Trump’s impeachment acquittal is bad for Democrats, but good for Australia
With the President being cleared of all wrongdoing, the prospect of another Trump term looks more likely than ever. Which can only be good for those of us Down Under, writes James Morrow.
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So, Trump’s triumphant, America’s Democrats have been humiliated, the president’s supporters still aren’t tired of winning … so what does it all mean for Australia?
Particularly now that it’s all but certain we’ve got four and a bit more years dealing with the man the experts said would reduce the planet to a radioactive cinder.
The first thing is to understand that we got here because Trump’s enemies refused to treat him like a normal president – and therefore allowed themselves to get baited into acting entirely abnormal themselves.
And it all came to a head this week when everything caved in for them.
The US Senate rejected the Democrats’ impeachment case over claims the president improperly pressured Ukraine into investigating the Biden family’s business dealings there.
The debacle of the Iowa caucus, whose results may never be known thanks to some as yet undetermined combination of conspiracy and cock-up, called into question the Democrats’ ability to run even a provincial preselection, much less reorganise the entire economy.
And the icing on the cake was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi theatrically tearing up Trump’s State of the Union speech – in which he’d trumpeted strong minority employment figures, made a 100-year-old African-American fighter putt a brigadier general, and reunited a soldier serving in Afghanistan with his family in the audience.
It was not, as they say, a good look.
The second, and more important thing, to understand is that particularly when it comes to foreign policy, Trump has turned out to be a lot better than the sorts of alternatives on offer.
Were a radical leftist like Bernie Sanders to take the White House and cripple the American economy with socialism and high taxes, we’d pay the price – and our dependence on China, already too great, would grow as Beijing moved to take up the slack left by a moribund US.
(Incidentally, Sanders is probably the best hope to take the White House for the Democrats because – despite being as far to the left as Trump is to the right – he speaks the same language of nation and community. This scares the pants off elite, globalised liberals from Manhattan and Silicon Valley and the Washington Beltway, which is exactly why they would rather spend four years in the wilderness complaining about Trump at dinner parties than let Bernie anywhere near the reins of power).
Meanwhile, were a Democrat such as Elizabeth Warren, whose foreign policy talk has been half about pushing back on bad guys and half pulling back to save money, to come into power, the world could see a return to sort of confused and costly interventionism that made the world far more dangerous under Barack Obama.
And if billionaire presidential wannabe Mike Bloomberg manages, somehow, to spend enough to lever Trump out of the Oval Office, it would be bad news all the way down.
Bloomberg’s long business history in China suggests he would seek to appease Beijing at almost any cost – something that would give the green light to the People’s Liberation Army’s expansionist push through the South China Sea and beyond.
To say this would be bad for Australia is an understatement.
So, four more years? We could do a lot worse.
James Morrow is Opinion Editor of The Daily Telegraph.