Two different brands of craziness make Donald Trump’s US election victory easy for Australians to understand | David Penberthy

Donald Trump is not fit to govern but one idea he’s pushed since winning the right to warms the cockles of my heart, writes David Penberthy. Vote in the poll.

Enough columns have been written about Donald Trump’s victory to sink a battleship. I don’t intend to add further weight here.

This column does however involve references to boats, not of the battleship variety but a kayak in an Australian mangrove and an airboat in a Louisiana swamp.

It is a weird meditation on competing approaches to freedom, told through the prism of two encounters at sea.

Some years ago I was having a paddle in one of my favourite places in my hometown, the Torrens Island mangroves near Port Adelaide.

You can see dolphins as you paddle around and there is a great stretch of water known as the Ship’s Graveyard where rusted hulks have been scuttled and are home to fish and crabs. The water is shallow and warm.

I was paddling on my own on a weekday when a guy in a tinny started waving at me shouting. I thought he might be in strife but as he got closer I realised he was shouting the acronym “PFD”. He was angry.

I asked him what the problem was and he told me that I was breaking the law by failing to wear my personal flotation device. I responded that I had one in my kayak but given that I was a 50-year-old man who was on his own, without his kids, knew how to swim and was paddling in less than two feet of water, I didn’t think I needed to wear one at all times, especially on a stinking hot day.

US President-elect Donald Trump gestures while speaking during a meeting with House Republicans at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Washington, DC. Picture: Allison Robbert / AFP

“They are compulsory at all times!” he shouted.

“Mate I could get out and walk here!” I replied.

“You have to put your PFD on or you will be fined.”

Every fibre of me wanted to respond with a two word reply, the first word being “get”. But I dutifully put the thing on lest I incur the full wrath of this busybody protecting me from absolutely nothing.

In passing, what kind of a pedant calls a life jacket a PFD?

Anyway. I met this guy in Louisiana a few years back. I mentioned him in a column once before but want to devote more time to him here, as he’s not only the one-man personification of what happened in the US last Tuesday, but a neat human symbol of a purist’s approach to freedom.

I met him about an hour out of New Orleans (where everyone votes Democrat) in the swampland town of Jean Lafitte (where everyone votes Republican as they do in the rest of rural Louisiana).

This bloke had bolted a V8 engine out of an old Chevy to a giant flatbed piece of steel and made his own airboat. He had welded the whole thing together attached to a giant fan.

He was covered in tatts and wearing a bandana. He was chewing tobacco and spitting it into the water. He had beers in his icebox. He drove like a maniac.

He had worked out that alligators loved marshmallows. He had a bag of marshmallows on the airboat and took us to a spot where they would wait for him to arrive. He leant out of the airboat fully stretched over the water, and a huge gator popped its head up waiting for the marshmallow.

It opened his mouth and tossed one into its gaping gob, then patted it on the head as if it was his pet dog.

Needless to say, he wasn’t wearing a PFD.

How many laws would this bloke be breaking in Australia do you think? Easily double figures.

I asked the guy if he’d always lived on the Bayou and he said “yessir always have and always will”.

He said that down here you can fish, hunt, smoke, drink, and concluded with the line: “Ain’t no-one here going to tell me what to do”.

Meanwhile in Australia a grown man can be cowed by a floating bureaucrat into putting on his PFD while kayaking in 12 inches of water.

Many readers asked me last week how I could write a column berating the Democrats for abandoning working people and embracing faddish PC nonsense yet not endorse a vote for Trump.

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The short answer is that I support Ukraine, don’t like insurrections staged by people who’ve lost elections and know that tariffs make everything more expensive.

Most of all I don’t think any man who’s boasted about grabbing women on the “p****” to use his putrid term is fit to hold any office.

But when I heard Trump talking last week about making government smaller it warmed the cockles of my heart.

David Penberthy and his mate from the Bayou. Picture: Supplied

Garden Island, Adelaide. Picture: Tourism Australia

And it made me think about my encounters with these two seafarers, the Australian bureaucrat and the tobacco-chewing American buccaneer.

There’s a lot to be said for the credo “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

It can of course lead to problems of compliance when united public action is need in the face of genuine threats, such as the onset of a pandemic.

The hard-wired response of many Americans to the sensible suggestion that they get vaccinated and avoid crowds at the start of Covid was to say, well, if that’s what government is telling me to do, I’ll do the opposite as a matter of principle.

Crazy, but here in Australia we saw another brand of crazy, where state power increased and remained ludicrously extended after the threat had passed.

Government became giddy on power, with people like my PFD mangrove mate getting their jollies bossing people around.

No, you can’t play golf. No, you can’t take your kids to the playground. No, you can’t open your business.

With the benefit of hindsight I’m not sure which approach was worse.

And whatever qualms we might have about the return of the Donald, the prospect of government becoming less obtrusive is something many of us cheer on, regardless of whether we’re getting told off in an Australian mangrove or having the time of our lives in an American swamp.

Originally published as Two different brands of craziness make Donald Trump’s US election victory easy for Australians to understand | David Penberthy