Stop The Votes…

It’s only a matter of time before they all realise what a mistake they’ve made…

I don’t mean the American people; I mean the billionaires who let Musk become the surrogate President because he’s just a bit too erratic…

Sorry, Musk isn’t President… he can’t be because the Constitution forbids it! Still the USA was founded on the idea of rebellion against authority, so you can probably raise a significant militia just by saying that it’s your duty as an American to bare your arms and rip off your sleeves and work towards overthrowing this oppressive document because the right to do this is protected in the Constitution…

I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be making silly jokes at a time when there are so many silly jokes in positions of power… I refrained from saying anything after Trump’s successfully renaming the Gulf of Mexico. I was going to give this the title: “Trump Announces That He’s Renaming the English County of Middlesex”, but I didn’t… and not just because it might make people think that I don’t understand the seriousness of his attacks on LGTBI+ people, but because I’m pretty sure that a large number of readers may actually believe it.

Understandably, a lot of people just switch off in troubled times like these… Yes, yes those communists and homosexuals and Jews are causing trouble but we can depend on Herr Hitler to deal with them and we don’t need to worry our pretty blonde heads about this whole political thing… We can just be patriotic and salute the flag and tell everyone that…

However much we ignore it, the trouble isn’t going away.

I’ve noticed that there’s an assumption that Trump has a strategy and he’s actually smarter than he appears because he’s managed to get to be where he is and that means that he must be smarter than he looks, soooo…

Ok, next time one of your conservative friends puts that to you pick one of the following and say the same thing:

• Obama
• Albanese
• Zelensky
• Idi Amin
• Hitler

Bringing up Hitler is always problematic because some arsehole will mention Godwin’s Law, as though Godwin would have agreed that in the 1930s you couldn’t have compared anyone to Hitler… including actual Nazis… and Hitler!

I just listened to Trump and the nominee for the FBI, so I have a pretty good grasp on this… As someone who’s been a teacher, I have a pretty good sense when someone is giving an oral presentation where they haven’t read the book. Sometimes, a really intelligent person can make it sound impressive but there’s a bit of a tell where they get something wrong like the fact that Gertrude wasn’t Macbeth’s mother and you wonder what website on earth they’ve clicked and whether it’s just some bastard of a teacher deciding to humiliate all those who google things on the internet rather than reading the actual text…

Now when I suggest they haven’t read the book, I’m not talking about “Mein Kampf”, I’m talking about the book of how to fool most of the people all of the time… No, no, not The Bible either. Many US Christians find the Bible a bit too confronting and should only be read in small doses with large bits ignored owing to the fact that they were written by communists in the Middle East and not by American Jesus.

Anyway, back to Trump and the horror of the USA…

Well, I’m not going to try and explain the horror of his economic plan because you’re other one of those people who understand economics or your one of those people who thinks that they understand his plan… in which case, you certainly don’t understand economics…

Ok, it’s true that Trump ended up with a small fortune after his real estate deals, but it should be remembered that he started with a large one…

So when he starts talking about tariffs, it’s clear that he doesn’t know how they work. The fact that the media hasn’t pointed this out means that either they don’t understand how it works either or it’s unpatriotic to point out that the POTUS is what we’d normally call “a complete fucking idiot”!

Which may be one of the few times Trump has been considered complete…

Anyway rather than deal with the economics of his tariff plan, I’d like to deal with the egocentricity of it. You see, Trump considers that any country that has a trade surplus with the USA is somehow treating them “unfairly”… Of course, it could be argued that the other country might think that the USA was treating them unfairly if the roles are reversed and the USA start having a trade surplus with them but that way madness lies because of US exceptionalism…

This is the equivalent of someone who owns a restaurant complaining that his suppliers have a trade surplus and it’s not fair and unless they start eating in the restaurant, then the owner will make them pay slapping a tariff on their food. Ok, it might sound good but, apart from the fact that it’s the customers who end up paying the tariff, what does the owner do if this causes the meat supplier to decide that the owner is insane and they’d be better off selling to restaurant down the road?

The good people of the USA are not alone in thinking that their country is the greatest on Earth, but they seem to be genuinely surprised that not everyone agrees with them. It even staggers some of them that other countries don’t see the wisdom of their foreign policy: “Why are you upset, we only invaded to get rid of that oppressive dictator because his policies were a real threat to world peace? So what if you voted for him… We didn’t!  Oh yeah, well sorry about the collateral damage but you didn’t really use that arm much, did you?”

Hollywood has manufactured some wonderful myths about the USA’s place in the world. The story is most frequently some form of the early settlers/the immigrants/the refugees are coming to the United States because it’s the land of opportunity and within the space of one movie, the protagonists will have defeated those savages who don’t understand that they’re bringing progress or, alternatively, made a million dollars by hard work or inventiveness. The typical coming to America story uses glosses over the push factors of immigration: for example, the Irish leaving Ireland because of the potato famine* and moving countries was preferable to starving. For most of its existence, the USA has been a backwater, lacking the culture and refinement of Europe, and it’s really only in the past century that it’s been thought of as some sort of world leader.

Still, Trump is promising a new Golden Age. Unfortunately for him, the rest of the world may see it as an Orange age.

*The potato famine was the 19th Century equivalent of Australia’s gas shortage. It wasn’t that there was an actual shortage, it was to do with potatoes being grown for export rather than food to feed the hungry Irish. While we can’t blame John Howard for the potato famine, he was the one who sold off our gas supplies, and for some reason, there’s a reluctance to say that we should keep more here rather than export it and buy it back…

Also by Rossleigh: Things That Don’t Work Or Elon, Donald And Peter

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