by PAUL COLLITS – IN 2015, I was sacked from an Australian council.
It was an act of raw senior executive power, but was, unexpectedly, a liberating moment. I was escorted from the building, with my cardboard box containing whatever was in it.
- Trump had appalling personnel management skills.
- He lead a White House full of enemies and spivs.
- JD Vance isn’t perfect, despite his compelling “story”. But he is close.
Everyone should experience unemployment. It is disconcerting, but adds massively to the life-learning process and the journey towards true humility. It builds empathy towards the less fortunate, among other things.
I challenged the decision in an industrial tribunal. Ironically, the day of the hearing coincided with a series of radio interviews I did across Australia about a peer reviewed journal article I had co-written with a friend.
KILLED OFF
It was on regional population movements, which had turned up on page three of The Australian newspaper.
The hearing was killed off because I had, in a bar at my farewell drinks, suggested to the then CEO of the council (who happened to walk in, accompanied by the Mayor and other senior executives) that he should “f#ck off”, and this was supposed to have shown – I don’t know what.
A month later, I was a keynote speaker at a national local government conference in Canberra.
I did my last radio interview for the day on a train from Sydney Central to the airport, interrupted by tunnels. I was off to New Zealand to take up a new job.
That friend with whom I had co-penned the article actually got me a job over there.
He is an American citizen. He showed me, in late 2016, his actual ballot paper for the presidential election in which he was entitled to vote. It bore the name Donald J Trump. It was a moment.
I wasn’t a fan of Trump’s.
This was partly due to what I thought then was the quality of the Republican field for the primaries that year. I still have the Ben Carson 2016 tee shirt to prove it.
And back then, I still trusted the National Review.
(If I were voting in a Republican primary this cycle, I would have picked Ron deSantis).
Like JD Vance, I came to respect Trump late, when in office. There was the recovered economy. Energy independence.
The absence of new wars. His disdain for the Bushes. Moving the embassy to Jerusalem. The patriot and worker-friendly rhetoric had always been great, but in office he delivered on many levels.
Downsides? Trump had appalling personnel management, leading to a White House full of enemies and spivs.
Then came COVID. Not Trump’s doing, of course.
But as former UK PM Harold McMillan said, it is “events, dear boy, events” that will do you in.
Trump’s tenure ended in ignominy, with an epic fail. Just read Scott Atlas’s book on the White House and COVID. The ultimate challenge maketh the man.
The lesson here? There is no such thing as the perfect candidate.
The great National Party front bencher John Stone once gave a speech at a Quadrant dinner in which he made the case that John Howard was our greatest prime minister.
FLAWED
He went twenty minutes into his speech before he got to the positive bits. Howard was our best but he had massive flaws too.
And he enacted many disastrous policies. Some he now regrets, others are still off limits for discussion.
The best PM? The perfect candidate?
COVID madness brought together some strange alignments. A number of old Leftists who vaguely remembered the old days of fights for free speech smelled rodents and joined the Right-of-centre COVID doubters and dissidents.
Those of us who disdain the Hamas-adjacent have quickly found that these same old-Leftists have pulled up their old (weird and ill-informed) pro-Palestine chants, and so don’t seem now so smart and principled.
There are no permanent allies in politics and in life.
The esteemed British conservative (Jewish) writer, Melanie Phillips, was all at sea, IMHO, over COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates. She just didn’t seem to get it.
Anyone who witnessed her recent, principled and fact-based defence of her people and the State of Israel will have been reassured of her clear-eyed sanity.
What to make of this?
Should all “conservatives” agree on everything? They shouldn’t and they don’t.
The history of the American conservative movement is one of divisions and internecine hatreds. The fusionists, the religious right, the social conservatives, the neocons, the country club establishment, the libertarians, the populists. On it goes.
DIVISIONS
Ronald Reagan himself was an amalgam of anti-communist, free-market and socially conservative positions, and his own White House harboured significant divisions.
But he got killing off the Soviet Union done while lots of other things went begging.
Anyone who has read Christopher Caldwell’s book The Age of Entitlement will probably want to re-asses Reagan’s tenure.
Margaret Thatcher was a libertarian star. Yet she totally ignored the culture wars that have since dragged Western countries into the toilet.
Is she to blame for this? She was even a (strategic) climate change supporter, so long as it helped kill off the coal unions.
I have only known one person in my life with whom I agreed on everything. Then we fell out over Tony Abbott’s perceived failures. That proved to me that the “perfect candidate” is a fiction, and a matter of muchly contested opinion.
Oh, and we actually change our own views over time.
We all have – well, at least I do – past political positions that now seem cringeworthy. At what stage are we judged? And against what?
We are works in progress. Views evolve, with new information.
Perhaps John Maynard Keynes, himself a complex and flawed individual, created his greatest line when he said: “When facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”
What do Winston Churchill, Jane Austen, Shakespeare and Peter Hitchens have in common?
Churchill was allegedly a racist. He certainly bungled Gallipoli. Jane Austen is said (by UK commentator James Delingpole) to have been an asset of the British colonialist class. (So what?)
Shakespeare, who may or may have not written his plays – the Earl of Oxford, anyone? – was an apologist of the Tudors and did Richard III in for centuries.
Peter Hitchens thinks that the Brits should have re-elected the Tories. He argues, correctly, that Keir Starmer is a Blairite disaster waiting to happen.
But UniParty theory suggests that voting Tory would not have made a jot of difference, bar the speed at which the nation was heading towards the cliff.
Who can you trust? Who is the perfect candidate?
JD Vance isn’t perfect, despite his compelling “story”. Nor is his new boss perfect, just quietly.
There are reasons why the Republican establishment hates Vance. Probably because he hates them, and opposes much of what they have stood for.
There are (apparently) reasons why MAGA true believers distrust him. The great St Paul was distrusted by The Eleven for his earlier efforts at Christian persecution.
It took Paul’s friend, St Barnabas, to convince the Apostolic Establishment that he was “one of us”.
And, of course, the Apostles themselves were a decidedly mixed bag. Judas Iscariot? The denying Peter? The doubting Thomas?
There is nothing new in history.
It has been suggested that endorsing RFK Jr in the current presidential election is a bad idea. Look at his views on abortion and on climate change. Yes, indeed.
But it might be argued that, post the Supreme Court’s overturning of Rowe vs Wade, and the return of abortion policy to the States, that what a 2024 presidential candidate thinks about abortion matters much less than it used to.
And RFK on climate change?
My view is that, absent a mass re-conversion to common sense and reality, the people are so hoodwinked by the new religion and that the private equity companies that run the world are so invested in the scam, that any presidential candidate’s personal views on climate are rendered almost immaterial.
CORRUPT
But what RFK Jr offers is a coherent attack on the corrupt establishment, the COVID State and crony corporatism.
If elected, and if successful in his main mission, the hill he is prepared to die on, it might just move the needle in directions that might contribute to the collapse of the climate industrial complex.
Of course, RFK Jr will not be president. But his candidacy might well be argued to have served democracy well. The perfect candidate? No way. He has done awful things in his own life.
This beast (the perfect candidate) doesn’t exist.
It is all about the big problems that candidates discern and on which they are prepared to shine a light, and on which hills they are prepared to die.
Trump has not, to date, shone a light on the COVID state and its out-workings.
Or on globalism and on the new world order. His attacks on the deep State have been, so far, mostly personal.
Will Trump do a real inquiry into the COVID dictatorship? I don’t think so. He was both a victim and a progenitor of it. And then there is his ego…
Principle versus compromise is one of the oldest debates in politics.
The long haul versus making a hero of yourself over one issue then being dispatched to the dustbin of history. Many are accused of being a sell-out.
There might be strategic reasons for ignoring or parking issues that “the base” deems non-negotiable. Politics is the art of the possible, and all that. They have all read their Machiavelli.
We all have the perfect candidate in our mind’s eye. As fallen men and women, our elected officials will fall short of the ideal.
This should be no surprise, and not the remotest cause of controversy. Even if a cause of disappointment.
And then, of course, is the view that it matters not “who governs” but who has global power and the real-time capacity to control all governments…PC
Good article Paul!
As recent events clearly show, it seems that it may indeed have been an act of divine intervention to keep former President Trump in the running to become the 47th President of the United States
It’s clear that all candidates are flawed in some way, they are no different to everyone else on the planet. So, taking this into account, Donald Trump displays obvious chinks in his armour. Yes, he is brash, egotistical and sometimes brutally insulting to his adversaries but he also has qualities that millions of his fans love. He shows humility and compassion to those he cares about and is often self effacing about his personal appearance. At a recent rally he apologised to his adoring crowd as he saw himself in the monitor, “wow, would you look at that” he joked, referring to his extreme comb over, “now that is a work of art.” This is why his followers love him because he talks to them like they are his friends. He makes them laugh, he does indeed have charisma, he gives his ‘forgotten’ people a lot of hope and he is the ultimate entertainer.
Other attributes are his patriotism and his amazing determination to withstand the most outrageous attempts to stop him, which surely shows a strength of character rarely seen before on the political stage.
If Donald Trump wins the next election, many will go running for the ‘Beverly’ Hills but others will look upon him as the hero who saved them from crazy woke policies and appalling governance. Times change and Donald J Trump is undeniably the man of our time, like him or loathe him.
“[…] it seems that it may indeed have been an act of divine intervention to keep former President Trump in the running […]”.
I once read a story about a WWII veteran who returned to Normandy, where he had been part of the D-Day invasion. He was poking around in a bunker, in which he found a U.S. helmet that had four bullet holes at the front and four at the back where four rounds had gone clean through it. He recognised the helmet, because he had been wearing it when those holes were made: he had been advancing down a road when a German MG42 opened up – a feared weapon that had a cyclic rate of between 1200 and 1800 rounds per minute – and four 7.92mm rounds struck his helmet, all of which came within less than an inch of blowing his head off as they ventilated his headgear. Was this divine intervention? Was it simply the case that his time had not yet come?
I read another story about a British sniper who served in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. He once took a long shot at one of three I.R.A. men who were unloading weapons from a vehicle. He missed his intended target, but, incredibly, the I.R.A. man took a fatal step backwards just as the bullet arrived – he moved right into it’s path, and was hit and killed. So was this, then, divine intervention? Or was it simply the case that the man’s time had come?
The truth about Donald is that he is, like Peter Dutton in Australia, the “least worst” option. It’s most surprising that not many people in Australia seem to realise this, and that some get caught up, to a certain extent, in reflecting the puzzling need of many in the U.S. to find a suitable champion before whom they can genuflect. (It’s true, of course, that if Donald gets elected, he will work to overturn the damaging woke nonsense that has been inflicted on his country, and for this he will certainly deserve to be commended).
Paul, Why do all these commentators bury in there story “I wasn’t a fan of Trump’s.” or something of the sort’s, having one foot in the other camp for later on?, A contingency plan of sorts, Do they know their subject? Are they a poor judge of character?