Tim Blair: Albo should be scared, we need to join Trump’s ride

To hell with the scolds and the wimps, the haters and the losers. Donald Trump has changed the way politics works, writes Tim Blair.

Donald Trump has changed the way politics works. He has proved that conventional assessments of electoral risk and gain no longer apply.

Trump has done this by taking his ideas straight to voters rather than filtering them through focus groups or committees, or elite media. His stunningly successful 2024 election campaign provides dramatic evidence that old-fashioned direct democracy is an awesome force.

No easily intimidated, safety-first, climate-frightened politician – which these days is almost every politician on earth – would ever call for, as Trump did at his Republican National Convention in July, hugely expanded fossil fuel mining.

“I will lower the cost of energy,” Trump said. “We will drill, baby, drill.”

For that, Trump was pilloried by all the usual media nancies. But so what? He’s already been vilified throughout the US and internationally as a Nazi, a fascist, a rapist, an appeaser of tyrants and a threat to planetary survival.

Donald Trump has changed the way politics works

And none of it mattered. Donald J. Trump’s re-election as US president is proof that nanny state screamers and their craven press enablers have lost their power.

They went all in on Trump and got absolutely smashed. They were beaten by a guy armed only with a glow tan and a brilliant idea: that regulatory tyranny and the imposition of elite cultural attitudes are poisonous to a free people.

Which brings us to Australia, where we are absolutely dominated by excessive regulations and can’t make a joke without being binned.

Anthony Albanese has previously said that Trump “scares the sh*t out of me”. He’s right to be scared. In fact, Albanese’s entire party and the global leftist bureaucracy should be scared.

Anthony Albanese has previously said that Trump “scares the sh*t out of me”.

Modern leftist power is based on myths and lies. It is dependent on perverse weather beliefs, psychologically corrupting racial and cultural theories and witless anti-Western self-loathing.

Very conveniently for our leftist friends, all of these things somehow always end up requiring bigger and more intrusive government.

That’s the dull, grey, suffocating, tax dependent and obscenely overpaid world of Albo and his crew. They are exactly of a piece with the Washington DC swamp dwellers Trump has vowed to remove.

When you use AI to replace every mention of "our democracy" with "our bureaucracy," everything starts making a lot more sense. pic.twitter.com/XZ65HXfN9H

— Bill D'Agostino (@Banned_Bill) November 5, 2024

(Speaking of whom, pro-Trump US tech guy Bill D’Agostino made a wonderful observation and a wonderful video to go with it: “When you use AI to replace every mention of ‘our democracy’ with ‘our bureaucracy’, everything starts to make a lot more sense.”)

The opportunity for Liberal leader Peter Dutton is to run with Trump’s momentum. Why only aim for nuclear power when Australia is rich to bursting with every other proven and cheap energy source?

Trump rightly boasts of his own nation’s underground wealth, which he seeks to liberate: “We have more liquid gold – oil and gas – we have more liquid gold than any country in the world.”

We need to join this ride. To hell with the scolds and the wimps, the haters and the losers. Drill, Australia, drill.