Trump has had an amazingly unifying effect on the world: you now can go just about anywhere, from Andorra (that's a tiny country between France and Spain, Des!) to Angola and from Mongolia to Mexico, and say, "He's a bloody idiot!", and everyone will know exactly who you are talking about.
Trump’s insane ideas keep multiplying: in addition to tariffs, mass deportations, annexing Canada and invading Greenland, he now wants to create a strategic crypto reserve. What, like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, where you can release oil from the places where it's stored in case of an energy emergency? Does he even know what that is supposed to be? The short answer is, "Probably not", because he has no idea what he intends to do with it or what it really is. Cryptocurrencies, after all, are just ones and zeros on computer servers somewhere. Crypto is just computer code that has no inherent value and has found no use - well, no legitimate use anyway. The only thing that people really do with it is money-laundering and paying off criminal organisations. Outside of the black economy, there is no use for this stuff. Now, Trump is going to accumulate a strategic reserve of a lot of strings of ones and zeros.
Could Elon Musk’s mishandling of American taxpayers' money result in Trump's downfall as the social safety net of millions is shredded while trillions of dollars in tax cuts are given to the wealthiest? Anger has already boiled over at town halls (and Tesla dealerships) across the US. The dark place that Trump is creating will no longer be a superpower but a sick country that stokes global chaos and helps its enemies.
(By the way, on February 26, NBC reported the following about Elon Musk: "Since mid-December, the tech titan's net worth has declined by more than $100 billion, or approximately 25%, as a sell-off in shares of Tesla, his electric car maker, has accelerated in recent weeks." Since then, Tesla’s share price has fallen another 17%. So, Elon has lost even more. He might be the smart guy who needs to have a talk to his boss.)
As the author Philip Roth already wrote in The New Yorker during Trump's first term: "I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognising subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English."
‘At least he built the Autobahn.’ Many post-war Germans remember this phrase from their conversations with parents and grandparents pointing to how the Nazi regime could receive such widespread support. Perhaps Trump's regime will go down as the time when the "LGBTQIA-inclusive" language was put back into the rubbish bin of history and we can say, "At least he brought back the proper pronouns". We paid a high price!
Take a big breath and consider yourself lucky to live here, far away from all the Trumpenomics, because Australia is one of the seven countries that met the World Health Organisation’s air quality standards last year. This septet of countries in which you can breathe easily are Australia, New Zealand, the Bahamas, Barbados, Grenada, Estonia, and Iceland.
I guess we're just lucky - or what Geoffrey Blainey called "The Tyranny of Distance" - that we are so far away from all the other polluters and the unrest of the world. That's just as well since our total Australian Defence Force, which includes all the cooks, storemen, paymasters, clerks, and all those who, when push comes to shove, will never fire the odd angry shot, wouldn't even fill HALF the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Mind you, that hasn't stopped the head of Australia's armed forces paying himself two-and-a-half times as much money as his counterpart in the US who commands a force twenty times larger than Australia's.
It's still early days, but a friend in Cairns has told me that baked beans and Tim Tams are an acceptable balanced diet for the time that Padma is away. I'm more of an Iced Vovo man but shall keep his advice in mind.
