In every horror/sci-fi/Jurassic Park/World movie/anything-involving-a-monster, there’s inevitably always a scene where whatever abomination ‘they’ have cooked up escapes and starts terrorizing the heroes. Usually with a fair amount of bloodshed.
This is US Politics 2024, with the landslide victory of Trump against Kamala Harris.
For transparency’s sake, I won’t pretend to know all there is to know about American politics; but I do know this: America’s experimental monster has escaped the lab. Y’all had a T-Rex in captivity and decided to go full Dennis Nedry.
Trump 1.0 was a fun experiment in breaking away from the establishment. The tired, old guard we all know and have come to be sick of. The career politicians, The Machine™.
Trump, being a brash, reckless media personality best known for firing people and appearing in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, disrupted all that. He wasn’t a politician (and as we later found out, barely a good businessman), he didn’t care for the petty whims of The System™, he just wanted to Make America Great Again so hard he made it his catch-phrase, and the world at large grabbed onto that and ran with it. So many people (celebrities included) harp on about “well, if I became president….” and this cheeto-dust-coated fucker actually went and did it.
The message was clear: “We’re not happy with the offerings on the table, so we’re gonna go with the loose cannon.”
What resulted is not only one of the worst presidencies I’ve seen in my lifetime, and a whole heap of people somehow missing the memo on what ‘freedom of speech’ actually means, but also a swarm of “me-too” demi-Trumps wanting a slice of the action. Especially here in Australia where the three things we’re good at are sports, being the world’s weird friend, and being casually racist.
We’ve had cult of personality candidates in Parliament in the past; most notably Kevin Rudd’s “Kevin07” campaign (that one actually succeeded, mind. and it wasn’t a bad run), but nothing stirred up the hornet’s nest like the Trump administration. The two most notable hornets being Pauline Hanson, and Clive Palmer.
Hanson had been memed into oblivion the last time she was relevant in the 90’s, with a number of songs produced by Simon Hunt, better known as drag queen Pauline Pantsdown, and after perhaps a decade of being completely irrelevant, gained a huge resurgence in popularity and votes after Trump took office.
Palmer tried to ride Trump’s coat-tails with his own “me too”-isms; he’s an eccentric mining magnate with more dollars than common sense, who’s active on social media in that “how do you do, fellow kids?” sort of way, but I feel never really got to capitalize on the same cult of personality that Trump relished in.
Both saw a considerable amount of votes their way, with Hanson and her party, the far-right One Nation managing to gain a place in parliament, and Palmer gaining a bit of traction, but not to the same level as Hanson.
Hanson, who has done very little her entire political career but make waves and be effectively useless, beating her chest about the “Aussie battler” and “a fair go for all” (also a few questionable words about anyone other than whitey) kept making waves (including climbing Uluru and getting stuck, and wearing a Burka in parliament much to the chagrin of pretty much everyone), and being useless short of getting a motion passed regarding clearer Halal labelling on foods and telling white people that it’s “okay to be white”.
Palmer sort of just buzzed about, his only real achievement being picking a litigious fight with political commentator and comedian Jordan “FriendlyJordies” Shanks. His party, the United Australia Party, was formally deregistered in 2022 except for Victoria, where it still somehow has a precarious foothold thanks to a senator I previously talked shit about, Ralph Babet.
All in all, they squandered their seemingly never-ending fifteen minutes of pseudo-fame; Two useless idiots riding on the coat-tails of an actually useful (to some, anyway) idiot. Even politicians who actually did some damage (proto-Nazi Fraser Anning comes to mind) couldn’t keep up with the Trump train.
But the dangerous part is that the Trump train paved the way for every sort of cockhead racist/bigot/transphobe/anti-“woke”-warrior/what have you to start thinking their opinions are valid and need to be heard, and I do not see things slowing down in 2024 with America’s newly-elected Criminal-in-Chief. Dunno about you, but I’m not exactly a fan of having far-right ideology on full display (whats that saying about one normal guy and 9 nazis at a table?).
The other dangerous part is that the whole cult of personality surrounding Trump really muddies the waters when it comes to our politics here. We do things differently here and the Westminster system -try as people might- really doesn’t gel too well with the sort of Americanized politics we see over in Freedomland. A lot of people here simply don’t give a fuck or thinks “fuck ’em all, they’re all the same” or are simply ignorant (wilfuly or otherwise) to how things are done, and the Rudds (don’t get me wrong, I liked Rudd mostly), Hansons, Palmers of Australia are gonna jump on that, I fear.
This is pure speculation, mind. I am, after all, an idiot with a blog. Still something I worry about all the same.
In the meantime, the monster’s escaped the lab and we’re gonna have a rough 4 years ahead of us, even if it’s gonna be good for business. Come January 20th, we gotta rally up.
Till next time…
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