Starring the Lynch mob in a full blown dose of late arvo Trumphalism ...

 

How could the pond ignore a full blown case of Trumphalism from the Lynch mob?

Sure, it could only be by way of a late arvo post, thereby ensuring almost nobody saw it, but perhaps for the tattered, battered reputation of the University of Melbourne that's a good thing ...

The header: Trump 2.0 at six months: a revolution in 10 acts, If Donald Trump maintains a fraction of the pace of his presidency so far, the remaining 42 months are likely to be transformative of American power and politics. Here are 10 reasons the Trump revolution may succeed.

There was no credit for that incredibly awful gif (above reduced to a snap) which saw Donald Trump doing a demented imitation of Charlie Chaplin doing an imitation of a demented Adolf Hitler whirling the globe, which was perhaps just as well, because if that's the best the reptiles' AI can do, then the long absent lord help their graphics department.

Talk about a travesty ...

There was however, the bog standard mystical advice: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

The reason for the Chaplin imitation? 

The bizarre notion that King Donald might bring the US, and perhaps the world back into balance.

Yep, the Lynch mob fancies himself as a scholar, which says a lot about the University of Melbourne and his seemingly infinite capacity for delusion:

The first six months of Trump 2.0 have been a rollercoaster. If it continues, and I think it may, the Trump revolution could actually help bring the US (perhaps the world) back into balance.
Academic prophecy, of course, should be read sceptically. One of the problems scholars have when confronting Donald Trump’s prospects is the absence of a historical template. We have seen the past six months only once before – March to September 1893 – when Grover Cleveland returned to the White House four years after he left it.
The rule that all second terms end in failure could come to apply to Trump. No US president, beginning with Richard Nixon, has enjoyed a better second term than his first. But, for lots of reasons, this is an exceptional second term.
If Trump maintains a fraction of the pace of the first six months, the remaining 42 are likely to be transformative of American power and politics. Here are 10 reasons, drawn from the past six months, the Trump revolution may succeed.

Oh it's an exceptional term alright ...

 

Oh hush, don't startle the Lynch mob, he's all in on the Cantaloupe Clown ...

1. He has a mandate
In winning more than 77 million votes, Trump has a mandate for change that no Republican president has enjoyed for a generation. He is the first leader of his party to win a plurality of the vote (49.8 per cent) since George W. Bush in 2004. The taint of illegitimacy does not hang over his second term as it did the first – when he lost the popular vote.

Cue an adoring snap that shows no signs of physical decay, though there's plenty to note, Donald Trump has a mandate for change that no Republican president has enjoyed for a generation. Picture: Alex Brandon / AP

Let's assume he actually manages to serve a full term so the Lynch mob can celebrate ...

This is a good thing.
It enables presidential government, something the US lacked under Joe Biden. Trump’s mandate also obliges the Democrats to defeat him on the battlefield of ideas, where they should be facing him, rather than in a courtroom, where they evidently could not. Trump’s mandate can’t be unwound by lawfare. The Democrats must come up with more sellable ideas. Identity politics is not that sellable idea (see below). This, too, is a good thing.

It's not just a good thing, it's a great thing when it comes to viruses: How Robert F. Kennedy Jr is cancelling medical science.

Do go on ...

2. His coalition holds – just
Despite the best efforts of a live Elon Musk and a dead Jeffrey Epstein, Trump leads a large coalition of political forces. Never-Trumpers and Trump nose-holders in the Republican Party, who had some sway during the first Trump term, have been relegated to podcasts and substacks. The factionalism of Trump 1.0 hasn’t reoccurred.

Spare a thought for MechaHitler, Trump leads a large coalition of political forces, despite Elon Musk’s best efforts. Picture: Evan Vucci / AP

Rather, populists, Christian nationalists, libertarians and neo-conservatives have formed an America First alliance. A political scientist might call this clever cooptation by Trump. He has managed to blend the competing factions of the American right into a sometimes tense but so far successful foreign policy. The maintenance of this alliance – a team of rivals – should be Trump’s No.1 priority. His revolution at home and especially abroad is built on it.

Indeed, never mind the quality, feel the width ...

3. What did Americans have to lose?
The past six months suggests, without being conclusive, that experts and technocrats, and the department of governments filled by them, did not provide any more reliable and effective administration than Trump’s populist team so far has. On September 11, 2001, the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering machine in world history failed to pre-empt the crude attacks on that day. The best and brightest foreign policy boffins, with only a few exceptions, then engineered losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The economic experts at the US Treasury and Ivy League universities turned out to be ignorant of the gathering global financial crisis of 2008-09.
Experts obliged government overreach during Covid. Their subsequent mendacity over its origins further ruined trust in them. Trump, so far, has committed no equivalent sin. The discrediting of the old regime is legitimising of Trump’s new one.

Spot on, for starters they have a tremendous chance to work the fields ...

Keep that Trumphalism coming ...

4. Identity politics is in retreat
Trump has waged a masterful culture war since returning to power. His opponents have not. One of the most effective campaign ads in US history – “Kamala Harris is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you” – was parlayed into one of the most energising executive orders of the 170(!) he has so far passed this year. Biden signed only 70 in his whole first year.

Ah, the old Biden brain worm, Joe Biden signed only 70 executive orders in his whole first year as president. Picture: Ben Curtis / AP

How happy the Lynch mob is in his MAGA dotage ...

EO 14168, on the day of his inauguration, declared: “It is the policy of the United States to recognise two sexes, male and female.” Democrats will struggle to replicate this simplicity in any executive order revoking it. The next Democratic presidency seems a long way off.
To compound progressive woes, Trump has waged a frontal assault on diversity, equity and inclusion – in government and on campuses. He has done so armed with as large a mandate from voters of colour as any Republican since 1960. His revolution is building a multiracial conservatism. This will be good for American politics. It is a realignment long overdue.

Yes, bigotry leads the way ...

And there's a court to hand to keep order ...

5. The Supreme Court is his (for now)
If the profusion of executive orders does not convince you of the permanence of Trump’s revolution, how about the US Supreme Court? It has been this institution, more than congress and the White House, that has been responsible for the nation’s social transformations. Dred Scott v Sandford (1857) gave us the civil war. Roe v Wade (1973) gave us a culture war. It was the Supreme Court, in Brown v Board (1954), not congress, that began the racial desegregation of American society. It was the court, in Dobbs v Jackson (2022), that handed regulation of abortion back to the states.
The current court, to all intents and purposes, is Trump’s. It is not his creature. It has defied him since he returned to office. But its majority is the most pro-presidential power in US history and this is key to Trump’s strategy (as his rule by executive order illustrates) and could well prove the most consequential in his revolution.
The greatest transformations of US politics were won by two Democrat presidents. Franklin Roosevelt made his New Deal and Lyndon Johnson his Great Society using a compliant Supreme Court. Trump, without being a student of history, is trying to emulate them.

And better still, he's so decisive ...

And King Donald is blessed by ring kissers, knee benders, lickspittle fellow travellers, and academics capable of astonishing mental gymnastics ...

6. Trump is blessed by poor opponents
Democrats need the Supreme Court back on their side. Instead, liberals are in the minority on it and are among some of the least capable jurists of recent vintage. Biden’s appointment, on gender and race grounds, of Ketanji Brown Jackson was derided as a diversity hire. She has been loquacious on the bench but her doctrine of judicial supremacy, as an alternative to presidential supremacy, is proving ineffective and hypocritical.

Cue that "diversity hire",  Ketanji Brown Jackson. Picture: Getty Images

Progressives don’t need judicial heroes on the Supreme Court. They do need candidatures that can win elections. Trump continues to be blessed by poor opponents. New York Democrats’ latest experiment in so-called left-wing populism proves the point. Zohran Mamdani’s recycled socialism, rent controls and modish Israelophobia will appeal to progressives in Queens. They are political death nationally.
All significant leaders change the nature of their opponents. We are seeing intimations of this in the Democratic Party. Woke elites snigger when Trump is compared to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But these great presidents redefined who their opponents were and what they believed. If Democrats want power back, they will have to let Trump change them. On the evidence of the past six months, that will be a slow but inevitable process.

It's all good, what a succulent feast for a prof ...

That sight should please David Brooks.

Now to borrow a line from Chairman Mao ...

7. America’s foes are paper tigers
The strength and unity of America’s foreign opposition continues to be over-egged. Russia did not need Trump to prove how inept its military-industrial complex, increasingly reliant on the coerced blood sacrifice of its young men, had become; brave Ukrainian resistance did that. (Trump should fund more of it.)
Ditto Iran. Trump chose to pre-empt the theocracy’s nuclear ambitions. Barack Obama and Biden coddled and appeased. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked. The feared reprisals to Operation Midnight Hammer have yet to materialise. The Iranian regime, it turns out, was much weaker than it appeared.
The Chinese economy is under strain. According to Reuters, “Ferocious competition for a slice of external demand, hit by global trade tensions, is crimping industrial profits, fuelling factory-gate deflation even as export volumes climb. Workers bear the brunt of companies cutting costs.”
Beijing can weather Trump’s tariffs. But it has no interest in losing the largest market for its factories: the US. In the age of Trump, the Chinese Communist Party has increased its military spending but not its moral authority. Our region wants US power, hard and soft, in it.
Canberra is desperate not for an alternative bloc to join but for a restoration of Australia-US mateship. The BRICS are the balancing coalition against Trump’s USA? Give me a break.

Yes, it's onward and upwards with the mighty US education system ...

The prof loves himself some of the poorly educated ...

8. Its friends are responding to Trump’s tough love

The EU and NATO have all but acknowledged that Trump was right to call time on their welfare dependence. For years the EU has relied on an American defence umbrella to enable its lavish welfare states. A defence welfare state, in effect, funded by the US, allowed European governments to fund mass immigration and net-zero ambitions.
Just as Trump has changed the nature of his opponents, so too has he forced on his friends a re-evaluation. None of the avowedly internationalist US presidents managed to pull this off. Bill Clinton, Obama, Biden: none got the EU and NATO to take their static defence spending seriously. Trump has.
Every NATO member (except Spain) has agreed to increase defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP. Anthony Albanese will be able to resist a pressure to which most of Europe has succumbed for only so long.

Indeed, indeed ...

9. There is an enduring market for US power
The response of US allies to Trump 2.0 shows there is an enduring market for US power. In 2003, many of its friends demanded the US “leave dictators in peace. No war for oil. Democracy promotion doesn’t work.” Today, what puts the fear of God into America’s allies is the withdrawal of the US from global responsibilities. They are terrified that if the US does not come to the aid of democracies, from Ukraine to Israel to Taiwan, no other liberal government is equipped to do so.

The reptiles decided to take a break from all the Trumphalism, How do we contain Vladimir Putin? American power. Picture: AP

There was an easy answer, scare him with cuts ...

No trouble for the unfazed prof ...

Despite the collapse in trust in federal institutions among US voters (see No.3 above), belief in and need for US global activism among liberal democracies have never been higher. How do we contain Vladimir Putin? American power. How do we end the war in Gaza? American power. How do we lock China into a rules-based global order? American power.
Trump’s show of strength in Iran likely will win more allies to his cause. We can speculate that this success – and, so far, it is – will encourage America’s friends into greater confidence and boldness. Victory is a powerful pole of attraction and inspires emulation.

Oh the pond feels incredibly bold and confident, enormously attracted and inspired to emulation...

And so to a final celebration, and the pond regrets that the prof, and so the pond, didn't get around to celebrate the shredding of the world through the slicing up of climate science ...

10. And power in the US market
Consider that six months in, despite the chaos of tariffs, the Trump economy is doing well. Unemployment is 4.1 per cent, low in historical terms. Job openings are growing. Inflation has dropped from 3 per cent to 2.7 per cent since January. The Nasdaq closed at its highest this week. My super took a hit back in April but looks better now. How is yours? Are you optimistic? Economic optimism is a strong foundational layer to the Trump revolution.
Trump almost certainly will fail to reshore America’s industrial base. Those jobs don’t exist or, if they did, would lack the workers willing to fill them. His tariffs are a negotiating ploy, tools of power politics and diplomacy. They cannot plausibly rebuild a generation lost to opioid addiction and suicide.
But what revolutionary meets all his goals? What he loses in his economic excesses he could well recoup in culture war victories. Trump’s appeal with his MAGA base is not that he will make them rich but that he will restore their cultural standing. The revolution, of course, may stall because its runs out of emergencies. The pace of presidential governance since January (even without the simulacrum Biden presidency to compare it to) has been breakneck, with war and theatre aplenty. And don’t all second terms implode?
Indeed. And this one may well, too. Just not yet.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

Just not yet? So the emeritus Chairman is going down?

Now that's a jolly good way to make the pond shed a crocodile tear ...because one way or another, a croc is going to bite someone on the bum ...

Oh to be such a happy prof, always tarnishing the reputation of the University of Melbourne ...

Per the WSJ, take it away Cantaloupe Clown, Trump Sues Wall Street Journal Publisher Dow Jones Over Jeffrey Epstein Article, Defamation lawsuit was filed in a Florida federal court (archive link)

As an added bonus, the prof's euphoric, almost uxorious, piece allowed the pond to clear a few cartoon decks...