Loads of commentators on the left of the political spectrum seem completely unhinged when it comes to former President Trump. Remember the celebrity philosopher Sam Harris who embarrassed himself by comparing Trump to an asteroid hurtling towards Earth, thereby making just about any response supposedly justified? Did this include justifying the political opposition lying, weaponising the FBI, or anything really…? And then we have our own Troy Bramston who sees Trump as a foundational threat to democracy (somehow missing that it wasn’t Trump as President who was trying to lock up for life his main political opponent on charges two Democrat-voting law profs – Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley – mock). Republican-leaning lawyers who aren’t paid up Trump Derangement Syndrome adherents point out that the January 6th indictments are trying to criminalise advice from your lawyer, take away First Amendment rights, and that there have been a myriad of Democrats attacking and contesting election results – from Hilary Clinton (who engineered the Russian Collusion Scam to boot) to Al Gore to, well, open up the internet and watch a 30-minute assemblage of top Democrat politicians asserting the election they lost was bogus. None was indicted by their winning Republican opponents. Meanwhile, stop and think about the document classification indictment for even a moment. No one contests that Trump could have declassified these documents any time he wanted; Presidents have the constitutional power to do that. Nor do they claim that then Vice President Biden did not have any power to declassify the many more documents he had taken from the White House and the keeping of which has not seen him indicted. The charge against Trump is therefore a process charge; it implausibly tries to piggyback on the Espionage Act even though no one asserts that Trump was going to give these documents to foreign agents and even though that piggybacking requires proof of mens rea which they can’t show. These indictments are, frankly, a disgrace and you can see that when you saw the derisive reaction to the Biden White House condemning Putin for imprisoning his main political rival – ‘the pot calling the kettle black’ was the response from many observers. The thing is that many conservative commentators also despise Trump, including most all of our top Liberal politicians past and present. They don’t seem to get his appeal. They hate his tweeting. They loathe his blue-collar tastes in food and entertainment. So let me try to show you the man’s appeal. Start with core economic issues and compare Trump’s first 30 months as President to Biden’s.

1. Jobs created: Trump 4.9 million; Biden 2.1 million (we can speculate how many of the latter were bounce-back jobs from the Covid lockdown fiasco).
2. Gas Prices: Trump $1.87 gallon (about 50 cents a litre); Biden just shy of $4 gallon (about $1.05 litre).
3. Mortgage rates: Trump 2.65 per cent; Biden 7 per cent (and rising).
4. Real Family Incomes: Trump Up $6,400 since his inauguration; Biden Down $4,000 since his inauguration.
5. Inflation rate: Trump under 1.9 per cent; Biden record highs over the last half-century.
6. Personal savings held by Americans Trump over $2 trillion; Biden $862 billion.

Or put it this way. The amount of real wealth the average middle-class US household has lost in the last calendar year is $33,000. Get the picture all you reductionists who believe ‘it’s the economy stupid’? (And by the way, I don’t in any way think economic issues are the only, or sometimes the main, driver of how people vote, not least because I myself would forego a fair bit of wealth to fix our free speech problems, our elites’ insidious attachment to identity politics and ‘diversity’, the massive influx of third world illegal immigrants, better schools, an assurance we’d never lockdown again and ruin the lives of our kids, etcetera.) So my take is that if an election were held solely on economic issues with a press that played it down the middle, Trump would romp home. And if we move off the pseudo-Marxist plane of thinking only money matters to voters consider that Biden has deliberately opened up the southern border and seen at least eight million illegal immigrants come in, almost 3 million in 2022 alone. Biden and the Democrats are all in with the trans lobby (with record high numbers of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria). And we now know, definitely, that the Biden administration went to the social media companies and lobbied – no, demanded – that they censor and shadow ban views during the entirety of the lockdown years, views that proved to be correct down the line as it happens. (This Big Tech/White House banning and censoring of views the Biden administration disliked is being litigated for patent breaches of the First Amendment rights and I think Team Biden will lose badly, eventually.) Oh, and did I mention that Trump was the first President since Hoover not to involve the US in a foreign war? The luvvies who say Trump was and is a threat to ignite a worldwide war simply cannot explain his actual record as President on this front and all the above ones. And he was doing all this while the FBI and Democrats and most of the lefty press were running the Russia Collusion scam and impeaching him. Remember why Trump was impeached the first time? Because he thought that Joe Biden had been on a ‘pay for access’ corruption gravy train using his son Hunter as a bag man and called up the then Ukrainian President. Read Miranda Devine in the New York Post or watch the Republican House committee lay out all the evidence. It is mightily damning. Moreover, no one at the time of the first Trump impeachment doubted Trump was entitled to call the Ukrainian President to ask him to look into an actual crime. The Democrats pooh-poohed any such possibility. The first impeachment was a disgrace, as well as being procedurally flawed. Now having said all that, I do think Trump completely screwed up Covid. Most do. He appointed Fauci. He left lockdowns to the States (but at least was not being a Scott Morrison cheerleader for them and the general thuggery and civil liberties infringements). On all lockdown issues, Ron DeSantis was miles better than Trump. I thought DeSantis’s best line of attack on Trump was to focus solely on the pandemic response. He didn’t and now I can’t see any real path to the nomination for the Florida Governor. And Trump did a poor job of appointing people to top posts, seemingly thinking that those from the Washington DC swamp would be good picks to implement his policies. Again, DeSantis has a much better approach and record on this appointments front – though no one could do worse on appointments than the Liberal Party in Australia whose record on top judicial picks, the Australian Human Rights Commission, top ABC jobs, you name it, is flat out appalling. So that leaves the regularly heard claims by Trump-disliking Republicans that Mr Trump cannot win a general election. But I’m not sure what evidence they base that on. If you go back and look at polls from the July-August period before the 2016 and 2020 general elections, and now, you see this: Clinton in 2015 was up 13.1 per cent; Biden in 2019 was up 8.6 per cent; and today Biden and Trump are pretty much tied, maybe there’s a 0.5 per cent lean to Biden. The 2016 election saw Clinton take the popular vote by 2.1 per cent (so the polls were wrong by 11 per cent) and Biden take the popular vote by 4.5 per cent (so the polls were wrong by 4 per cent). In other words, popular vote totals moved both times towards Trump compared to the polling from a year before. And don’t forget that in 2019 Biden was running as a moderate and a nice guy, from his basement, taking no questions – with no woeful track record to have to defend and no pay-for-access corruption stench swirling around him that even the left-leaning MSM will have a difficult time covering up. So of course nothing is for sure in politics. But to say Trump can’t win in 2024 just seems to be based on wish-fulfilment by all the Trump-haters out there who make up the bulk of what we can sneeringly describe as ‘polite society’. What we can say is that the Democrats are throwing all sorts of indictments at their main political opponent in a way that has never happened in the previous 240 years of the Republic. This is a very dangerous game as it breaks all sorts of conventions that undergird democratic life. It really does smack of third-world, Venezuela-like practices. If Trump does win I expect him to be out for revenge. I would be. If one side weaponises the criminal justice system and the intelligence services game theory tells you that your side has to reciprocate. Or you are mugs and will lose. That’s the sad reality we’re observing in the US. But to assume Mr Trump can’t win the next election seems to me to be based on not much at all. Mr Albanese might need to have a back-up US ambassador ready to appoint because I’m pretty sure a new Trump administration will have no time for Kevin Rudd, given his past comments.