After years of bravado and beating of war drums in the call to arms against Russia while they have gutted their own militaries and have become almost defenceless against an aggressive Putin, the Europeans got the collective fright of their lives when Trump told them to get stuck in and go forth without American military might and the billions of dollars they'd been granted over the last fifty years. Which is why Trump seems to have chosen to ignore these once great countries, and end the war in Ukraine, which is possibly the biggest money-laundering operation in history - even Zelensky admits $100 Billion has gone ‘missing’ - without them.
Not that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer's visit to Washington will make any difference. When Trump was asked what they would be discussing, he was unable to hide his contempt. 'I don’t know', he replied, 'ask him, he asked to come here, I didn’t'. One is left wondering if Starmer is bringing along his Foreign Secretary, the same David Lammy who called Trump a 'racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser' and 'tyrant and a women-hating neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath', and who, when asked on a quiz show what Hitler's first name was, replied 'Heil'.
Not that anyone could accuse Trump of not having compassion. When asked about any possibility of Prince Harry being deported for allegedly lying about drug-taking on his US Visa application, Trump replied, 'No', he said, 'that guy’s got enough problems with his wife ... she’s terrible!'
I think there's a method to Trump's madness: he simply throws out some ideas to see which ones will stick, but he also turns on a dime when a concept doesn’t work and a better solution emerges. Of course, Canada won't become the 51st state; of course, America is not going to rebuild Gaza; of course, Greenland won't become part of the United States. As for Mexico and Panama, the Mexicans are stopping the flow of migrants and Panama is putting a stop to China's undue influence over its ports. And holding the blowtorch to bloated US federal agencies and their staggering abuse, fraud, and waste has been long overdue. Thumbs up!
As for those Chinese live-fire manouvres in the Tasman Sea, Anthony Albanese has declared war on the Chinese but asked that the start date be pushed back to the mid 2040s when Australia will receive the first delivery of its new submarines. He's also pushed back the start of his Medicare bulk-billing pledge until after the election which he will lose anyway, and therefore he can't be blamed for the country going totally broke when visiting the local GP has become a totally cost-free national sport for anyone with nothing better to do. Another NDIS in the making!
Speaking of which, the two nurses Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, one of whom claimed to have sent Israeli patients to hell or "Jahannam", while the other said, "I won’t treat them, I will kill them", have been suspended - on full pay, no doubt; after all, we're the country of the soft touch! One of them, the "hellbent" Ahmad Rashad Nadir, is now a hospital patient himself and must be hoping he'd receive more compassionate care than he meted out. The solicitor acting for Sarah Abu Lebdeh, who has since been charged with several offences and is out on bail, said that his client had sent a "very sincere apology ... to the Jewish community as a whole". Ah well, that's all right then, isn't it?
