This time I know who I’d vote for

…unlike in 2016

It’s only a few days until we discover the fate of the free world.  In October 2016, I was a panellist on ABC’s Q&A program, and the subject of the US presidential election came up.  I’d like to be able to say I voiced my wholehearted support for Trump and I predicted his victory.  Sadly – I did neither.

The transcript of the show is up on the ABC website and I’ve just had a look at what I said.

When average household income in America in 2016 is lower than it was in 1999, when poverty is up, when inequality is up, when unemployment in America is only relatively low because of so many people not looking for a job, we have a problem.

And while all of this is happening, Hillary Clinton goes and gives three speeches for $650,000 to Goldman Sachs, and then we ask ourselves why do 40% of people support Trump?

Trump would not have been my candidate, he would not have been the candidate, I think, of a lot of conservatives, of a lot of liberals, and of a lot of libertarians.  But we have what we have…if I was in America I would not know how to vote.

I’ve been reminded of that ‘I would not know how to vote’ line by my Trump-voting friends ever since.  In 2016 my pick for president would have been Rand Paul. Looking back on it now there’s a convincing argument that Trump was the only Republican capable of beating Clinton. Rand Paul’s campaign for the presidential nomination was as forgettable as Harris’ in 2020.

My figure of 40% of Americans supporting Trump was out by a bit.  In 2016, Trump got 46.1% of the vote of the 54.8% of Americans of voting age who voted, ie 25% of Americans supported Trump at the ballot box.  Clinton received 48.2% of the vote.  I’m a supporter of voluntary voting,  but it says something about the state of democracy in America when less than 55% of the population can be bothered voting.  According to an IPSOS poll the main reason Americans don’t vote is because they believe ‘It makes no difference who is elected president – things go on just as they did before.’

In 2024, in both America and Australia, the left is united around the claim that if Trump wins the presidency, things most definitely won’t go on as before.  So, for example, according to people like George Brandis, Attorney-General in the Abbott government, a Trump presidency risks America falling to ‘fascism’.  In The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, Brandis claimed, ‘Whether or not Trump is rightly described as a fascist, a demagogue he certainly is.  And if the history of the past century has taught us anything, it is surely to take demagogues seriously.’  His reference to ‘the history of the past century’ says more about Brandis than it does about Trump.  If Brandis thinks Trump is like Hitler, then he should have the courage to say it out loud – not hint at it with a wink and a nod.

(If you’re an Australian reading this, you’ll remember Brandis’ two contributions to Australian politics.

His first was to torpedo the fight for freedom of speech and the reform of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act by claiming its purpose was to allow people to be ‘bigots’.  Section 18C makes unlawful acts that are reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate someone because of their race or ethnicity.

Last week, a Federal Court judge found that Pauline Hanson had breached the section when in response to Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi reacting to the death of the Queen by tweeting, ‘Condolences to those who knew the Queen.  I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples’, Hanson replied on Twitter, ‘Your attitude appalls [sic] and disgusts me.  When you immigrated to Australia you took every advantage of this country.  You took citizenship, bought multiple homes, and a job in parliament.  It’s clear you’re not happy, so pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan.’

The judge ordered Hanson to take down the tweet and pay Faruqi’s legal costs, which could amount to $1 million.  The judge conceded that ‘the words in Senator Hanson’s tweet did not refer to skin colour’, but he added, ‘The tweet was directed to a Muslim woman of colour who immigrated from Pakistan’.  As Andrew Bolt has written: ‘Duh! Yes, of course it was, because that happened to be the author of that nasty anti-Queens post.  What’s the judge suggesting?  Hanson’s response would have been OK had she been criticising a white Christian instead?’

Brandis’ second contribution to Australian politics was voting to remove Tony Abbott as prime minister and install Malcolm Turnbull.)

Brandis is just repeating a left-wing trope.  An honest assessment of any supposed ‘fascist’ tendencies of Trump would compare his first presidency with what followed.  Which is exactly what Victor Davis Hanson did a few days ago.  This is some of what Hanson wrote.

In the last two weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris has been trying to revive her stagnant campaign by smearing Trump as being Hitlerian and a fascist… If Harris refers to Trump’s supposed fascist policies during his prior four-year tenure, there is no such evidence.  Nonetheless, the once ‘joyful’ Harris is ending her campaign by trafficking in lies and smears reminiscent of the Joe McCarthy era.

Recall that fascists hijack law enforcement and the military to suspend constitutional rights and punish enemies.  Trump did neither.  Instead, in 2016, a corrupt FBI went after Trump himself during the Obama administration with the bogus Steele dossier.  The FBI, which in 2016 had hired the faker Steele, in 2020, fused with social media to suppress accurate news reporting of the embarrassing Hunter Biden laptop scandal…

Fascists try to warp the legal system.  But Trump’s own Justice Department selected an independent special counsel to investigate the invented Russian collusion against him.  In vast contrast, the Biden Justice Department coordinated with Georgia prosecutors Fani Willis and Nathan Wade, special counsel Jack Smith, Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg, and New Your Attorney General Letitia James to prosecute Trump, bankrupt him, and keep him off the campaign trail.

Fascists use their government to destroy their enemies.  During Trump’s term, for the first time in history, the House of Representatives impeached a first-term president twice.  And in another first, the Senate tried Trump as a private citizen.  A self-styled ‘anonymous’ federal official bragged openly of deliberately, and likely unlawfully, leading a bureaucratic cabal to sabotage Trump’s lawful executive orders…

Fascists seek to change existing laws to destroy opponents and illegally consolidate power.  Currently, it is only the Democrats who seek to pack the court, destroy the Electoral College, end the Senate filibuster, and create two new states and thus gain four left-wing senators…

Fascists arbitrarily nullify any laws they feel do not aid their agendas.  Biden-Harris destroyed immigration law in order to bring in more than 12 million illegal aliens and gain new constituencies…

Fascists seek to politicise the military.  But in Trump’s case, his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, brazenly violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice by libelling Trump as a fascist.  Worse still, Milley sabotaged the chain of command by ordering theatre commanders to report directly to him in times of serious crises.  And in near-treasonous fashion, Milley contacted his Chinese communist counterpart in the People’s Liberation Army to assure him that he would warn the Chinese military before carrying out any Trump order he felt existentially dangerous.

(Despite all of this, Brandis cites Milley as an authoritative source.  ‘The warnings of sober people like Milley and Kelly [Trump’s former chief of staff who Trump fired] – not political figures but military officers bred in an ethic of service – cannot be written off as hysterical campaign overstatement.’  Brandis makes no reference to Milley’s and Kelly’s antipathy to Trump.]

Hanson concludes:

Fascists seek to control and weaponise the media.  So, Facebook and Twitter both conspired with the FBI to censor news accounts favourable to Trump.  The major newspapers, social media corporations, television networks, and public broadcasting systematically and continually attacked Trump, censured his supporters, and fused with his opponents.

Yet somehow, according to Brandis, it’s Trump we should be worried about.

Brandis claims that while 73% of Australians don’t want Trump back in the White House, ‘there is a small but voluble element of the right-wing commentariat barracking for Trump, regardless of the threat he poses to global security and Australia’s interests…along with other screaming lefties like Dick Cheney, George Bush and John Howard, I will be hoping against hope to see Trump defeated.’

Comparing what Brandis said yesterday about Trump to what Alexander Downer wrote in today’s The Australian newspaper reveals the difference in quality between the senior ministers in Tony Abbott’s government and those in the government of John Howard.

…the bulk of the US media – particularly the Washington-based media – is passionately anti-Trump.  That spills over into our own perceptions of what a Trump administration would be like.  The anti-Trump media [and anti-Trump commentators like George Brandis] take literally the Democratic Party’s campaign attacks on Donald Trump as though they were fact.

For a long time, they claimed Trump was a threat to democracy.  More recently, they have described him as a fascist and a Hitler-like figure.  This sort of unwise exaggerated rhetoric should be seen for what it is: an extreme form of party politicking…

So what about Trump?  His foreign policy theme is peace through strength.  By that he means he would negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni and Chinese President Xi Jinping but he would do so from a position of strength.

He would abandon attempts by the Democrats to renegotiate agreements with Iran, he would increase tariffs on China, unless Beijing agrees to give the US better access to its market, and my guess is he would tell Putin to negotiate an armistice with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky or the US would pour additional military resources into supporting Ukraine.

The claim by the Democrats that Trump likes dictators and therefore would agree to what the likes of Xi and Putin wanted is just party politicking.  He may admire the leadership qualities of those dictators, but his point is he wants to deal with them but from a position of strength, not hesitation and weakness.

Unlike George Brandis, I’m hoping against hope that Trump wins.

Thank you for your support.

kind regards John