Joe Hildebrand: How smug elites who dismissed, persecuted and lost to Trump – twice – are doing it all over again
Donald J Trump may or may not be a genius but he is so vastly more intelligent than the supposed intelligentsia it almost changes the meaning of the word, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Opinion
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It is an infallible rule of life that the people who think they are the smartest are always the dumbest. A happy footnote to this iron law is that the people they think are the dumbest keep on outsmarting them.
Exhibit A: Donald J Trump.
Trump may or may not be a genius – I do not share his acolytes’ view that he is Jesus with a spray tan – but he is so vastly more intelligent than the supposed intelligentsia it almost changes the meaning of the word.
The smug tertiary-educated elites who dismissed him, then persecuted him, then lost to him – then dismissed him, then persecuted him, then lost again – are, if you can believe it, doing it all over again.
Er, and again.
There was a nanosecond of soul-searching after the Donald left the lofty toffs temporarily lost for words with his blockbuster comeback last November, but it is clear merely three months later that they have not learnt a thing.
They still hyperventilate with outrage every time he says anything off script and still hyperbolise with planet-ending predictions every time he unfurls a new thought bubble.
The latest is Trump’s plan for Gaza – though the meaning of the word “plan” might also have to be redefined in this context.
Appearing alongside what might best be described as a staunchly bewildered Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump essentially announced that he would like to turn the Gaza Strip into a holiday resort.
This was inspired stuff. For decades, if not millennia, countless foreign policy owls and hot-blooded freedom fighters have viewed the eternal conflict in the Middle East through the lens of religion or politics or military strategy.
Then Trump came along and just looked at it in the best way he knows how: as a property developer.
And as crazy as it seems, it is not that crazy.
On a trip to Israel just a year before the horrors unleashed by the October 7 terror attacks, this was a recurring theme among several people I met.
I was travelling as a guest of the Australian-Israel Jewish Affairs Council, so the formal events were very much curated – though they included very senior pro-Palestinian figures, including the Prime Minister of what is effectively the West Bank.
But my impartiality was not dependent on the itinerary. I have throughout my professional life somehow managed to be an apostate to just about everybody, with the possible exception of the NSW Labor Right.
And one of the odd unscripted things I noticed was a few Israelis marvelling that two million Gazans inhabited some of the best beachfront real estate in the Mediterranean. This was just down the coast from the glitter strip of Tel Aviv. Imagine Bondi Beach as an entire city and Tel Aviv is what you get.
The people I spoke to didn’t want to annex Gaza or attack it – on the contrary, they just wanted to leave it alone in the hope that Gaza would return the favour.
They just couldn’t believe that a place that should be paradise was, according to its own internal propaganda and much of the international community, a supposedly unlikeable hellhole.
Much of this attitude is the story of Israel itself, an immense geopolitical project forged in the ashes of the Holocaust by the order of the same UN that now seems so dedicated to destroying it.
The Arab locals, understandably, objected to this. And waged war after war, which they lost and lost again.
As the arch-fatalist Ned Kelly once said, such is life.
Meanwhile, the vast multinational wealth of skill and intelligence – and, to be fair, actual wealth – of the Jewish diaspora, transformed Israel into a mighty economic and military Western oasis in the Middle East within the space of a generation.
But Trump doesn’t care about that broad and bloody span of history. He’s just looking at a vast stretch of Gazan real estate gold and thinking “How have these guys not turned a profit?”
He is like Lex Luthor in Superman II: “You see, I have this affinity with beachfront property,” Lex says smiling while he tries to strike a deal with General Zod.
“What do you want?” asks Zod.
Luthor responds: “Australia!”
But that is just how Trump’s brain is flickering. It has no bearing on what he intends or even wants to do. Trump just drops bombs – or threatens to – then waits for everyone else to clean up their own mess.
He did it when he threatened all hell against Hamas unless it released the hostages (Spoiler alert: It did) and all hell against Canada unless it agreed to his border demands (Spoiler alert: It did).
All the hand-wringing analysis is pointless. Trump is an unrestrained purebred of bravado and brinkmanship, a man so crazybrave he doesn’t even know if he’s one or the other.
And all the same predictable hysteria from all the same predictable people only strengthens his uncannily successful grip on a new era of madman diplomacy.
Listen to The Real Story with Joe Hildebrand wherever you get your podcasts
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