BLOWING HIS OWN TRUMPET

We’ve seen some absurdly-named political parties over the years: America’s ‘Guns and Dope Party’; Russia’s ‘Party of the Dead’; Britain’s ‘Fancy Dress Party’; or Hungary’s ‘Two-Tailed Dog Party’.

But Clive Palmer’s ‘Trumpet of Patriots Party’ is surely up there with the dopiest.

In essence, it seems to be a vague Oz version of Trumpism: ‘Make Australia Great Again’. At the shambolic party launch this week, it was hard to detect a single original thought, just some mumbled recycling of Trumpian tweets.

Now Clive is no mug. He made millions, then billions, from real estate and mining leases, almost always shrouded in controversy.

And he’s been fiddling around the edge of politics since his time as State Director of the Queensland National Party at the feet of the old Flim-Flam man himself, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, in the 1980s.

His own political manifesto is a jumble of hand-picked beliefs and policies that has changed and morphed with the prevailing winds. The only thing that seems to tie them together is their ultimate benefit to old Clive.

Down the years he’s become a master of the half-truth, an accomplished press conference tap dancer and a prolific, but bewildering, creator of low-rent TV commercials.

He’s also a serial litigant. In fact, he named litigation as his hobby in Who’s Who.

But his achievements, aside from lining his own pockets, are harder to find. His Coolum Dinosaur park lies in ruins, Qld Nickel went into voluntary administration in 2016, he’s on the third iteration of his project to rebuild the Titanic, now due to set sail in 2027. And his last foray into politics saw him secure a single seat, at a cost of more than $120 million.

And this time, the Trumpet of Patriots Party, with its bizarre logo/crest of a Lion blowing a horn (certainly not a trumpet) above a motto of ‘honor omnia’ does not fill us with confidence. Clive reckons the motto means ‘honour above all’. Latin scholars say it actually translates as ‘honour everything’.

One thing is certain: Clive has shown himself to be a virtuoso when it comes to blowing his own trumpet!

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TIME TO EXTEND THE NO DICKHEADS POLICY

Many sporting teams have adopted the ‘No Dickheads’ policy with outstanding success. It’s long been a standard operating procedure in our military. And smart voters have been using it as a political yardstick for many years.
In essence, ‘No Dickheads!” sets a standard for behaviour within teams, realising that dickheads, no matter how talented or even charismatic, generally cause far more damage and disruption than they’re worth.
Their toxicity destroys collaboration and undermines harmony and respect. Inevitably, it white ants the team from within.
Apparently, it does the same thing to nations, as is becoming clearer with each day of Trump’s Second Coming.
In Australia, we grew up with three guiding principles that we inherited from our parents: a Fair Go (equal opportunity for all); mateship (the power of community); and an inherent distrust of those who made promises that seemed too good to be true.
These principles spawned the No Dickheads policy.
I reckon it’s time we extended that policy to the national level and applied it to our dealings with other countries, starting with America.
Trump recently pretended to tear up the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), calling it a *“terrible deal”*.
Yet, he had presided over that agreement (in 2018 calling it *“truly historic”*, *“the most important ever agreed to by the US”* and *“the biggest trade deal in the United States’ history”*).
That’s taking Dickhead to hitherto unimagined levels … and that’s dealing with his closest neighbours and trade partners. Imagine how secure his deals will be with remote allies and partners.

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THE ELASTIC EDGE OF LEGALITY

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TRUMP PUTS THE PLUTO INTO PLUTOCRACY

TECH THUGS TAKE CONTROL

Plutocracy, or rule by the wealthy, has been around since ancient Rome. We saw it flourish in the Italian city-states of Venice, Florence and Genoa, and in America in the Gilded Age of the late 1800s. Today, wealthy elites control Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China.

And now we’re witnessing Trump and his tech thugs working to transform the United States into the biggest plutocracy of them all.

It’s not yet clear in this bizarre Disney remake whether Trump is playing the role of Mickey Mouse, with Musk as his pet dog Pluto, or vice versa. What is clear is that there’s no director, they’ve thrown away the script and they’re in full improv mode.

Strangely, while Pluto derives from the Greek word for wealth (ploutos), it also has origins in ancient mythology as the Latin name for the Greek god Hades, who ruled the underworld.

In Trump’s case these origins combine to make perfect sense in a Truman Show where stupendously wealthy individuals control an impenetrable tech underworld and are hellbent on disrupting democratic structures and ideals that would limit their powers and future wealth.

At the rate at which Trump is blundering ahead with multiple daily executive orders, we should soon see whether the dog is wagging its tail, or vice versa.

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DARWIN ABANDONED ...

NINE BAILS FROM THE TOP END …

Nine’s closure of its Northern Territory news bureau leaves the ABC as the only television outlet covering the Top End.

It’s yet another blow to regional news coverage across this wide brown land, a massive loss to Darwin’s local community and another victory to the international tech thugs.

Nine is proposing to replace the Darwin bulletin with the network’s Queensland service. It says it will retain a reporter and a camera operator to “tell the territory’s stories to a national audience”.

Considering that the Northern Territory has a population of about 250,000 (more than Hobart) and is bigger than France, Germany and Italy combined, (and twice the size of Texas), that’s a big ask!

I hope the Nine team has a reliable crew car: just driving from Darwin to Alice Springs, around 1500km, is the rough equivalent of driving from London to Rome.

Thank God Darwin still has its inimitable NT News to keep it up to date.

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TRUMP'S HOSTILE TAKEOVER OF AMERICA ...

HOW DUNNING AND KRUGER GOT IT RIGHT

My old friend ‘Toolo’ Timlin, a very wise sound recordist, summed up the Dunning-Kruger Effect better than most: “They don’t know what they don’t know.

Ever since academic psychologists, Prof David Dunning and Dr Justin Kruger, released their study back in 1999, their work has been validated time and again, especially in politics.

The Dunning-Kruger report highlighted “a cognitive bias where those with little knowledge or expertise overestimate their knowledge or skill because they don’t have enough knowledge to know that they don’t have enough knowledge”

I prefer Toolo’s definition but you get the point. And when you think of the concept who immediately comes to mind? Yep, Trump … and his tech thugs.

Perhaps the Dunning-Kruger effect could be extended: just because you know one field of endeavour really well, it doesn’t follow that you know or understand others to the same extent.

This is especially true when someone with limited knowledge acquires power, but lacks compassion and empathy. Their inability to view things through others’ eyes or to care about the impact of their decisions on others can have devastating results.

Trump is Dunning-Kruger personified. With his compassion bypass and his narcissistic personality, he’s been emboldened by a supine Republican Party and a toothless Democratic Party to act on his every whim.

He’s going to keep on signing those Executive Orders until America’s legislators grow spines. God knows what nation and world will be left by then.

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I’M A TECH BRO, LET ME OUT OF HERE!

TRUMP 2.0, THE REALITY TV SHOW

Anybody who has ever worked in television (or watched it) will instantly recognise Trump 2.0 for what it is: a reality TV show.

Season Two opened with an all-day broadcast on January 20, starting with the inauguration, moved inside to the Capitol Rotunda, which was transformed into a shiny-floor TV studio. The set dressers placed Trump’s fawning tech bros (the ‘broligarchy’) in front of his prospective cabinet members, alongside his family and camp followers.

As is his want, Trump then tap danced to his audience, which, clearly, he imagines as America’s TV and streaming audience and where he sees success as victory in the ‘ratings’:

“America will be respected again and admired again, including by people of religion, faith, and goodwill. We will be prosperous, we will be proud, we will be strong, and we will win like never before.”

After the inauguration, the show switched to official luncheons, then to live public signings of his executive orders. On Day One, Trump managed to scratch his name on 26 Executive Orders, almost three times more than the previous record (nine, by Joe Biden in 2020). Many of these orders have been immediately challenged in courts across the land because they exceed presidential powers.

The tech bros have paid millions, some of them billions, to join this show. How long it will take them to realise that the show exists solely to promote and make money for its host, ‘The Presenter of the United States’. How long before, one by one, they bail as their conflicting interests clash with Trump’s aims.

The next questions will be how long it takes for the audience to realise they’ve been scammed yet again by the old stager.

The show’s promos promised everything from ending the war in Ukraine (firstly, even before he took office, then the day after, now within 100 days), lowering the cost of US petrol to $US2 a gallon (“drill baby, drill”), halving car insurance, imposing tariffs on Canadian, Mexican and Chinese imports, closing the border with Mexico, lowering US food prices (originally on Day One, now “it’s very hard”), and slashing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (affecting one third of the US population, that’s a lot of voters).

It's going to get harder and harder for a 78-year old to keep tap dancing when the show’s ‘reality’ kicks in.

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DOES AMERICA’S ‘TECH BROLIGARCHY’ REALLY TRUST TRUMP 2.0?

In one of the most dramatic examples of the triumph of hope over experience, America’s unleased tech ‘broligarchy’ is betting billions on the Second Coming of Donald Trump.

Shrewd heads like Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichai (Alphabet), Elon Musk (Tesla), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Masayoshi Son (SoftBank) and Sam Altman (OpenAI) descended on Washington, cash in hand like giddy school fanboys, to sing from his praisebook and sign up to his promised American ‘Golden Age’.

Old heads are wondering whether it’s more likely to be a replay of America’s ‘Gilded Age’ (taken from a Mark Twain novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today).

The ‘Gilded Age’ ran from around 1870 to 1890 and was powered by industrialisation and the explosive growth of the nation’s railroads. It followed the carnage of the Civil War, saw great technical and economic growth and mass immigration and spawned ‘robber barons’ like Carnegie and Rothschild.

It produced great individual wealth and excesses but it was built on institutionalised labour exploitation and entrenched corruption and it exposed a chasm in prosperity between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ that has continued to today.

There’s a world of difference between ‘golden’ and ‘gilded’: the former describes pure or solid gold, the latter refers to a thin coating of gold over base metal.

Experience tells us that gilded is a perfect description of Trump and his world.

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