Friday News Roundup
Global Election News
The biggest foreign political news this week was the recent landslide electoral victory for Australia’s Labor Party last Saturday. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese won a second term in an election season marked by backlash against Donald Trump. Albanese’s opponent, Peter Dutton of the center-right Liberal Party, had been taking his party in a more pro-Trump direction. A spokesperson for Dutton even vowed to “make Australia great again” in a campaign event this April, but the electorate soundly rejected the attempt to recreate MAGA in Australia.
For example, Dutton has taken a page from Trump in campaigning on racial resentment, but in the Australian context, this resentment is focused on the indigenous population. In 2023, Dutton used his position as leader of the opposition to defeat the Voice for Parliament referendum, which would have granted indigenous groups a greater role in Parliament. Dutton has also opposed the flying of indigenous flags alongside Australian flags. When neo-Nazis booed an Australian indigenous elder during an Anzac Day ceremony (Australia’s equivalent of Veteran’s Day), Dutton condemned the booing, but then qualified it by saying events for indigenous people shouldn’t be included in veteran’s ceremonies. But in Saturday’s election, Dutton not only lost his chance to be prime minister; he lost his local seat in Parliament too.
(Side note to keep anybody from getting confused: The Liberal Party in Canada is center-left and anti-Trump, but the Liberal Party in Australia is center-right and pro-Trump.)
On Tuesday, Christian Merz of the center-right Christian Democrats became chancellor of Germany after his party formed a Grand Coalition with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD). The Grand Coalition has successfully maintained the “firewall” against bringing extremist parties into the German government, specifically the Allianz für Deutschland (AfD), which had been officially branded as “extremist” by German’s top domestic intelligence agency as of last Friday. The official designation will now make it easier to monitor AfD and its neo-Nazi ties, but this has not stopped a MAGA Republican-AfD alliance from developing over their shared hatred for immigrants.
The forecast is not as hopeful in Romania, where the pro-Trump hard-right nationalist George Simion won about 41% of the vote in the first round of Romania’s elections on Monday. Nicușor Dan, the centrist mayor of Bucharest who won 2nd place, faces an uphill battle in beating Simion in the election’s second round. Before the election, a Russian hacker group attacked Nicușor Dan’s official campaign website, but yet left Simion’s website untouched. Unsurprisingly, Simion is in favoring of cutting off Romania’s military aid to Ukraine. Simion has also gone on record saying that his party is “almost perfectly aligned with the MAGA movement.”
We Are Ruled by the Worst People
One problem with mainstream news coverage is less about left vs. right bias than about a refusal to confront the reality of how stupid, venal, and unqualified Donald Trump is to be in charge of anything, let alone the presidency. The Narcissist-in-Chief insists on wasting $45 million of our taxpayer money for a military parade with a route that will literally trample on Constitution Avenue, while creating potholes on Washington, DC streets that Trump will of course refuse to repair. Then, there’s the relatively softball ABC News interview where Donald Trump was unable to explain what the Declaration of Independence is, even by using his dim vocabulary knowledge of what “declaration” or “independence” means.
Even worse, when NBC News moderator Kristin Welker asked Donald Trump if he had a duty to uphold the Constitution, Trump said, “I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know.” The duty to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” is literally written into the presidential Oath of Office as spelled out in Article II of the Constitution! On the other hand, Trump literally failed to put his hand on the Bible during his second inaugural ceremony, which I suspect Trump may have done because he thought he found a loophole that would relieve him of the obligation of following the Constitution. I’m so old I even remember that Obama even had to retake the oath of office in 2008 because Chief Justice Robert accidentally flubbed the wording. I wouldn’t put it past Trump to think he’s found an “out” that releases him from having to stay within the bounds of the Constitution.
In yet another flash of idiocy, Donald Trump called for the re-opening of Alcatraz after watching the Clint Eastwood movie, Escape from Alcatraz, on TV. Alcatraz is not only implausible as a new prison; it’s currently eroding away due to the same rising sea levels that Trump has censored from being mentioned on government websites. Trump’s viewing of Escape from Alcatraz on TV also probably inspired his decision to announce a 100% tariff on foreign films. Ironically, the broadcast of the Clint Eastwood film was on a PBS affiliate station, the same institution his recent executive order against “biased media” tried to defund.