We are a little over 160 days into the second term of President Trump.  That’s just a tad over five months and still not half a year in. In no particular order, and just to list some of the highlights, Mr Trump has pulled the US out of net zero and the Paris Accords and out of the World Health Organisation and out of the UN Human Rights Council and is ending electric car mandates and all sorts of subsidies. He has taken a border that President Biden had intentionally or unintentionally (I say the former) made so porous that some 15 million or so illegal aliens poured through in just his one term and President Trump has closed it entirely. Literally zero people are coming through illegally now. And President Trump has moved to forcefully deport people, either involuntarily or voluntarily, with estimates of the total having left already at a million or so. And these deportations appear to be accelerating. He is fighting all DEI practices and winning.  So too the transgender lobby. Trump has also supported Israel, including bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities so as to set back this zealous theocracy’s ability to build nuclear weapons by at least five or six years. (If you believe the leaked intelligence report doubting this, the sort of thing that said Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, I have some beachfront property in Alice Springs going for Sydney prices. Give me a call.) Trump played some role in soothing the waters in the India and Pakistan dispute that could have become dangerously serious. Despite the scaremongering about the effects of Trump’s tariffs on the stock market the S&P 500 last Friday closed at an all-time high – up 2.9 per cent since inauguration day and up 6.7 per cent since election day last November.

Oh, and Mr Trump has strong-armed Nato countries into promising to spend 3.5 per cent of GDP on defence with another per cent and a bit on infrastructure to help defence. Okay, not Spain, but Orange Man Bad has promised to slug Spain with big extra tariffs as a result. (Look out Mr Albanese!) Britain, and even Canada (that up to now spends even less than Australia) has hopped on board this promise.

If you think any other president could have delivered this sort of Nato spending promise I’m afraid you and I will have to disagree.

And to round out these highlights, let’s not forget the big-ticket judicial wins Mr Trump has received from the Supreme Court and which his first-term nominees helped deliver (unlike our useless Coalition’s appointees). The top US justices have given the green light to third country deportations (as they should have). They have come within a fraction of ending nationwide injunctions by District Court judges. This is the practice of litigants forum shopping – of looking around the entire US for some regional entry-level federal judge who is likely to be favourable to the applicants – and asking that judge to shut down across the country the executive actions of the elected President, in every case on matters he promised to pursue before the election. The US Supreme Court was pretty brutal about how this practice was attempting to create an imperial judiciary. In my opinion such injunctions at such a low-level of the judiciary, from any judge at all, were wholly incompatible with any working notion of democratic decision-making. Leave it to big panels of the circuit courts. Or better still to the Supreme Court itself. And as an aside, the blunt opinion of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in this case, in which she eviscerates the feeble reasoning of Biden nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, was up there with former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s fireworks aimed at his fellow judges. Yes, yes, yes, I know that after this case many on the political left complained about commentators alleging that Brown Jackson was a DEI pick, totally out of her depth on the top court.  But after all, there is solid evidence for that claim that she was a DEI pick. Remember, former President Biden announced upfront and before he picked Brown Jackson, that he would only pick a black woman. In other words, Biden was limiting his potential pool of choices to about six per cent of the otherwise available pool (i.e., the black women’s share of the US adult population). That may be many things but it is not a merit-based appointment. It’s flat-out affirmative action announced in advance. So you can own such practices or disown them. But if it’s the former you can hardly complain when critics call this out for precisely what it is. And ironically, if any US university or employer openly announced such intentions it would be patently illegal, not least under recent Supreme Court rulings. (I’m not saying DEI hiring isn’t still done, disguised and with a wink and a nod, because it is, especially in the universities. But hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue and this is better than the open flirting of our Liberal party with DEI practices, not least with preselections. By the way, is there a single reason so far that any conservative would vote for Sussan ‘let’s do more acknowledgements of country while supporting the woeful eSafety Commissioner’s attacks on free speech’ Ley? Any at all?)

At any rate, getting back to Mr Trump, however you score his record above I think we can all say that his first five-and-a-bit months have been somewhat disappointing in terms of The Donald’s being a latter-day Hitler. Alas, he hasn’t burned down the legislature. He’s been remarkably supportive of Jews and of Israel. He and Elon Musk have done more for free speech in the US – and tangentially in the rest of the democratic world – than any president or court in the last half-century or more. He’s forced all sorts of democracies to spend more on their defence.  He hasn’t become a vegetarian. At least, though, he continues to be mighty boorish and uncultured. Phew! Because that’s what counts.

Meanwhile in the Democratic primary to choose a candidate for New York City mayor the registered Democrat party voters shunned former governor Cuomo (a sort of lefty establishment guy who screwed up the Covid response right up there with Gavin Newsom). Instead, they went for a Muslim socialist Zohran Mamdani who wants to up already high city taxes on the rich, freeze rents, up welfare, and to some extent replace police with social workers when you call the 911 emergency number. He openly supported Hamas after 7 October and said that once mayor he would have Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu arrested for war crimes if he came to New York City. And all the exit polls showed that the richer the Democrat voter the more likely he or she was to support Mamdani over Cuomo. Same goes for the more degrees the voter had. That, dear readers, is the state of higher education and of the Democrat party.

Meanwhile President Trump called Mamdani a communist and a threat to New York City’s future.

And Florida’s Ron DeSantis said Mamdani was the best thing to happen to already inflated Miami real estate prices.