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Maybe that space is for Kamala................. bwahahahaha
hair apparent ?
That's a face that rocks could be cracked on and not even make a dent on it.Nancy and Chuck were the real 'insurrectionists'. Like we didn't know.
Honestly hope they clean out public service and go after sorosAnother slimy hypocritical Democrat falling flat on his f'g face trying to smear an opponent. It's all they've got. Luckily Hegseth had an answer that clean bowled him.
Similar story to our solar cells, an Australian invented the first current technology solar cells a UNSW, then one of the members of the team set up manufacturing in China and our manufacturing plant in Homebush was closed in around 2010 and it wasn't on Abbott's watch.Incredible but not surprising with the past Democrat administrations. Bet there are kickbacks as well as ideological leanings?
Just a digression: I remember years ago a local newspaper article glowing with fraternity wherein a Chinese agro scientist was over here on an ag research facility learning about our dairy industry. Firstly I reacted to the animal welfare angle but then it was WTH are we transferring knowledge gained over generations of farmers to these ruthless competitors for?
It's weird how little we heard which generally means there's a cover up.Trump mentioned it recently in one of his reporter attended oval office signing ceremonies. He explicitly wants it investigated. Mentioned the 6 cellphones the first assassin had - I think three were encrypted? Said, "I dont have 6 phones". I felt he was implying Crooks was an agent of some big entity. I guess intelligence organizations are still in turmoil with many issues vying for attention?
Why did news about the Trump assassination attempts just drop off the radar?
Never really heard much of a follow up.
Want to understand Trump? Forget tariffs — it’s all about culture
Is the whole of Australia suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome? The President’s tariffs on us will now proceed. Did we ever imagine buddying up to Donald Trump would avoid this?
Malcolm Turnbull is possibly too present in our politics. But it is hard to criticise his stance on Trump. He called this one right. The economists of aluminium and steel can devise ways to lessen Trump’s blow. But we can hardly stop this one landing. Turnbull’s demand that we stand up to Trump, and inevitably fail, is a better psychological place to be than standing back and being shafted anyway. Trump’s chaotic revolution can’t be stalled, or Australia exempted from its penurious effects, by better mateship. Being “mates” mattered not much this week.
This rebellion against globalisation – which he has been promising for a decade and more – is going to play out, and no amount of middle-power harrumphing can forestall it. Anthony Albanese shirtfronting Trump just isn’t going to work. Penny Wong’s deepest scowl, terrifying to ordinary mortals, will do no good.
Getting Trump to back down would be beyond even Kevin Rudd’s brilliant man-management skills. Better personal chemistry is just not going to cut it.
There are much deeper forces at work. One is the culture war, which has now taken on global dimensions. Second is the gathering of systemic forces that Trump may struggle to contain.
Trump is waging a culture war in the guise of a war about tariffs. We need to stop calling out Trump’s economic illiteracy. The Wall Street Journal has been doing a lot of this. Its editorials offer compelling diagnoses of Trump’s bad maths. But this misses the point of his surge through the institutions of the global deep state. He is using economics to wage a culture war. Despite his transactional reputation – that he will Make America Wealthy Again – Trump is fighting on a different battlefield. Winning is measured by the recapture of cultural terrain.
MAGA doesn’t want a redistribution of wealth but of cultural power and of social status, from a woke managerial class back to blue-collar workers. Farmers of the Midwest will certainly lose money because of Trump’s tariff war. They did during Trump 1.0. Their reward is cultural renewal.
Illinois and Iowa are America’s soybean capitals. Their farmers will be among the hardest hit by tariffs. But Trump won Iowa in November by over 13 points (55.7 per cent to 42.5). While he lost Illinois to Kamala Harris, rural Illinois was deep red. Its residents have begun a campaign to secede and join, possibly, Indiana and Idaho. This is a sociocultural phenomenon, not an economic one.
JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) documents less an economic dispossession than a collapse of civil society. The rust-belt Ohio, from which he escapes, made him “a cultural emigrant” among the DC elite. The Trump-Vance cabinet is full of rich men for whom money has declining salience; they are culture warriors.
America has some of the wealthiest universities in the world. Harvard’s $US50bn ($79.4bn) endowment makes it number one. (For comparison: the University of Melbourne, Australia’s No. 1, has an endowment of less than $US1bn) Trump is not targeting Ivy League wealth, but its culture. Ending DEI and reducing the number of genders back to two has no economic rationale, beyond the small cost-cutting both measures will entail.
The DEI academic industrial complex does not appal Trump supporters for its financial costs but for how it is used by progressives to police the culture. DEI commissars, embedded at every major American institution, enforce a left-wing ideology. Resisting it now has a popular pay-off for Republicans.
The most effective campaign ad in the 2024 election reminded ordinary voters that “Kamala Harris is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you”. Democrats had no way of countering this.
Columbia University, the mecca of American anti-Semitism, is in Trump’s sights not because of its profits. What is $400m returned to federal coffers? He means to effect a campus revolution. The objective is cultural seizure – or at least the beginning of a long march back through elite institutions.
Take Trump to task for his mercantilism. But remember, tariffs are a means toward a bigger end: the remaking of American and, if he dreams big, of international society. And herein lies the rub. By internationalising his culture war, he is mobilising forces against himself more potent than a weak Democratic Party and its DEI bureaucracy.
“The Global Deep State” sounds the stuff of conspiracy theories. There is not a sinister Davos cabal plotting to do Trump in. But there are markets. And so far, they do not like what Trump has wrought.
Remember Liz Truss? Her 45 days as UK prime minister were a blur of economic activism that meant to begin a fundamental reshaping of British society. Global investors, big banks, the markets – they called a halt. Trump is running a bigger economy, of course. The US dollar is the global currency of choice. He has an electoral mandate; Truss did not. He will be around for some time yet.
But he is generating opponents at a furious lick. He is losing the confidence of allies, such as Canada and Australia, and augmenting the ambitions of competitors, such as Russia and China. Many of us are seeing our super funds fall. Appearances of Trump’s impregnability could prove illusory.
Finally, American history tells us that most second terms go wrong. LBJ had Vietnam. Nixon had Watergate. Reagan had Iran-Contra. Clinton had Monica. George W. Bush had a global recession. Barack Obama sowed the seeds of Trump 1.0. No student of history, Trump does at least know he must act fast. There are systemic forces – global and historical – looking to rein him in.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
It would be all over the news if that were the case. Democrats would be raging in the houseBecause it was staged and fake the blood wasn’t real (tomato sauce) and the secret service agents were b grade actors real ones couldn’t possibly be that bad
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