In which the pond celebrates meditative Sunday with prattling Polonius and the bromancer ...

The pond realises it's the day after, but finds it incredibly hard to drag eyeballs away from the best three ring circus in the world.

There was Will Sommer in The Bulwark celebrating assorted oddities, including this one, RFK: Chemtrails are real, and the Trump administration is doing them!

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been chemtrail-curious in the past, saying there was some validity to the idea that the government is nefariously spraying chemicals from airplanes.
Now that he has been tasked with overseeing the nation’s massive healthcare bureaucracy, he appears determined to act on these suspicions.
The secretary of health and human services said recently that he might even hire a sort of chemtrails czar, whose sole job would be stopping the practice.
“I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it, or bring on somebody who’s going to think only about that, find out who’s doing it, and holding them accountable,” Kennedy said in an appearance Tuesday on Dr. Phil tied to Trump’s first 100 days in office.
Depending on whose version of the conspiracy you believe, chemtrails are a government plot meant to either control the climate or brainwash the population—or both! On his pre-government-life podcast, Kennedy hosted a prominent chemtrail conspiracist and left, in his words, “persuaded” by his pitch.
But Kennedy’s comments on Dr. Phil appear to be the first confirmation that he intends to actually act on chemtrails as HHS secretary. Should he follow through, it would constitute a remarkable amount of government resources dedicated to pure quackery.

And so it goes and so on and so forth, and in a comment below another Bulwark post celebrating this vast conspiracy, the pond found a link to Penn and Teller explaining the huge Dihydrogenmonoxide conspiracy on YouTube.

And the pond's supposed to focus on the reptiles with tears of joy cascading into the world?

Never mind, the pond knew its duty and, as a matter of archival preservation, captured this effort by the reptiles c. 9.10 pm last night, sometime after the pond had finished a dire Robert de Niro dual role Mafia movie, and dropped in to hear Antony Green call his final result at 8.25 pm (farewell Antony, the pond will miss your twitches (click on to enlarge):

The pond then got up early to on the Sunday to capture the lizard Oz's digital front page, another piece of archival preservation...

Uh oh, that's gotta hurt, that's gonna to occupy the reptiles for months, years, until the twelfth of never, and that's a long, long time. All that pain, all that suffering, all that humiliation ...

With that done and dusted, the pond could seek out distractions that have nothing to do with current events.

Yesterday the pond ruled out spending time with the disgraced Pelezzullo, and this sample will serve to explain why, and never mind all his hopes and dreams being shattered overnight, as shuttered as a Duttonator in son of Dick, Dickson if you will ...

...So, what will be in the prime minister’s in-tray on Monday morning? We will have to build more rapidly our capacity to defend ourselves with our own combat forces in all contingencies short of the threat of national annihilation. We will have to renegotiate our strategic bargain with the US, such that its costs, contributions and obligations are explicitly agreed, including in relation to how Australia will help to protect the US, in return for both existential protection and crucial strategic support. We will have to build different kinds of relationships in Asia, with countries such as Japan, South Korea, India, Indonesia and The Philippines, which will need to be more explicitly geared to mutual security and protection. We will have to reshape our economy so it can better absorb the shocks of supply-chain disruption and geopolitical confrontation and, if necessary, be switched seamlessly to war production. We will have to build societal resilience in anticipation of possible conflict.

These issues have hardly featured in the election campaign. They should have. Unfortun­ately, there are no structured processes or practices that might have crystallised the issues and forced the debate – no pre-election defence and security outlook, no applicable data releases, as occurs with economic data, no independent voices such as there is with the Reserve Bank in economic affairs, and no appetite in the media for demanding a dedicated leaders debate on these questions.

Given this silence, and to paraphrase Keating, will we be so undisciplined and so uninterested in our own salvation that we refuse to confront the challenge of possibly becoming the geopolitical equivalent of a “banana republic”? It will take a shock to shake us from our complacent belief that we are still living in a strategically lucky country. Will that shock be delivered by a leader speaking as plainly as Keating spoke in 1986, or will it take the sight of Chinese aircraft carriers and Russian bombers routinely operating at the frontiers of what was once our sheltered land?

No credit where no credit is due, but with the credit suitably annotated:

Mike Pezzullo is a former (disgraced) deputy secretary of the Defence Department and was (the disgraced) secretary of the Home Affairs Department until November 2023.

There seems to be no end to the Pezzullo rehabilitation tour in the lizard Oz, so come on down Polonius and distract us with your 'Nam prattle, a hardy standby that you've reverted to many times over the years, what with your hawkish tendencies and your many years serving the country.

The header: Gough Whitlam hung our Vietnamese allies out to dry, PM Gough Whitlam went out of his way to stop Vietnamese who had supported Australia from fleeing Vietnam with our diplomats. Certainly, the Fraser government was more sympathetic to Vietnamese refugees than its predecessor.

The small print caption for the risibly bad artwork, inexplicably featuring a mad mullah: The final nine months of 1975 involved the Whitlam government having to respond to the exodus of refugees from South Vietnam after the fall of Saigon . Artwork by Frank Ling. For DIGITAL.

The inevitable injunction: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

And with a leap and a bound, here we are, with Polonius repeating himself, having kept a copy of his previous ramblings on the matter on hand for future use.

The pond doesn't intend to rehash the entire 'Nam disaster, save to say that nothing good came of it, and Australia should never have joined in the folly.

The same could be said for the Afghanistan venture, featuring the shocking behaviour of some Australian troops in the field, and a terrible result for women and for that country more generally.

It took decades for Vietnam to recover, and while still a Communist dictatorship, they at least finally adopted capitalism with a 'Nam twist.

The pond doesn't expect Polonius to talk about any of this; instead expect him to rabbit on endlessly about Gough ... which means vulgar youff won't have the first clue what he's blathering about ...

Fifty years ago, unbeknown to himself, Gough Whitlam was in the final year of his prime ministership.

He had led Labor to electoral victory on December 2, 1972, after the Coalition had been in office since December 1949. But Whitlam was dismissed by governor-general Sir John Kerr on November 11, 1975, when Labor could not ensure supply and would not advise an election. All this, no doubt, will be discussed again in a few months.

It so happened that the final nine months of 1975 involved the Whitlam government in having to respond to the exodus of refugees from South Vietnam after the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) to the forces of communist North Vietnam on April 30, 1975.

The North Vietnamese Army and its Viet Cong operatives in (then) South Vietnam were supported with arms by the communist regime in the Soviet Union, with some assistance from the communist dictatorship in China led by Mao Zedong. However, the non-communist government in South Vietnam was losing allies.

At this point the reptiles provided an AV distraction, Vietnam commemorates the 50th anniversary of its unification — a turning point that ended US involvement and reshaped the country.

Polonius was now fully into it, as only Polonius can be, reciting events in his pedantic way ...

In March 1973, under the Paris Accord, the US withdrew its final combat troops from Vietnam. Soon after, on July 1, 1973, congress passed a law – despite opposition from president Richard Nixon – that prevented US military operations in the region.

The US congress continued to cut back on military aid to South Vietnam. And then the Watergate scandal had an immediate effect. Because of this mishandling of the break and enter into Democratic National whCommittee (sic) headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington in June 1972, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.

His replacement as president, Gerald Ford, could not get approval from congress to send additional military aid to Saigon. The government in Hanoi understood that the US had lost the will to support its one-time ally.

North Vietnam renewed its assault in March 1975. The South Vietnam forces fought valiantly but could not prevail. Saigon fell on April 30.

In Australia, from early April the Whitlam government understood that Saigon would soon fall. Australian combat forces had been withdrawn from Vietnam by the William McMahon-led Coalition government by November 1971.

The Whitlam government withdrew the remaining Australian Army Training Team the following December.

However, Australia still had diplomats in Saigon. Moreover, there were local Vietnamese who had worked in, or with, the Australian embassy in Saigon along with Vietnamese who feared persecution if the Hanoi totalitarian regime came to power in South Vietnam.

You wouldn't have the first clue from this recitation how deeply corrupt, how ruined by the American intervention, the South Vietnam government became.

When handing out blame, it would have been appropriate to mention the French, and their shameless desire to cling to empire.

The pond recently saw a 2018 French movie, Les Confins du monde, which opened to mixed reviews, and which faltered at the end. 

Director Gaspard Ulliel was happy to show guerrilla violence - brutal beheadings, body hackings and such like - and jungle terror, and a mythical hooker love interest, but when it came to showing his hero poring petrol on three Vietnamese locked in a small cage, he dodged showing him actually performing an atrocity. Much like the way the French dodged responsibility for 'Nam and Algeria for many years.

Never mind, back to celebrating that perpetual drunk, the cur Kerr, though he's only mentioned in the caption for the snap, Gough Whitlam addresses the crowd near Parliament House, Canberra, after his dismissal by Sir John Kerr. Picture: Ross Duncan

That sight, Gough bloodied but unbowed, sent Polonius off the deep end again, thrashing away at one of his most cherished and favourite hobbyhorses.

And then Whitlam and some of his senior ministers threw the switch to intolerance.

Richard Palfreyman reported the final days of the Vietnam War for the ABC. He concluded the extract from his unpublished memoirs in The Weekend Australian last Saturday by stating that he still felt “a sense of shame and regret” about the events of the day when the Australian embassy staff finally left Vietnam. It was April 25, Anzac Day.

Put simply, Whitlam went out of his way to stop Vietnamese who had supported Australia from fleeing Vietnam with Australian diplomats. He was willing for Australia to accept infants but not adults.

The reason? The Whitlam government did not want to antagonise the communist rulers in Hanoi who were soon to conquer Saigon.

Clyde Cameron was a left-wing member of the Whitlam cabinet who happened to be opposed to Australia accepting Vietnamese refugees.

In his 1986 book China, Communism and Coca-Cola, Cameron wrote that in cabinet in 1975 Whitlam told his colleagues that he was “not having hundreds of f. king Vietnamese Balts coming into this country with their religious and political hatreds against us”.

I had an extensive correspondence on this matter with Whitlam in late 2002 and early 2003. It is published in the March 2003 issue of The Sydney Institute Quarterly.

Why only Gough? What about the dismal Americans? What about their ongoing ability to fuck things up, whether Iraq or Afghanistan? What about the chance that Ho Chi Minh might have been up for turning via diplomacy way back when, if only Harry and his buck had stopped there?

Sssh, have another snap, South Vietnamese civilians try to scale the 14-foot wall of the US embassy in Saigon, trying to reach evacuation helicopters as the last Americans departed from Vietnam. Picture: AP

The pond can't begin to recount the number of times Polonius has been down this path.

Here he is on 26th April 2005 in what was then the Fairfax rags, with Thirty years on, an occasion for some to say sorry.

It never occurs to Polonius to say sorry for dead Australian soldiers, conscripted country boys sent off to indulge in a Coppola nightmare.

Here he is in the same rags on 18th April 2006, How Whitlam closed the door on refugees.

The 2005 outing produced a flood of letters. 

Please forgive the pond for quoting them, because they're now a period artefact, suffering souls enduring a blast of Polonius's Colonel Blimp war mongering ...

Not all people who opposed military intervention in Vietnam approved of, or supported, Ho Chi Minh, Mr Henderson ("Thirty years on, an occasion for some to say sorry", Herald, April 26). Some of us were opposed to war crimes, civilian slaughter and human rights abuse on both sides.

The difference was we were invaders in a manipulated political-economic war of ideology, while the Vietnamese were fighting for their independence after successive waves of colonial interference. Little wonder many followed Ho Chi Minh's plans. It's time to understand the realities that brought such horrors lest we repeat them.

However it is nice to see the sympathy for the refugees from the slaughter and to point out how successive Australian governments have made it possible for us all to enjoy the benefits of those Vietnamese who sought refuge on our shores after 1975.

I look forward to Mr Henderson's next piece on the war in Iraq when he will no doubt criticise the abuses on both sides and implore our government to free those in detention centres on our soil (and Nauru) seeking refuge from the Iraqi tyranny perpetrated by both sides. We will once again benefit from these refugees.

Peter Maher Newtown

Gerard Henderson has omitted one key desideratum: an adherence to the key principle of democracy. The Geneva Accords of 1954, after the French defeat, provided for a "provisional military demarcation line" in Vietnam, pending national elections scheduled for 1956.

But the Americans determined that those elections would never be held, after President Eisenhower received intelligence that Ho Chi Minh probably had 80 per cent support and would win in a landslide. He admitted as much in Mandate for Change, published in 1963, before any significant commitment of foreign troops.

The US had no concern for Vietnamese nationalism or popular support. It was determined to get its brand of "free-market" regime, just as it had done and was doing in Central and South America.

Allan Healy Wollongong

It's great to see Gerard Henderson finally addressing the plight of asylum seekers, albeit a little belatedly. Now, if we could just get him to relocate his concerns about "lack of compassion" to the 21st century, we'd really be getting somewhere.

Bruce Hulbert Bateau Bay

Contrary to Gerard Henderson's article, Australia welcomed thousands of "anti-communist" refugees after the end of the Vietnam War and they settled in and prospered in their new country. Having finally got rid of foreign troops Vietnam got on with rebuilding its country, and today it welcomes thousands of Australian tourists who enjoy their hospitality and the picturesque countryside, with an occasional qualm of conscience at the sight of some of the remaining devastation from what the locals call the "American War".

It was a dreadful war and we should not have been there.

Surely, Mr Henderson, we have had enough of these tirades against Gough Whitlam and the "left". Let's be like the Vietnamese and get on with it.

Brian Strong Baulkham Hills

Memo to Gerard Henderson. What is the definition of a conservative? One who has an unlimited ability to fight yesterday's battles.

Fergus Hancock Muswellbrook

In the early 1960s I was a true Liberal voter like my parents. To gain "ammo" against the left, I wrote to Canberra and the government sent two booklets setting out its argument for Australia's military role in Vietnam. On reading its propaganda, I was shocked to realise we had no case. We and the US had no business in Indochina. I voted Labor for the first time (age 34) in l966.

I and others, as we walked in the Vietnam moratoriums, had no time for communists, but you can't always choose your bedfellows. The real import of Gerard Henderson's article is that we should have gone on fighting that unwinnable war.

Rodney Knock Merewether

Last week a justification of the Dardanelles campaign and a claim that its leadership wasn't so awful. This week, Gerard Henderson makes out that the Vietnam War was a worthy cause and manages to cast his predictable stones at some leftist target or other. Being too familiar with his staunch support of the Howard Government, I find bitter irony in his contention that the Whitlam government showed lack of compassion towards refugees and should apologise.

Jack Sumner Carlingford

Gerard Henderson's idiosyncratic recollections of the Vietnam era are becoming a bit worn. It's time, to coin a phrase, for a Henderson exposé on why the death and destruction of the Iraq war and its aftermath are the fault of Australian lefties.

Tony Moore Caringbah

Well yes, so it goes and all that and more, so on and so forth, and yet here we are twenty years on with the same mendacious bee buzzing in the Polonial bonnet ...

Whitlam told me that he did not recall making the statement attributed to him that “these Vietnamese sob stories don’t wring my withers”. However, Whitlam did not dispute the comment attributed to him by Cameron.

Whitlam’s attitude at the time was explained to me by Peter Wilenski at a private dinner I attended in the Foreign Affairs Department in the early 1990s. He was head of the Department of Foreign Affairs at the time and in 1975 had been head of the Department of Immigration.

Wilenski told me the Whitlam government was willing to admit Vietnamese to Australia in 1975.

But the Labor government was looking for candidates other than those who had, or were alleged to have had, an association with the anti-communist government in Saigon. In response, I made the point that it was the anti-communists who were refugees because they had genuine fear of persecution.

Wilenski did not refute this analysis.

Quang Luu is a case in point. Formerly a South Vietnamese diplomat in Australia, he returned to Saigon before the communist victory. Luu fled the regime and eventually made it to Australia, only to experience difficulties with the Whitlam government. The advent of Malcolm Fraser’s government in November 1975 resolved his problem.

Luu’s story is in the April 2009 issue of The Sydney Papers.

Certainly, the Fraser government was more sympathetic to Vietnamese refugees than its predecessor.

But as Greg Sheridan wrote in The Australian on March 26, 2015, it was not until late 1977 that Australia accepted Vietnamese refugees in large numbers.

That quoting of the bromancer reminded the pond of just how much the reptiles still blather on in favour of a lost cause, and so to a last snap ...Young Vietnamese refugee children being taughtat (sic) the Pennington Hostel in South Australia in 1977.

Finally Polonius began to wind down, and the pond should note that the only benefit for this country arising from the war was the arrival of Vietnamese refugees, but what a pity that nothing was learned in relation to the Afghanistan adventure ...

To quote just a little:

A parliamentary report has laid bare the flaws in Australia’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, detailing how communication failures and shortsighted planning contributed to Afghans in need being left behind.

The Senate committee investigating Australia’s two-decade mission in Afghanistan handed down its interim report on Friday afternoon, around five months since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban.

The report addressed the timeline leading up to and during the emergency evacuation from the Afghan capital last August, which triggered scenes of desperation and chaos.

Australia should have stayed in Afghanistan until it got 'everybody' out: John Howard

Among its eight recommendations, the report stated the Australian government must continue to exert “all available effort” to finalising visa applications - in particular - for Afghans who served with Australian troops.

“There is no excuse for bureaucratic delays when lives are literally at stake,” the report said.

It also called on Australia to match its coalition partners in committing to a substantial intake of Afghan refugees - given the scale of the crisis in Afghanistan.

They love their adventures, but they only worry about consequences when well into the distant past ... as Polonius at last let the bee in his bonnet fall silent.

Overwhelmingly, they were chosen from UN camps and arrived in Australia with valid visas on Qantas planes.

The Fraser government’s position was made easier in a political sense because Bill Hayden had replaced Whitlam as Labor leader following Labor’s defeat in the December 1977 election. To be fair, there was opposition to Vietnamese refugees in the late 1970s and early 80s from some Coalition politicians as well as some Labor MPs.

However, the refugee intake worked. Not only have Vietnamese Australians made a significant contribution to Australian society; what’s more, they convinced many Australians of the communist tyranny imposed on some Southeast Asian nations a half-century ago.

From the late 70s, the “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” chant, once much beloved by the left, was rarely heard in the land.

Even Whitlam declined to maintain his rage towards anti-communist Vietnamese.

Gerard Henderson is executive director of the Sydney Institute.

It might surprise Polonius, pace the letters above, that it's possible to hold two thoughts in the same noggin at the same time ... 

Many people had read Animal Farm at the time of the 'Nam folly, and learned its lessons, and yet many people also think that the Vietnam war was a fucking disaster from beginning to end, not helped by fundamentalist barking mad colonial adventurers of the Polonial kind.

Sorry for that outburst. Even though it was tired and shop-worn, Polonius still manages to troll the pond.

And then it was time to return to entertainment of the kaotic karnival of klowns kind...

Now the one thing you won't find in what follows is that the mango Mussolini is actually a narcissistic, fascistic, attention-seeking clown, with just one skill - the ability to incite, troll and distract ...

Having mentioned the bromancer, what a pleasure to see him out and about with a ten minute read, or so the reptiles timed it, and how predictable that he entirely misses the point of the clown show ...

Oopsie, the reptiles produced a splendid gif to celebrate the first 100 days of the klown karnival, but if you scored the wrong screen cap, it all went pear shape.

The header: What just happened? Making sense of Trump’s frenetic first 100 days, America’s national leadership has gone from narcoleptic to hyperactive, from chronic fatigue under Joe Biden to Attention Deficit under Trump. Biden put the world to sleep; with Trump we dare not close our eyes for a second.

No need for a caption to match the gif comedy, just the tried and true instruction, This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

So here we are, and the pond should warn that there were many visual distractions in the bromancer piece, and the pond has compounded the problem by seizing the chance to slip in a few 'toons. 

You know ...

Watching the bromancer try to grapple with mad King Donald I is surely even more fun than a 'toon:

Donald Trump is the most hyperactive 78-year-old in the world, perhaps in the history of the world. He’s also the busiest, most energetic national leader on the planet. He wants to make 78-year-olds great again! America’s national leadership has gone from narcoleptic to hyperactive, from chronic fatigue under Joe Biden to Attention Deficit under Trump. Biden put the world to sleep; with Trump we dare not close our eyes for a second lest the whole world change in the blink of our eye.

At the end of the week in which Trump celebrated his first 100 days in office, he announced that his administration had concluded trade deals with Japan, South Korea and India, and official figures showed the US economy had shrunk in the first quarter of this year by 0.3 per cent. He also wondered whether Vladimir Putin has been lying to him over Ukraine. Is this a Trump correction? Already? All these developments are big news.

The reptiles immediately jumped in with an AV distraction, US President Donald Trump has claimed his tariff decisions are policies of “common sense and genius” after being in the White House for 100 days.

The pond also had a visual offering or two ...

Back to the bromancer grappling with what Faux Noise helped wrought ...

What do the trade deals mean exactly? Are these deals really concluded? The President said he might take a couple of weeks to announce the detail. Trade deals normally take years to negotiate. Can we read into these deals a longer term, more sustained change in Trump’s approach to tariffs and global trade?

The US and Ukraine also announced an agreement to jointly develop Ukraine’s rare earths minerals, with the deposits being developed by US investment and the two nations sharing the revenues on a 50-50 basis. There will be a Ukraine reconstruction investment fund and US aid to Ukraine can be considered a contribution to the investment fund. That’s a bit weird, but it’s still a good deal if it happens. It can’t happen if there’s a war raging. Rare earths are expensive and difficult to extract at the best of times. But it’s the biggest more or less pro-Ukraine statement from Trump and one that indicates a Washington commitment to Ukraine’s independent future. Or does it?

The first 100 days of Trump’s second term are unlike anything America or the world has ever seen. They’ve transformed US politics and economics, global geo-strategic relations, the global trading system and the world’s economy.

Here the reptiles slipped in a snap of a neo-Nazi in full flourish, Elon Musk gestures during his speech celebrating Trump’s inauguration. Picture: AFP

Yes, another triumph ...

Well done chainsaw man, a car company and a country carved up ... and so much winning ...

Meanwhile, the bromancer was still challenged in his noggin about the whole damn thing ...

Not bad for 100 days. But working out what it all means is extremely challenging. Distinguishing structural change from surface noise is exceptionally difficult, both because things may not work out as Trump intends and because Trump changes his mind, and policies, so frequently. Trump disconcerts everybody, not least Australia’s national leadership.

In the last leaders’ debate of our excruciatingly dull election (more Biden after bedtime than Trump), Anthony Albanese, in admitting he didn’t have Trump’s mobile phone number, claimed not to know whether Trump had a mobile phone or not.

As Albanese was uttering those ridiculous words, two journalists from The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine Trump says he hates, published an interview with the President. His office had refused the interview. The two journalists, better informed than our PM, got Trump’s private phone number and rang him mid-morning on a Saturday. Trump answered and they ended up having a long sit-down in the Oval Office.

If Albanese really didn’t know whether Trump had a private mobile phone, he’s surely the worst informed national leader in the world. More likely he was embarrassed to be so obviously unimportant to Trump.

But Trump will be President for the whole of the coming parliamentary term. This campaign, surely the most wretchedly vacuous in our history, revealed no willingness by either side to think through the radically changed world Australia now confronts.

Trump is central. His actions have been prodigious, wide-ranging, dizzying in scope and speed. He floods the zone. He owns the moment. He dominates the narrative. It’s not just that Trump is the story. On any given day there are five or six competing Trump stories.

He never rests. One of The Atlantic Monthly reporters missed a call from Trump because it came through at 1.25am.

Then came another comical snap, US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump embrace after he was sworn in inside the Rotunda of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 20. Picture: AFP

The bromancer seemed to be in a state of udder confusion ...

He bravely pressed on ...

Let’s try to tally some key themes from the first 100 days.

Trump has solved the crisis on the US southern border. It’s not an open border any longer. Illegal border crossings are at nearly an all-time low. Trump said he would deport illegal immigrants. He won’t deport a million people in his first year but it will be hundreds of thousands.

Until a minute ago, the American people were giving Trump strong support on immigration. They’re still happy the border is closed. But some deportations seem so aggressive that people worry they’re needlessly cruel, that characteristically Trump overreached. Trump now actually has negative ratings on immigration.

People like that Trump has forced America’s European NATO allies to spend much more on their own defence, to shoulder more of the burden. There are elements of Trump’s first 100 days that are nasty, unnecessary, excessive, indefensible, a bit mad. It’s a tremendous mistake, however, analytically, politically, morally, to ignore those Trump positions that are right in principle and that generated huge support for him.

On the economy, Trump’s in some trouble. There’s no sense that voters regret avoiding Kamala Harris. Democrat congressional approval ratings are actually slightly lower than Republicans’ ratings. But people voted to get inflation down and the economy up. So far, that’s not happening.

Another distraction, There’s no sense that voters regret avoiding Kamala Harris. Picture: AP

No regrets, none at all, just freefalling in featherless flight ...

Time now to call Saul :

Trump’s truly bizarre performance on tariffs has had the opposite effect. Trump first imposed a general 10 per cent tariff on all imports, then on April 2, “Liberation Day”, so-called reciprocal tariffs, often of 30 or 40 per cent, on most nations, even some with which the US has trade surpluses. At first Trump said he would never change these tariffs. Then the bond markets approached crisis. US Treasury bonds are normally the safest of safe havens but bond rates were rising sharply. People wanted a premium to lend money to the US government. Yikes!
The bond markets beat Trump, just as they destroyed Liz Truss’s brief prime ministership in Britain. Trump understands bonds and he could see a developing financial system crisis. So he reversed course and announced a 90-day suspension of the reciprocal tariffs, except for China, where the tariffs are 145 per cent. Trump said he would negotiate trade deals during the 90-day suspension.
The tariff suspension calmed things down but the US has still sustained serious economic damage from the instability Trump’s actions have caused.
Not only did the economy shrink unexpectedly in the first quarter, the S&P 500 has fallen more than 7 per cent since Trump’s inauguration, the biggest drop in a president’s first 100 days since Richard Nixon’s second term. Surveys report consumers and businesses now have an expectation of high inflation. That changes the way they behave.
The International Monetary Fund has substantially cut its forecast for global and US economic growth, while forecasting increased inflation.
Economist Saul Eslake produced a paper drawing together quantitative estimates of the effects of Trump’s tariffs. If implemented, these would cut US GDP by about 1 per cent, raise its average tariff to more than 22 per cent and increase prices in the US by nearly 2.5 per cent, costing every American household nearly $US4000 ($6266).

Splendid stuff, and a snap of the numbers man, Economist Saul Eslake. Picture: Chris Kidd

The bromancer slumped, if not into a deep depression, then certainly a recession, except maybe not, because it's important to give an authoritarian regime a break...

Don't worry about legal niceties, it's the money ...

All this has badly hurt Trump’s political standing. The RealClearPolitics poll average gives him a 45 per cent approval rating. That may not seem too bad but it’s the lowest ever recorded at this stage of a new presidency, some 20 points lower than Barack Obama or George W. Bush at the same point in their presidencies, and lower than Trump recorded at this point in his first presidency.

Voters wanted Trump to restore the economy and get rid of inflation. But the administration, deeply divided internally, has become nearly incoherent.

The objectives Trump has for tariffs are contradictory. If tariffs are designed to produce revenue they have to be high enough to collect substantial money but low enough that the imports still sell. If the objective, alternatively, is to erect a protective wall so factories open up in the US, then the tariffs need to be high and sustained, but by definition won’t generate revenue. If the objective is to get trade partners to remove all their trade barriers so there’s a level playing field, tariffs ultimately go to zero, don’t generate revenue and may or may not result in building domestic industry.

The three objectives can’t work simultaneously. Trump speaks as though his tariffs will yield all three outcomes.

Eslake points out that it takes years to build new factories. If you were an investor in Vietnam, say, you have no idea whether you will pay a tariff of 10 per cent, or 47 per cent, or some other figure, for products going to America.

This kind of uncertainty kills capitalism’s animal spirits. That syndrome contributed hugely to the Depression of the 1930s.

Neither Beijing nor Washington has blinked and trade between the world’s biggest two economies is set to come to a grinding halt. Eslake thinks a recession in the US quite likely and a big slowdown, possibly even a recession, by no means unlikely in China. If there were a recession in the US and a huge slowdown in China, Australia would be virtually certain to go into recession. All the pretty promises and fantasy policies of our election would turn to dust.

It’s equally possible this won’t happen. Trump has deep prejudices, in favour of tariffs, nationalism, fossil fuels, but no real policy commitments. When a policy hurts him personally he tends to declare victory and reverse direction at full speed.

American voters, and the world generally, want Trump to settle down. It’s not in his nature to settle down, but he might do it if necessary. Kimberley Strassel argues in The Wall Street Journal that Trump’s successes in his first term came not from MAGA nuttiness but from implementing orthodox, Reaganite, Republican policies – tax cuts, business deregulation, supply-side reform in energy leading to US energy independence. Trump would have won re-election in 2020 had it not been for Covid.

Trump’s Republicans face mid-term congressional elections in November next year. Their cigarette-paper thin majority in the House of Representatives will almost certainly go. This century the president’s party has lost seats in every mid-term congressional election except the Republicans in 2002, after the 9/11 terror attacks. A House of Reps controlled by the Democrats could impeach Trump again. Trump won’t want to be harassed by the government after he leaves office, which gives him a strong incentive to get a Republican successor, presumably Vance, elected president in 2028.

The bromancer was clearly struggling, and turned to a snap of a faithful ally,  a man who could spot a Hitler and want to work with him, US Vice-President JD Vance attacks European allies on culture war issues at the Munich Security Conference. Picture: AFP

What a fashion inspiration ...

Back to the struggling bromancer ...

The Republicans will probably hold on to the Senate next year, but if they lose the Senate it could withdraw the “emergency” power under which Trump unilaterally sets tariffs. Geo-strategically, Trump has talked some fantastic nonsense, suggesting he might invade Greenland, that Canada has no future unless it becomes the 51st state of the US and that he could transform the Gaza Strip into the Riviera. It’s impossible to know whether he believes these things, partly believes them or is just generating headlines.

Sacking national security adviser Mike Waltz conveys instability and disunity. But Trump also does outright damaging things like betraying Ukraine.

Infamously, Trump and Vance humiliated Ukraine’s President, Volodymr Zelensky, in public at the White House, allegedly because Zelensky didn’t say thank you enough to Trump. Trump withdrew all support from Ukraine, including satellite information to enable it to target its weapons at Russia.

Another snap quickly interrupted, US President Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky meet in the Oval Office of the White House in February. Picture: AFP

Did the bromancer just mention the elbows up mob?

It turned out that the bromancer was ready to sell Ukraine down the line to a sociopathic dictator in much the same way as King Donald ...

This support was restored a couple of weeks later, but combined with Trump saying he probably wouldn’t go to the defence of America’s NATO allies if they were attacked, the episode cast grave doubt on the stability of the US alliance system.

Trump proposed a peace deal highly favourable to Russia, then this week changed his position, saying perhaps Putin is not interested in peace but had just been stringing Trump along. The peace agreement Trump proposes is unfair but something very much like it is the best Ukraine can get.

Trump’s threat that he might just walk away from the conflict is confusing. If walking away means no more US support for Ukraine, that just hands victory to Putin.

Then came an AV distraction, featuring the bromancer himself, The Australian’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan says Donald Trump has had a “shocking month” ever since his disagreement with Ukraine’s President.

Uh huh ...

Then came a final bromancer flourish ...

Several themes emerge from Trump’s first 100 days. Trump is extremely capricious and erratic even as he generally follows his prejudices for protectionism and nationalism. Though Trump’s approval ratings are now historically low he has been wrongly written off many times before.

Nothing is certain for the next three years. Trump could settle the tariff troubles, get Europe to pay for most of Ukraine’s resistance, rev up the economy and yet make a comeback.

Trump demonstrates over and over his extreme susceptibility to flattery. Analysts keep looking for the hidden key to the Trump-Putin relationship. It may be no more than that Putin, recognising Trump’s personality, flatters him relentlessly and extravagantly. Sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.

Nonetheless, the alliance system is seriously damaged. Jared Mondschein, director of research at the US Studies Centre, tells me he cannot work out what the Trump vision for the future US alliance system actually looks like, or if the administration even has a coherent vision.

John Kunkel, former chief of staff to then prime minister Scott Morrison, tells Inquirer it must now be extremely difficult for the US to lead an alliance of the West, meaning Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, The Philippines, Australia and a few others, in strategic and commercial competition with China.

Mike Green from the US Studies Centre emphasises how often and how strongly the US has bounced back from incoherent or damaging moments in the past. Vietnam and Watergate looked to have left America crippled in the mid-1970s. A minute later Ronald Reagan was president and America won the Cold War.

Trumpism is unlikely to survive Trump’s departure from politics. When Trump runs for office he typically performs better than polls predict. But when he gets Trumpian candidates on the ballot, they typically bomb, doing much worse than conventional Republicans.

Albanese and Peter Dutton, though unimpressive during this campaign, have been sensibly low-key in their reactions to Trump. Australia needs to keep the structure of the US alliance intact. If Albanese finds himself in minority government dependent on left-wing teals or Greens he may be tempted to follow Mark Carney’s example in Canada and seek political advantage by publicly confronting Trump.

Australia must defend its interests and stick with its values, but any avoidable controversy with Trump would be madness, for there are few countries more completely dependent on the US for their security than Australia.

We must respect reality, Trump or no Trump.

Might the pond suggest a good way to start? 

Refuse to buy the products of an American owned company, which via affiliate Faux Noise, did much to help introduce this karnival of khaotic klowns to the world ... only then might an alternative reality be possible.

Second thoughts, maybe the bromancer and the rest of the reptiles should stick around. They and their culture wars and their blather about nuking the country, and the diligent work of Faux Noise promoting the pumpkin-coloured narcissistic fascist just exploded big time...

And so to celebrate these epic pumpkin days with a 'toon...

And so the pond's current indulgence,  a few more snaps from the pond's slideshow night featuring the pond's recent travels ...

After leaving Barraba, the pond fanged up, and across, to Bundarra, a decidedly horsey town ...

Like other country towns on the way it was full of life, centred around the pub ... though really all the pond remembers is that the toilet block, seen below in the distance on the right, was surprisingly well tended, way better than lost memories of a bank ...

The pond took the back road to Armidale, fully dirt and not apparently changed since the pond drove down it decades ago, and ended up on Thunderbolt's Way, before arriving at the old UNE alma mater ...

It being a holyday weekend, the only signs of life were old farts and fartesses like the pond wandering around looking at all the changes and admiring the uncredited artwork ...

The ostentatious chess set was new, at the new library entrance, though the pond discovered its old habitat - old wooden arts portables - still lurking down the hill, behind all the new buildings (not worth a snap, conjure up any cream coloured wooden building)...

The uni had long ago given up communicating with the pond via begging letters, and had in the interim, hit on a new scam. 

For a few humble shekels, graduates could buy themselves a brick paver and put their name and date of graduation on it ... and have it cemented into the walkways ...

The pond happily trod all over the pavers on the way to take a nostalgic gander at the White legacy ...

Enough of all that, you'd need more than a few of those pavers - see them all in a row on either side - to build that mansion ...