Trump for Dummies

The biggest threat to Australia’s security might not be its Keystone Cops military industrial complex, or its failing energy sector, but the misreporting, deliberate or otherwise, on its key security partner, the USA, and its Commander-in-Chief, Donald J Trump.

The media; public intellectuals and gas bags; and the she, it and he leaning on the water cooler; all seem determined to recycle Democratic Party talking points, with the result that there has been a precipitate decline in favourable perceptions of the US. That’s a problem when they provide you with security insurance.

According to the Lowy Institute Poll 2025, only 36% of Australians “trust the United States to act responsibly in the world”, and 72% have no, or not too much, confidence in Donald Trump, statistically indistinguishable from Xi Jinping who scores 71%.

Recent evidence of how malign this is can be found in the deliberately biased editing of footage of Donald Trump by the ABCwhich framed him for the violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2020. Perhaps only to be expected after the National broadcaster’s recycling, back in 2018, at enormous expense, of the Russiagate Hoaxby their perennially wrong, Walkley Award-Winning, head girl, Sarah Ferguson.

If your citizens don’t trust your principal ally and see them as equivalent to your real security threat, then you will be in a mess if something blows up.

Part of the problem is that those paid to analyse the US situation accurately are just as clueless as those with the biggest mouths. I recently watched a panel discussion involving an economist and three foreign affairs specialists, one with a particularly personal reason to abhor the Chinese CCP regime who couldn’t make sense of Trump and his policies.

It reminded me of Donald Horne’s quote that “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck”.

There were three major criticisms of Donald Trump – one that he is stupid; another that he is erratic and a third that he has no plan.

These combine in an argument that Trump is a buffoon running the largest economy in the world who is destroying it and the international order. With China revving-up its belligerence now is a good time to revisit those propositions.

There are some things I think most people can agree on about Trump, like him or loathe him. He’s a businessman, a promoter, and a wheeler-dealer. He cares more about outcomes than processes. And he’s been closely acquainted with existential threats. Financially least 4 times businesses he has been closely associated with have had to seek bankruptcy protection, and personally there was the bullet that almost liquidated him.

While most leaders believe the status quo will hold, Trump knows just how quickly disaster can unfold. He views the USA as a business as much as a country, and he brings the company doctor’s sense of urgency to an entity on its way to bankruptcy and irrelevancy.

The America that bought Trump in the 2024 election is one that has overpromised and overgeared. Debt is out of control, and housing has become unaffordable. Graduates drown in student debt which has proved a poor investment in higher incomes. Meanwhile universities, had become infected by gender and race ideology, failing in their role as the producers of empirical knowledge.