Proud Boys, stand back.
There was no need for plan B, as it turned out. No need for Steve Bannon and his gun-carrying MAGA army to “Fight, fight, fight!”. Donald Trump very clearly set out his stall as a depraved dictator ramping up hate against aliens who would poison the blood of America. Americans looked at this neo-Nazi movement, led by a felon, and said “Hell yeah, I’ll take that.”
They say youth is wasted on the young. We can now add that democracy is wasted on America.
Guardian writer Carole Cadwalldr summed it up this way: “Who knows what comes next but this now is oligarchy. It’s the conjoining of state power & business interests. It’s 90s Russia. It’s the chaos before the crackdown. It’s Musk & Thiel & every cryptobro chancer in Silicon Valley.”
Nine newspapers’ columnist Jacqueline Maley described the devastation for American women: “The Trump campaign amounted to an open-carry licence to misogyny and contempt for femininity. It gave social permission for the worst kind of sexism and nastiness towards women. It didn’t matter.”
US stand-up comedian J-L Cauvin, famed for his exquisite Trump impersonations, concluded that amid all the excuses it was high time for Americans to turn the mirror on themselves: “The [conclusion] seems pretty clear that America decided it was hateful enough and, let’s face it, stupid enough to put Trump back into office.” Cauvin’s five-minute take is well worth a listen. It goes to the heart of America’s darkness.
Gone to the dogs
You can look for the reasons as we did collectively here at The Politics a few weeks ago but in the end it turns out America is just plain dumb. Breathtakingly so. Haitian immigrants eat pet dogs in Springfield, don’t you know?
Silver linings? There are a few for those who are with the program. Former prime minister Scott Morrison is right back where he belongs, schmoozing a dictator for Jesus. Atheists and sinners beware: this must surely be God’s plan in action. Gina Rinehart was the belle of the Mar-a-Lago ball last night, seeing in the dawn of a new Trump dynasty, an oligarchy of Trumps stretching out for perhaps decades. Rupert, too, will be well pleased that Fox has seen off the woke threat emanating from those them/they LGBQTI+-addled Democrats. Poetically he will be able to point to the will of the people as justification for his ruthless profit-driven twisting of reality.
Meanwhile back in Australia …
Trump’s victory reinforces the lesson that you can get away with pretty much anything in politics — especially if you have the Murdochs on your side and a population that isn’t paying attention and barely gives a toss about democracy anyway. Just such an example played out yesterday. As the world’s gaze was fixed on the voting intentions of Fulton County, Georgia, perpetual trainwreck Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie was quietly correcting the record on her declaration of travel upgrades.
McKenzie’s doings — conducted in the metaphorical dead of night — should not be glossed over because in their own small tawdry way they exemplify the slide in political standards which is part and parcel of plummeting trust in government. Just last week she postured as the integrity tsar when it came to denouncing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s alleged abuses of Qantas upgrades. Yesterday though it emerged that she had failed to declare 16 flight upgrades from Qantas and other carriers. It was a spectacular own goal, but as we have seen over more than a decade, McKenzie doesn’t do shame.
In her first speech to the Senate in 2011 she declared she was “suspicious of government and its role in our lives”. She conceded that her position “may be unfashionable” and that it contained an “inherent contradiction”. McKenzie, as she was making clear, doubted the very institution she had joined.
As we have documented, McKenzie has always struggled with the twin concepts of transparency and parliamentary accountability. For years she failed to declare on her pecuniary interests register that a gun company had paid for her “recreation” trips to New Zealand and Tasmania. She came to grief in the 2020 “sports rorts” affair when she failed to fully declare her interests, although she never admitted there was any “real or apparent” conflict of interest in her decisions.
Having been sacked from the ministry, McKenzie then took to reporting the tiniest gift, with a list of declarations so comprehensive as to be absurd. Her declared gifts included a packet of Allen’s Chicos chocolate lollies, a box of Cadbury Roses chocolates, a Cadbury Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut bar and a single gerbera. And yet, as we now know, while carefully recording the $2 chocolate bars, well over a dozen flight upgrades possibly worth thousands of dollars eluded her net.
The dark side
So what action might we expect an opposition leader to take when a prominent member of the team breaches the transparency rules so extravagantly? And is clearly a repeat offender? Might Peter Dutton remove McKenzie from the shadow ministry to send a signal about the importance of parliamentary standards? Pigs might fly. (And, it turns out, they do.)
The Trump example, thoroughly absorbed by the opposition leader, is to never apologise, always attack — and to keep flooding the zone with outrage. We have now seen exactly where that ends.
Vale USA. It was nice knowing you. But perhaps we never knew you at all.
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