantly more difficult to work with the United States, or to persuade domestic electorates of the real facts of the matter.
Yet with an actual war on the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean, skirmishes around the Horn of Africa, Iran on the verge of becoming a nuclear state, and a threatened invasion of Taiwan by the Chinese Communist Party as well as its increasing militarisation of the Indo-Pacific, this is a moment when we need to work with our allies, whoever they are.
That means doing our best to understand them. We don’t need world leaders we'd like to ask home for dinner.
We need world leaders who deliver.
