MARTIN FLANAGAN: 9 thoughts on Trumpism in Australia

Donald Trump mocks a disabled journalist, and (top left, clockwise): Sky News, Kevin Rudd, Rupert Murdoch and Pete Evans.

ONE: Is Trump in Australia? Originally, I thought not. Here’s an old World War 2 joke that might explain why. The year is 1943. An American GI is in a Brisbane bar. He’s telling everyone how big everything is back home. He says, “My ranch is so-o big it took me three days to ride around it on my horse”. An Australian up the other end of the bar says: “Yeah – I had a horse like that once”.

Trump’s the American GI. In his book “The Art of the Deal”, Trump wrote: “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do”.

I spent 1993 with the Footscray Football Club (now the Western Bulldogs). Their philosophy added up to the single belief that actions speak louder than words. If Trump talked about himself as a player in the way he talks about himself generally, he would have to be the best player in the club. Because if he wasn’t, he’d be a joke and the bigger he talked the bigger a joke he would become.

Remember when Trump was talking about the American War of Independence and attempted a masterly overview of a battle, saying the American army “did what it had to do” and, without missing a beat, in exactly the same tone, said the Americans “took over the airports” like he thought there were planes around in 1775. In the footy clubs I grew up around, that would have earnt him a nickname like “Airports”. Kick it to “Airports”, lead you fat bastard.

TWO: I’ve never felt closer to the writers of antiquity than I have during the Trump years. They were such good thinkers. Why? Maybe because they had lots of silence. They distilled things down to their essence. Five hundred years before Christ, a Greek philosopher called Democritus devised an atomic theory of matter. Democritus said: “There are only atoms, emptiness and opinions”.

If Democritus were alive today, he would say: “There are only atoms, emptiness and Sky News after dark and radio shock jocks and tabloid newspaper editors writing headlines aimed at pulling the eyeballs out of your head on a daily basis”. We are drowning in demagoguery. I quote the Greek philosopher Aristophanes (427BC-386BC): “Demagogues are like fishers for eels. In still waters, they catch nothing, but if they thoroughly stir up the slime, their fishing is good”.

I reckon they saw certain things more clearly back then.

THREE: We are in a period of enormous historical change which carries before it a dark wave of fear and apprehension. In this context, I would like to mention something I observed last year during the George Pell affair – I noticed someone regularly tweeting that Pell was a saint.

Intrigued, I tracked the tweeter back to his home page and found an elderly, ultra-devout English Catholic. Apart from an on-going war he was waging with the present Pope, this individual had three obsessions – defending George Pell, Donald Trump and Brexit.

What do George Pell, Donald Trump and Brexit have in common? Answer that question and you have a clue to the mystery of our times. Add to it the fact that the planet is overpopulated, overcooked and there’s a strange new virus on the loose … if history is a river, right now it’s a raging torrent. We catch glimpses of where we are but each day it changes.

Someone on Twitter said Trump voters are like the man who goes to a strip club and thinks the naked woman sitting on his lap is doing it because she likes him.

It’s more complicated than that, I know – there are people who see Trump exactly for what he is and support him anyway. But there is a furious amount of projecting going on, like those homespun paintings of Trump in the oval office with Jesus. In one of them Jesus was an eight-foot Caucasian who looked like he played centre for the Boston Celtics. Trump was holding him like he held the American flag, wrapping his body in it.

This is a man with allegations of sexual abuse from 26 different women against him plus a court order to produce a DNA sample, which he is refusing to give, arising from an allegation of rape.

Some of what Trump represents is pure Americana. Phineas T. Barnum, the archetypal 19th century American showman, said there’s a sucker born every minute. Trump thinks those who have died serving in the American military during two world wars are suckers. I cross for a comment to Antisthenes the Greek philosopher (446-366 BC): “States fail when they cannot distinguish fools from serious men”.

FOUR: In the early 2000s, on a visit to South Africa, I was confronted with the issue of torture. I met a peace activist, a black man, tortured by black men in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. No race politics in the story, just plain old-fashioned evil.

To put it mildly, the experience sent me on a long trajectory of thinking about torture. By the end, I had a new-found belief in democracy. Democracy is one of the supreme human achievements – just look at the alternatives.

There is no such thing as a perfect democracy but some are better than others. The next rung down from where the US and Australia currently stand is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a place where opposition leaders get poisoned, protestors arrested and journalists murdered, but calls itself a democracy. Donald Trump, as we all know, is “a big fan” of Vladimir Putin.

PLEASE HELP US CONTINUE TO THRIVE BY BECOMING AN OFFICIAL FOOTYOLOGY PATRON. JUST CLICK THIS LINK.

Having lost the election, Trump has taken every opportunity to foster fear and doubt and resentment, thereby further degrading the democratic process, claiming the election was “stolen” without producing evidence of it.

Americans are lucky their legal system stood up. If they’d rolled over like the Republican Party has, we’d been entering a whole new period of history, a worse one. Reporting on the decline of the Roman empire, Tacitus wrote: “Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.”

FIVE: Democracy, like religion, is a shared belief. This week, American businessman Andrew Yang said that “radicalization will continue to rise in large part because you can profit from it”. That’s what Fox News has done in America and Sky News after dark is doing here.

Simultaneously, in the US, Fox provided a huge stage for Trump, a reality TV star with a history of untruthfulness, to persuade 40 per cent of the population that the mainstream media is “fake news”.

The mainstream media is where stories exposing Trump’s venality and multiple business failures are to be found. The whole Trump persona got packaged with notions of religion and patriotism and we’ve ended up with a nation which can’t even agree on what’s real. You did that, Rupert Murdoch. That’s your legacy. American democracy is semi-paralysed.

I need to add that Murdoch also employed war correspondent Marie Colvin, one of the great journalists of recent times. Rupert, for all his sins, has employed some good journalists over the years.

I’ve seen no evidence that his son Lachlan, who seems to believe what he sees on Fox News, can tell the difference between good journalism and bad. Lachlan Murdoch sets the tone and ambit for 66 per cent of Australia’s newspapers plus Sky News.

SIX: In the 1930s, when Hitler and Mussolini were on the rise in Europe, the Irish poet WB Yeats described a democracy under stress as one in which “the centre cannot hold”. That is why I support what Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull are doing here in Australia.

They are now the centre. Yeats’ poem describes a democracy in crisis as a place where “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. Last week, Peta Credlin, who does passionate intensity as well or better than anyone, claimed that Rudd was using the petition he launched for a Royal Commission into the Murdoch media to harvest personal data. It was a claim tailor-made for the internet age.

Celebrity chef Pete Evans is an example of someone who has prospered from the internet age. Pete’s as shallow as he is boyishly good-looking. In April, he promoted a machine on his website that came with a $14,990 price tag and would “optimise and improve potential health, wellness and athletic performance”, the ABC reported.

The website claimed the machine replicated light, frequencies, harmonics, pulsed electromagnetic fields and voltage that are found in nature, for a variety of treatments, including “a couple for the Wuhan coronavirus.” Pete played his sales pitch like a flute, but it brought him a $25,000 fine from the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

Evans’ schtick is that he’s an unrestrained free thinker. Last week, lest we forget, he put out a message depicting a MAGA supporter as a caterpillar that grows into a butterfly with the symbol worn by the Christchurch shooter patterned into its wings.

Evans has 1.5 million followers on Facebook. That is 10 times more than the Leader of the Federal Opposition, Anthony Albanese, a man relying on reason to persuade the public of his arguments.

SEVEN: Contemporary politics in the US and Australia is billed as a battle between “conservatives” and “liberals”. Of all the lies of our time, that’s possibly the biggest.

Under this terminology, I’m classified as a liberal. I don’t believe in human perfection, I don’t believe perfect societies are attainable. I am not a Utopian, I am not of the “woke” Left, I don’t like political correctness. These are conservative beliefs. Trump’s not a conservative. Conservatives believe in the rule of law. Trump doesn’t believe in any law that stands between him and what he wants. The word “conservatives” as currently used is a gang name like Hell’s Angels.

EIGHT: Is Trump here in Australia? I reckon I saw “Airports” at the footy during the Adam Goodes affair. He said he’d boo who he liked and the next day the demagogues were praising him for his honesty and saying he spoke for the ordinary Australian.

NINE: All I know is we are powerless alone. Nor should we complain if the battle is long. Our mistake was to think it ever ended.