In which there's the usual prattling Polonius, and Joe, lesser member of the Kelly gang, and a bonus of garrulous Gemma

 

The pond would like to begin this Sunday meditation by way of a detour, though it's eventually relevant to the Polonial matter at hand.

Back on Thursday, the savvy Savva did a beat up ...

Bending the knee: Why Andrew Hastie is on the brink of abandoning the Liberal Party  (*intermittent archive link) The Coalition has been crushingly ineffectual. They need Hastie now more than ever 

...Angus Taylor’s leadership hangs by a thread. Without dramatic changes, including a concerted corporate effort to cut down One Nation, he invites rebellion or defections or both.
Taylor’s obvious replacement, Andrew Hastie, a conservative who can be both cerebral and cut-through, has pledged to destroy Hanson before she destroys him. Hastie’s rationale is that Liberals have to fight on all fronts. If they can’t convince voters they can stand up to Hanson, they will never convince them they can stand up to Labor.
Despicable threats to Hastie’s family incited by his opposition to One Nation and his appearance in court against accused war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith have understandably had a profound impact on Hastie’s thinking and approach.
Those two issues have won him admirers outside the Liberal Party, however they have undoubtedly cost him support internally, to the point where if he feels abandoned by the Liberal Party in this fight to the death, he will abandon the Liberal Party.
The departure of Senator Jonno Duniam for family reasons was bad enough; the departure of Hastie would be devastating.

That was immediately followed by a hasty, somewhat pastie, refutation ...

Hastie rules out leaving Liberal Party, says he’ll contest next election (*intermittent archive link)

Inter alia ...

...Andrew Hastie has vowed to recontest the next election as a Liberal, denying he was reconsidering his future amid competing views within the party about how best to tackle the surge of One Nation and despite being forced to ramp up personal security.
Political commentator Niki Savva suggested on Thursday that Hastie could leave the party if he felt abandoned in his fight with One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and her supporters.
Hastie said on Thursday that was “not at all” on the cards. “I intend to contest the next election as a Liberal,” he said.
...Hastie last week told his colleagues he would rather be “taken out in a box than bend the knee to One Nation”, while Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has avoided taking on the minor party so directly.
Hastie said he was “more than happy with the support that I’ve received, and a happy member of the Liberal Party”.

What did it suggest?

That the Liberal party continues to decline under the beefy boofhead, that all sorts of speculation is the go, and that the leadership isn't settled, and that there might be a need to bring the lettuce out of retirement.

What to do? as John Oliver often asks. 

Easy, bring out Polonius to sort it out by boring everyone into submission...

The header: Taylor-made recovery? Focus on economy the ‘slow boring’ path ahead for Libs; Angus Taylor and Matt Canavan are well suited to tackle the Albanese government’s economic performance and One Nation’s inability to produce a coherent economic policy.

The caption for an uncredited work of art featuring the beefy boofhead in what must have seemed to the reptiles as a flattering pose: Angus Taylor’s economic policy agenda will make or break Liberals.

Well suited? In Polonius's alternative bizarro world they are ...

Michael Costa, the former NSW Labor Party minister, gave good advice to Liberal leader Angus Taylor in particular and the Coalition in general on Sky News this week. Namely, all that the likes of Taylor and Nationals leader Matt Canavan can do over the next year or so is to work hard while focusing on the economy.
Taylor and Canavan are well suited to doing so. They are diligent doers and highly qualified in economics. After all, the key issue in the lead-up to the next election is likely to be the cost of living – including inflation, interest rates, energy prices and home affordability.
The leaders are well equipped to tackle the Albanese Labor government’s economic performance and the inability (so far, at least) of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party to produce a coherent economic policy.
The task of the Opposition Leader is one of the toughest in politics. Taylor came to lead the Liberals not long after the tragedy of the Bondi Beach massacre on December 14 last year aimed at the Australian Jewish community and killing and injuring some others as well. Support for One Nation surged between the beginning of December last year and the beginning of February this year.
Then Sussan Ley, who was deposed as Liberal leader on February 12, decided to quit politics immediately. Her disappointment at losing the leadership is understandable. But Ley owed her success in politics, including ministerial appointments, to the Liberal Party – for which she did not campaign in the resultant Farrer by-election.

Bloody fickle women, they're all the same ... and it's all her fault this rowdy mob turned up to party, Pauline Hanson, Malcolm Roberts, Barnaby Joyce and David Farley celebrate the Farrer win with One Nation supporters in Albury. Picture: NewsWire / Simon Dallinger

Polonius then indulged in some tedious regurgitation in a way only Polonius and Mr Pooter can do ...

Hanson grasped the opportunity and One Nation won its first House of Representatives seat with a two-candidate-preferred vote of 57.6 per cent. After which One Nation increased its support in Newspoll.
Without question, One Nation will achieve better results in the next federal election than it did in 2025 when its primary vote was 6.4 per cent. The task of the Coalition is to get its primary vote (currently at 17 per cent in News­poll) above that of One Nation (29 per cent) and/or Labor (33 per cent). A difficult task to be sure. But not impossible.
According to a Liberal Party spokesperson, at the partyroom meeting in Canberra last Wednesday Taylor said: “There is no silver bullet but we just need to be focused on one thing: the interest of the country and the Australian people.”
Later, Canavan was reported as saying there had been too much talking about polling and parties within the non-Labor and Greens side of politics. Quite so.
The Nationals have a good sense of their own history. The same cannot be said of some Liberals. Early this week, Melissa McIntosh, an opposition frontbencher and the Liberal MP for Lindsay in western Sydney, suggested the Liberal Party should change its name. This overlooks one central fact. The Liberal Party is essentially a federation, not a centralised organisation like Labor.
There is a Liberal government in Tasmania (albeit of the minority kind). Also the Liberal National Party government in Queensland is constitutionally part of the Liberal Party of Australia. What would happen to these entities if the Liberal Party changed its name? Moreover, creating a new national party is a huge task.
The Liberal Party was founded by Robert Menzies in Canberra (not Albury as some claim – that was the second meeting) in October 1944 out of the old United Australia Party (no relation to Clive Palmer’s party of the same name). Menzies brought together 19 political parties and like-minded non-party organisations.

Oh dear, the Liberal party site said it was 18 parties, but what would they know about their history? They're pretty clueless about most things. 

Trust Polonius, and stand by for a pair of visual distractions ... Andrew Hastie’s interview ‘sounded like a tract produced by the leftist Greens-adjacent Australia Institute’; Melissa McIntosh’s suggested the Liberal Party change. but the party is ‘essentially a federation, not a centralised organisation like Labor’. Pictures: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

And so to Polonius dealing with the pasty Hastie, and that Savva matter ...

Even so, the Menzies-led Liberal Party lost the 1946 election to Labor in a comprehensive defeat. Menzies contemplated retiring from politics but stayed on. He won in December 1949 after Labor, led by Ben Chifley, unsuccessfully attempted to nationalise private trading banks.
There are some commentators who see Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie, the MP for Canning in Western Australia, as a future Liberal leader. This may be the case; he has a strong personality and is a good communicator. But so far Hastie has not demonstrated competence in economics, a requisite for prevailing over both Labor and One Nation.
Interviewed on ABC TV’s Insiders program in March, Hastie declared: “I think multinationals and big business in this country have lost their social licence.” He also supported changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing, and declared himself open to a windfall profits tax on gas exports.
It sounded like a tract produced by the leftist Greens-adjacent Australia Institute, and not far from the anti-business attitude that can be found among some One Nation supporters.
Hastie, who served in Afghanistan, is close to former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull – who has been a constant critic of the party since he was replaced by Scott Morrison as prime minister. Hastie is a fierce opponent of One Nation, which is campaigning against him primarily because he gave evidence against Victoria Cross winner Ben Roberts-Smith in a defamation case.
Hanson is a strong supporter of Roberts-Smith, as is Coalition frontbencher and fellow Afghanistan veteran Phillip Thompson. In April, election analyst John Black wrote that in the current polls “the low-income outer urban seat of Canning would be one of the first lost to One Nation”.
Obviously, it is in Hastie’s interest to bring about a situation whereby the Coalition vote is as strong as possible. In an election, Labor would probably preference Hastie over One Nation – but this would work for him only if Labor came third behind One Nation and the Liberals in Canning.
Writing in Nine newspapers on Thursday, Niki Savva – a vehement critic of the contemporary Liberal Party and a fan of Turnbull – suggested if Hastie “feels abandoned by the Liberal Party in this fight to the death” against One Nation “he will abandon them”.
The Liberal Party would want Hastie to win Canning. The only point at issue turns on whether this is best achieved by the Liberal Party attacking Hanson or by producing a significantly better economic policy than that of One Nation and Labor.
As German sociologist Max Weber once remarked, successful democratic politics is akin to slow boring through hard boards. That’s the immediate task for Taylor, Canavan and the Coalition team.

Splendid Polonial stuff, and worthy of a 'toon ...

And so to Joe, lesser member of the Kelly gang ...

The header: On its 250th birthday, focus on America questions whether it needed the Trumpian revolution – or a more careful recalibration Can the American experiment survive the consequences of Donald Trump’s pursuit of his promised ‘golden age’?

The caption for a frankly terrible collage, and credit where credit is due ...Donald Trump taps real grievances to convince Americans the system is broken. His appeal was powerful enough to return him to the White House in 2024, even after he refused to accept his 2020 defeat and roused supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Artwork: Frank Ling

The reptiles seem to be grooming Joe, lesser member of the Kelly gang, as a substitute for the bromancer and "Ned", and so they allowed him an interminable 12 minute read, as ponderous and as stultifying as anything "Ned" might offer ...

The pond allowed it because the chances of being around for the 300th birthday party seemed remote...

In the outing, Joe showed that he could both siderist mad King Donald in a way that the both siderist NY Times might envy ...

America is a nation in turmoil and the world – and Americans – know it. The great American experiment in self-government, born 250 years ago when the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, has reached one of its most dangerous moments.
Critics of Donald Trump point to the US President and his MAGA revolution as the central problem, but this is a one-dimensional picture. Trump sees himself not as the destroyer of the American experiment but as its saviour – a historic figure reviving a republic he believed was already failing.

How the reptiles love cheap archive visual distractions... Declaration of Independence, painting by John Trumbull. The optimistic vision of the United States’ founding fathers is colliding with a darker belief on both sides of politics that the American experiment is fraying Picture: Universal History Archive

Knowing this was going to be a long haul, the reptiles provided plenty of snaps and AV distractions ...

America finds itself at a crossroads over its identity and founding mission. Trump correctly has identified many of the problems the nation faces – which explains why he was elected twice, in 2016 and 2024 – but he has proposed radical and damaging solutions to these problems that have undermined America’s reputation as the standard bearer for global democracy and freedom.
A quarter of a millennium after the 13 Atlantic coast colonies’ rupture with Britain, Trump proposes an alternative interpretation of where the nation’s founding values should lead the American experiment – into a new revolution that threatens to reshape the US economy, foreign policy and society.

Cue an AV distraction for the hive mind ... Sky News contributor Kosha Gada believes there is a “dark cloud” over America’s 250th birthday, but the “best days can still be ahead". “It is, I believe, the most exceptional country in modern history,” Ms Gada told Sky News Senior Reporter Caroline Marcus. “Hopefully it will be a good moment for the country to come together despite the country being very divided."

Still no Sky Noise rebrand?

Joe had some kind words for mad King Donald ...

For years Trump has warned the American experiment is broken. He said the old orthodoxies no longer worked, out-of-touch elites had betrayed ordinary Americans and the nation needed to adapt to a changing world – themes culminating in his bleak 2017 inaugural vision of “American carnage”.
Trump’s appeal has been his ability to tap real grievances to convince Americans the system is broken; that ordinary people in the heartland were losers of a liberal international order that prioritised free trade over national indus­try, open borders over sovereignty, foreign wars over domestic security and politicians who had forgotten the people who elected them.
It was a vision forged in pessimism but promised a better future. And it proved powerful enough to return Trump to the White House in 2024, even after he refused to accept his 2020 defeat by Democrat Joe Biden and roused supporters who, believing the election had been stolen, stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to prevent certification of the result – a low point in US history.

Oh it was a powerful vision alright ...

Sorry, bit early for a 'toon, especially as the reptiles preferred the mad King himself ... Revealing the depth of his paranoia about free trade, Donald Trump cast America as the victim of the trade system. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP

Stand clear former Olympians, as Joe finally got on to the matter of a darker consensus forming, and what better way than turning to the head of the America250 committee, made completely irrelevant, redundant and out of funds by the mad King and his Freedom 250 cronies and minions ...and didn't they perform miracles.

Uh oh ...that danged climate change again ...just choose your poison, heat stroke or hail ...

Dang it, the weather's not going to get in the way of mad King Donald, or Joe ...

Now, as the US and the world celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial, the optimistic vision of the founding fathers is colliding with a darker consensus: a belief on both sides of politics that the American experiment is fraying, its institutions are not working as they should and the nation must change in radical ways if it is to repair itself.
Rosie Rios, chairwoman of America250 – the congressionally approved bipartisan body charged with co-ordinating semiquincentennial commemorations – tells Inquirer she wants the anniversary to “renew our belief in the possibilities ahead”.
Rios hopes it will be a moment for the nation to “educate, engage and unite” while assessing how Americans’ own experiences and contributions “connect to the broader American story, one that includes many perspectives, experiences and contributions”.
Echoing Thomas Jefferson’s belief that every generation needs to make the Declaration of Independence’s ideals its own – applying them to the challenges of their times – Rios says America’s story has always been one of “continuous reinvention anchored by enduring values”.
“The semiquincentennial is not simply about looking back at 250 years of history. It is about helping shape the next chapter of the American story,” she says.
This is precisely what Trump is doing. Yet the US President – who has portrayed himself as the modern-day inheritor and defender of Jefferson’s historical legacy – has not been successful in unifying the country around his bold vision.
Instead, Trump is leaning into the partisan divide as he moves to dismantle the status quo and recast American power in pursuit of his promised “golden age”, while Democrats rage at the direction his revolution is taking the country – a cycle pushing politics to the extremes. Trump’s strategy has been to leverage division to energise his own base and amplify the scale, personal nature and intensity of the political contest, all while communicating directly to Americans in a constant stream of messages on social media.

And such strong messages ...

Sorry, this was the official reptile AV interruption, celebrating astonishing corruption. 

Remember the fuss about slick Willie's blow job? Hold mad King Donald's beer  ... 

US President Donald Trump's earnings for last year have been unveiled, which include some surprising investments. The nearly 1,000-page financial disclosure report shows that Mr Trump earned more than $1 billion from cryptocurrency trading. The President also made almost $2 million from merchandise sales, including his coffee table book, Save America. Mr Trump continues to receive healthy royalties from appearances in Hollywood films, including the 1992 hit Home Alone 2.

Joe turned to something of a litany of follies ...

He has done so while greatly enhancing his personal wealth; his 2025 financial disclosure shows he has raked in about $US2.2bn ($3.2bn), including $US1.4bn from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses. Even as ethical questions mounted this week, Trump took his first flight aboard the new Air Force One – a retrofitted Boeing 747, a gift from the Qatari royal family – and praised it as “maybe the greatest commercial plane ever built”.
Already, Trump has shifted Washington’s historic mission in world affairs away from curating the liberal international order and towards the promotion of an alternative vision that upholds national culture, sovereignty and character against globalist forces.
In an astonishing speech at the UN in September last year, Trump said he would always “defend our national sovereignty” as he railed against globalist climate and migration agendas, branding climate change as the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”.
The US has returned to a modern version of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine as the foundation of its foreign policy, seeking to dominate its own hemisphere through coercion and gunboat diplomacy, while Trump has revived the notion of territorial expansion through his verbal attacks on Canada and Greenland.
On the first day of his second term, Trump gave blanket pardons to 1500 January 6 defendants – including those who attacked police – in a move that went further than even his closest aides expected.

Up came a snap of a loyalist ... Proud Boys leader Henry 'Enrique' Tarrio was among those prisoners pardoned by Trump. Picture: AFP

Haven't we moved past all that ugliness to much better judicial times?

Joe carried on ...

His former adviser Steve Bannon hailed the move as evidence that “you’re getting pure Trump now”, with the President defending the Capitol rioters as patriots who had been unfairly prosecuted.
Trump swiftly set about up-ending the global trading system through tariffs found unlawful by the courts and that strained relations with friends and foes alike, instilling grave doubts over Washington’s reliability as an ally.
NATO has been gravely undermined and the 2025 National Security Strategy warned Europe faced the “stark prospect of civilisational erasure” through its embrace of transnationalism and lax migration policies. The document’s defining statement declared “the days of the US propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over”.
Yet emboldened by the successful military extraction of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro from Caracas in January this year, Trump plunged the US into a war with Iran – igniting one of the biggest energy shocks in history.
He has continued to reshape the Republican Party in his own image, sought to bend congress to his will and embarked on a radical experiment to expand the frontiers of executive power, testing whether the judiciary will defy him.

And there was that sublimely successful war, with Pete Kegsbreath and Captain Bonespurs leading the way ...President Trump has discussed resuming full-scale war with Iran, but is opting to stay the course with diplomacy for now.

The pond will concede that Joe has learned a trick or two from "Ned", not least the art of turning to others to provide thoughts and ideas to fill up the word salad bowl ...

Critics have warned the constitutional system of checks and balances is collapsing, pointing to Trump’s tariffs, domestic military deployments, immigration crackdown, prosecutions of political enemies, pressure on critical media outlets, freezing of federal funds, tighter control over the organs of the state and attempts to influence the Federal Reserve.
Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, warned in March that the US was effectively a “highly personalistic autocratic government” and pointed to the war in Iran as evidence it was making “reckless” and “incredibly damaging decisions”.
In September 2025, Trump used a speech to senior military leaders at Quantico, Virginia, to suggest using “dangerous cities” as “training grounds” for the military and National Guard. He later faced a national backlash after two US citizens were shot dead by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis in January.

There came a reminder of murder in the streets, reduced to a still so that the actual nature of the murder might remain opaque, A still from the video of a witness who filmed ICE killing a 37-year-old American mother Renee Nicole Good in the city of Minneapolis.

Amidst all this, Joe had a kind word for mad King Donald's "intuition", if that's what you call the frothings emerging from dementia ...

Last year Trump fired the starter’s gun on a gerrymandering arms race designed to give the GOP an advantage in the midterms, while hand-picking MAGA candidates in Senate and House of Representatives primaries to preserve the conservative movement he built.
Now the Democratic Party faces its own brewing revolt, contending with a slate of socialist candidates driven by a new left-wing populism and demanding a more combative response to Trumpism. The poster boy for this new progressivism, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, told ABC News “a democratic socialist can get elected anywhere across this country for any position”.
The US is going through a period of deep cultural and political upheaval, beset by bitter divisions and torn between conflicting views about how to solve its problems – a crisis exacerbated by social media, declining trust in institutions and weakening faith in democracy. It is a picture the founding fathers could never have imagined, although the struggle to ensure the survival of the republic remains the same.
New York University ethical leadership professor Jonathan Haidt, a leading advocate for tougher social media safeguards, warned in 2019 that there was a “very good chance” US democracy would fail within 30 years.
However, Trump’s intuition that the US needs to change is not unfounded. It is grounded in real challenges in the global economy and emerging problems in the international order that need to be addressed.
Speaking at The Economic Club of New York’s America 250 gala dinner, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the milestone anniversary required a deep reflection “on the creation of our country, of course, but no less, on its condition”. He said Americans had watched their strategic industries migrate abroad and their critical supply chains concentrate in jurisdictions that did not share US interests while foreign subsidies and non-market practices had distorted competition.

Speaking of minions, acolytes and lickspittle lackeys ... US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Picture: Mark Schiefelbein/AP

Joe kept on regurgitating correct, proper talking points ...

The goal of the Trump administration was to remake America and write the rules for a new global economy, a project imbued with fresh urgency given that economics and security could no longer be treated as separate spheres.
“Our founders scarcely could have foreseen the world we inhabit today,” Bessent said. “It now falls on us to preserve that inheritance … by insisting on fair competition. By ensuring that our openness serves to strengthen America.”
In September last year, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer branded decades of US free trade policy as a “quixotic misadventure” for trying to bring democracy to Beijing, arguing it was necessary for the US to create a “production economy” again.
“We voluntarily dismantled our defences and outsourced the rules of trade to a system overseen by a World Trade Organisation in Switzerland,” Greer said. “During that process we lost five million manufacturing jobs, over 60,000 factories as cheap goods flooded our markets from countries like China who were completely misaligned with our own goals.”
Speaking in May this year at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that too many US allies and partners were free riding on the American security umbrella. Too many nations now lacked the capacity to enforce the international order they believed in. “You can have all the rules you want, and rules are great, but if you can’t back them up with hard power, the rules are not worth the paper they are written on,” he said.
The “old toothless, utopian, and globalist course of foreign policy was headed for a disaster”.
Instead of retreating from the world, these critiques show the Trump administration trying to remake the global order in a manner that better serves the interests of the American people.

Because the pond approves of reptiles quoting themselves, it decided to save one of Joe's links to the intermittent archive, featuring Joe's thoughts on remarking the global order, even though it seemed to contradict what he was now suggesting...

Donald Trump has no road map for remaking the global order
In his first 100 days in power Donald Trump has set about dismantling the post-WWII global order, but the President no longer believes it is America’s job to offer an alternative.

So he has no road map for remaking the world order, except he's trying to remake the global order in a manner that better serves the interests of the American people.

Excellent, do carry on ...perhaps 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. “Every single day of my administration will continue to live by the motto promises made, and you’ve seen it before, promises kept,” Mr Trump said. “After 100 days back in the white house, America is a free, proud, and sovereign nation once more, and our magnificent destiny is closer than ever before. “We will never give in, we will never give up, we will never back down, we will never ever surrender. “Together we will make America powerful again, we will make America wealthy again, we will make America healthy again, we will make America strong again, we will make America proud again, we will make America safe again.”

As for the country being filled with furriners, Joe was entirely on board ...

For instance, Trump’s instinct to crack down on illegal immigration was a needed corrective to a damning failure. Official US Customs and Border Protection figures show there were about 8.7 million southwest border encounters during the four years of the Biden administration. This was an intolerable situation, and Trump’s belief that Western nations must ensure immigration consistent with their values presciently signposted the dilemma facing many liberal democracies today.

Indeed, indeed ... what an instinct, how helpful ...

And so, like many reptiles trying to do the both siderist rag, on to Joe's inevitable billy goat butt ...

But Trump’s MAGA revolution also shows the danger of meeting problems with disruption alone. His rebuild is haphazard, lacks a broad consensus at home or abroad and has yet to deliver better outcomes for Americans.
The solution may yet prove worse than the disease, raising the question of whether America needed the Trumpian revolution – or a more careful recalibration.
Ira Shapiro, a former senior Democrat Senate aide, US trade official and historian of the Senate, has convened a bipartisan and nonpartisan “Common Sense Coalition” comprising dozens of experts including former government officials, former military officers and scholars. He tells Inquirer the American experiment “faces its greatest challenge since the civil war”.
“Our country has had a very bad 21st century, starting with the 9/11 attack, followed by the terribly misguided invasion of Iraq and the subprime mortgage crisis triggering the Great Recession,” he says.
This had weakened US institutions and “opened the door to a celebrity, outsider demagogue to become president”.
“America has come through difficult periods before … but in the past our crises involved attacks by external enemies – Pearl Harbor and 9/11 – or economic chaos never seen before, the 1929 market crash and the Great Depression,” he says.

The reptiles kept currying favour and delusion by showing what a perfect fit mad King Donald's head made ... President Trump at Mount Rushmore on July 3. Picture: Saul Loeb / AFP

Joe began to indulge in dire "we'll all be rooned" thoughts ...

“The second Trump presidency poses a much different and more threatening crisis. For the first time, we have an administration making a concerted effort to dismantle our government and replace our checks and balances system.”
Betrayed: America Didn’t Vote for This, authored by the Common Sense Coalition in May, delivers a damning report card on the Trump 2.0 era. It finds the US President’s policy revolution is not working.
So far, Trump’s sweeping tariffs have failed to rectify the trade imbalances deemed so problematic by the administration. In 2025, China notched up a record $US1 trillion trade surplus while the US posted its own record trade deficit of $US1.2 trillion.
Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis shows manufacturing employment fell by 91,000 jobs last year, declining from 12.673 million workers to 12.582 million.
The slide in labour force participation by white men has continued and, despite Trump’s deportation campaign, the unemployment rate for American-born men was the same in March this year as in January 2024 at 4.3 per cent.
After unlawfully raising about $US166bn in revenue from tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1973, the administration had refunded only $US23bn by early June – less than 15 per cent.
America’s long-term fiscal position was becoming increasingly unsustainable, a trend that has been exacerbated by Trump’s policies. A Congressional Budget Office analysis of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act – which signed huge tax cuts into law last year – found it would add $US3.4 trillion to the federal deficit across the next decade. The Yale Budget Lab forecast that national debt would lift to 194 per cent of GDP by 2054.

Suddenly it all sounded gloomy... Americans are getting squeezed financially. Picture: Getty Images

Other voices added to the sense of chaos ...

Inflation was running at 4.2 per cent in the 12 months to the end of May, its highest rate in three years, because of the disruption caused by the Iran war.
American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Stan Veuger tells Inquirer there has been “no rebirth of manufacturing in the heartland; how could there be, with extreme uncertainty over future policy and tariffs on industrial inputs? The main consequences of Trump’s second-term tariff policies have been chaos and disruption. American households have faced higher prices and businesses have seen their supply chains upended.”
While Washington needs to respond to Beijing’s export-driven economic model and deliberate industrial overcapacity, this hardly justified the imposition of tariffs across the board – a step that has strained ties with its closest allies.
Shapiro says Trump’s presidency is a “boon to America’s adversaries. In their fondest dreams, Putin and Xi could not have imagined an American president who would do so much damage to our country.”
Trump’s policies have accelerated a process of hedging against Washington, with Canada’s Mark Carney moving to expand trade relations with China and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declaring in December last year that Europe needed to become “much more independent” from the US.
Trump has heightened the confusion by sending conflicting signals about whether he views China and Russia as great-power partners with which he can cut deals or strategic rivals. His inability to end the Ukraine war – despite claiming he could do so within 24 hours – and berating of Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House in February last year stand as deep failures.
Similarly, his decision to allow Nvidia to sell its more powerful H200 artificial intelligence chips to China and place a $US14bn Taiwan arms package under review following his Beijing meeting with Xi Jinping have raised doubts over the extent to which transactional improvisation is the guiding force driving Indo-Pacific policy.

For some reason, at this point the reptiles decided to make Joe bold ...and what could the pond do but follow?

Defenders of the US President can point to his Hamas-Israel peace plan and the return of hos­tages as evidence his disruptive style can still deliver major breakthroughs, although the promised reconstruction of Gaza under Trump’s Board of Peace has not yet materialised.
But it is his intervention in Iran that may well emerge as the defining event of Trump’s second term.

There came a final snap ... Oil tankers and cargo vessels remain anchored off Oman. Picture: Getty Images.

And even more bold ...

Apart from dividing his own political constituency, the signing of a 14-point memorandum of understanding to end the conflict is being widely seen as a hobbling of US power that has delivered upfront benefits to Tehran – an admission that American battlefield victories have failed to deliver a strategic victory.

Joe ended on a suitably both sidest NY Times note ...

This combination of damage to Washington’s international stature, the fallout from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, building pressure on the US economy, deepening political polarisation and attempt to expand presidential power casts a long shadow over the nation’s 250th birthday.
Shapiro says it will “take many years” to recover. “The term generational harm is frequently seen and it is by no means an exaggeration,” he says.
“Trump’s return to the presidency, even after leading an attack on our Capitol, is a shattering experience, not only for America but for our allies. We have proven our unreliability. In the past 18 months, Trump has decimated our foundational institutions and destabilised the world.”
There is no doubt that Trump’s political ascendancy is emblematic of a nation searching for a new chapter in its history. The US President has presented himself as the author of its revival and one of the nation’s most important leaders since 1776.
On its 250th birthday, whether Trump is the saviour of the American experiment or a false prophet leading it deeper into crisis is the defining question of the age.

After all that, it's still a defining question? There haven't been any answers to it?

Then let the celebrations continue ...

And so to garrulous Gemma, and after all that, some might wonder why the pond bothered with a reptile determined to fill up space with another rant, all five minutes of it, but suffice to say that on a meditative Sunday the pond can be a glutton for punishment ...

The header: Smoke, no fire: Why the new teal party is entirely irrelevant; Community Strong Australia is electorally powerless and a wasted vote for constituents. They talk a big game, they get airtime, but that’s it.

The caption for the collage, featuring Gemma quoting an indignant Gemma: They talk a big game, they get airtime, but that’s it.

Be fair, she's not a journalist, she's a weekly blatherer ... or commentator, or lickspittle fellow traveller, or some other adjective of choice ...

Have you heard the news? Australia finally has a new political party. I say finally because the teals have been a party on the sly all along.
Oh, they denied it, but come on. If it walks like duck … They wear the same colour, for heaven’s sake. They are known as the teals, they’re co-branded, they share almost identical funding sources. And wait until you get to their voting patterns.
For those not paying attention, a recently published analysis that interrogated how the teals voted and who they voted with, dating back to May 2022, shows a true affinity for the shade green. They sided with the Greens, overwhelmingly and within cooee of each other, in terms of percentages.
Mackellar MP Sophie Scamps has voted with the Greens 74.8 per cent of the time. Wentworth’s Allegra Spender has voted with the Greens 66.8 per cent of the time. So far Bradfield MP Nicolette Boele, who was elected in May last year, has voted with the Greens 74.7 per cent of the time. Which leads me to my local member of parliament, Warringah MP Zali Steggall. Her record? A 72.2 per cent track record of siding with the Greens.
That’s the recent past; let’s talk about the here and now.

Naturally there had to be a snap of the collection of deviants that had turned Gemma even more outraged than usual ... From left, teals MPs Allegra Spender, Kate Chaney, Monique Ryan, Sophie Scamps, Nicolette Boele Zali Steggall at this week’s Midwinter Ball at Parliament House.

Bloody womyn ... but that's why the pond was compelled. Is there any better attraction than a cat fight with girlie on girlie action?

After what seems like an insufferably long period of denying they’re a party, and scoffing at anyone suggesting they might become one, two of the teal MPs have finally teamed up. Spender and Steggall have relaunched themselves to the world as Community Strong Australia.
It’s the party nobody asked for and nobody needs. It brings to the table all the energy and gravitas of two authoritarian school prefects, ready to conquer year 12 and beyond. They embody a head girl and her erstwhile deputy, ready to hand out detentions at will.

You see? You thought the pond was being reductive by talking of "girlies", but the pond's got nothing on a Gemma when she chooses to grate ... 

Why these girlies are no better than authoritarian school prefects, which might explain why the reptiles decided to slip in an academic to give the freshers a good talking to, Flinders University Associate Lecturer Josh Sunman says the formation of Community Strong Australia “comes with risk” for Teal independents Zali Steggall and Allegra Spender.​“It is really interesting, we have often seen the Teal independents described as having party-like structures, in that they are Independents, but at the same time they are affiliated,” Mr Sunman told Sky News Australia.​“Part of their brand is that they're seen as staunchly independent advocates for their community, and by becoming a bit more party-like, I think it could potentially hurt their independent brand.”

Still no rebrand for Sky Noise down under?

Gemma asked for a little humour, so the pond offered it with a condescending flourish ...

Humour me, will you, as I take a moment to comment on the branding of this new entity. This is the territory of my day job and the visual identity of this party immediately caught my eye. I’d love to see the creative brief behind this one. If it was a hand held out to receive a large soft stool sample, then congrats to the designers – you nailed it.
Now to the name. “Community”: small, insular, local. “Strong”: low-key union vibes.
Local is totally fine if you’re the mayor of your local government area. Local is fine if you’re dealing with micro issues that have no bearing on, or connection to, matters of national importance. Community Strong Australia says cake stalls and local markets. It doesn’t say geopolitical strategy, energy security or sovereign risk.
This new party, like the teal party before it, is a rolled-gold example of when perception trumps reality.

If only she'd expended her energy on fixing up the Liberal party, suffering under a kind of terminal decline by being forced to pretend that the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way has a shred of charisma.

Up against him almost anything, even the most vacuous of logos might seem compelling... Community Strong Australia Logo

And here's the real rub. One of the teals dared to have a go at garrulous, grating Gemma, and damned if she was going to stand for that sort of cheek, fancy a pollie daring to snap back at her, why it was worse than that night she had trying to sleep on forty mattresses that simply couldn't handle that problematic pea ...

The teal MPs are electorally irrelevant. What that means is this government, with its whopping majority in the lower house, doesn’t need their votes as a group or as individuals. No teal MP has the ability to influence anything, let alone in their own electorate. They talk a big game, they get airtime, but that’s it. Smoke, no fire.
This is a point I have made publicly many times over. Which leads me to something I previously had decided to let slide because of the inanity, pettiness and smallness of it.
However, as the saying du jour goes, I changed my position. Why? These are serious times. We are in times that require cohesion, servant leadership and maturity. We are getting none of that.
So, a couple of weeks ago, I reiterated the point about lack of electoral influence when commenting on a social media post about the government’s attempt to flog off prime defence land assets such as HMAS Penguin in Mosman on Sydney’s lower north shore. It is bang in the middle of the seat of Warringah. We have a government drunk on spending and wanting to pawn the family jewels, and a local member impotent in the face of it.
I commented on a community post about a pending protest meeting, simply to the effect that this situation is an excellent example of how voting teal is a wasted vote because they lack influence.
Soon after, I had a response from Steggall’s verified account. It was sarcastic, dismissive and came complete with a rolling-eye emoji: “So says a journalist at the Australian …” Like I said, all the late-teen energy and gravitas of a school prefect. I responded politely, reminding my local MP that as I’m a constituent, she works for me, and pointing out that what I said was not personal but an incontestable fact. If she had any influence over what happened in her electorate, HMAS Penguin wouldn’t be on the chopping block. Attacking me, rather than addressing my point? It’s the hallmark of the person with no point to make.
I don’t know if Steggall runs her own social media account or if that post was made by a staff member. I suspect it’s the latter; one would presume an MP has more to do.
Either way, it indicates two things: the first, an obscene level of entitlement. Even if it was a staff member responding, the fact they did so without any shame says it all. Piss off, minion. The message was clear and others noticed. And the second thing this interaction delivered was validation for my point, though unintended I’m sure. A vote for the teals or any other independent in the lower house is a wasted vote.
Perhaps you voted teal here or in other electorates, and I’m sure you have your reasons, but let me spell it out logically.
You voted teal to punish the Coalition, perhaps to feel as if your vote might count. What you did, though, is help elect a Labor government that is there only because of Greens preferences. You directly elected local MPs who are just a different shade of green and who are powerless to do anything at a local or a national level other than squawk from the sidelines and take shots at constituents and, while you’re at it, the national newspaper.

Um, does that mean the beefy boofhead stays in the wilderness? 

Sounds like a good, compelling deal, no matter what turgid AUKUS-loving mess is the alternative ... as the reptiles kept on trying to pretend that there was a real alternative oppositon at work, blathering away on Sky Noise down under with someone boasting of an unfortunate Jaimee as a first name ... Shadow Health Minister Anne Ruston reacts to the formation of Community Strong Australia by two Teal independents. “Well, you’ve only got to have a look at the track record of the so-called Teals, I mean, they usually vote together,” Ms Ruston told Sky News host Jaimee Rogers. “Their main funding source is the same, so I think they have been acting as a semi-party for some time,” she said.​“It is a party of two. I’m not sure that many Australians would think that two people joining together is really a party.​“Just look at the track record of their voting, look where their funding comes from, and I think it tells the whole story.”

Garrulous Gemma was determined to keep on grieving ...

Oh, the irony of the socialist march across the nation being facilitated by the wealthiest Australians in the most enviable addresses in the country: Wentworth, Curtin, Warringah.
Here we have it, people, a Pyrrhic victory writ large. You have enabled Labor to make us a weaker, less secure, less prosperous country. The party is doing its best to drive Australia off a cliff and the teals are filling their tank up at the servo. Wait, sorry. The teals are manning the charging stations along the way because, of course, they’re driving electric vehicles. The Greens are laughing all the way to the communal bank.
This political shaking, this fracturing of the traditional order, it’s painful but needed. Why? Something had to wake us up. The party I vote for has much work to do, a herculean amount. The party in government has betrayed Australians, has a dangerous socialist agenda. Our Treasurer is economically illiterate. Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese delivered a so-called widow’s tax in this budget and their response to our outrage? Stop your fussing. We’ll fix it later. In a domestic or romantic relationship, this behaviour would be called financial coercive control.
We are in nation-shaking days. I see in my own circle of friends and clients people who previously were politically disengaged but now awakened from a lengthy slumber and driven by the rage of betrayal. It is quite something to behold.
As always, I’m the tragic optimist. Perhaps these are not just nation-shaking days. Perhaps they’ll prove in time to be nation forming, or re-forming. That’s my hope. That all of this will be worth it. A lot depends on us. I’m game if you are.

A socialist march across the nation? If only ...

A closing question: if the teals and their kind are completely pointless and useless, how useless and pointless is it to rail with wild-eyed rage and fury at the pointless and the useless? You'd have to be pretty pointless to do it...

Waiter, the pond wants a serve of whatever garrulous Gemma is drinking. If she's game, it's likely a form of Dutch courage (no shade on the Dutch, it's just the colonial English being Pommy).

Some days the pond wants to live in Gemma's nirvana of socialist delusions...

And so to end with the usual fun, with bonus luxury US snacking while talking on a telephone while driving a car ...