John Barron: Why I won’t call Trump barking mad, but I’ll happily say he’s a ‘moron’

John Barron has been co-host of Planet America – with Chas Licciardello – for the past 12 years. He is the author of a book on the history of US presidential politics since the 1960s, Vote For me! The Long Road to the White House, and has interviewed dozens of presidential candidates, including Joe Biden. I spoke to him on Wednesday.

Fitz: John, thank you for making the time for this. Taking it from the top, we all knew Chas from The Chaser as a politically active comedic figure but where did you pop up from?

JB: [Laughing.] I’d been mostly in radio, doing 2GB in the ’90s, ABC in the early 2000s and then one of the hosts of The Drum for a couple of years before we started doing Planet in 2012. But yes, I certainly didn’t get arrested at APEC while dressed like Osama bin Laden, as Chas did in 2007 ...

Planet America’s John Barron: “You really can’t find valid comparisons to [Trump] in the history of American politics.”Credit:

Fitz: Planet America really took off with the rise of Donald Trump for the 2016 election. It was a terrible shock for most pundits and punters alike when he beat Hillary Clinton, but did you see it coming?

JB: No. Based on my knowledge of American political history, there was absolutely no chance that Trump could win the election in 2016 and that’s still my answer today. It defied rationality. It defied historical precedent and it was a shock to me, as were the four years when he was president. But of course because he is such a breaker of precedents and norms, he is such an atypical presidential character, you really can’t find valid comparisons to him in the history of American politics. So part of me still doesn’t believe that Donald Trump, this reality TV star, six-time bankrupt real estate tycoon – who managed to go broke running casinos – somehow tapped into the zeitgeist of grievance and nostalgia for a remembered past that, if it ever existed, only existed for a very small slice of white male America in the 1950s.

Fitz: In discussing Trump, it is obvious to me, and I say it loudly and proudly, he is barking mad. He’s a danger to shipping, a disgrace, who embarrasses America. I say such things ad nauseam to anyone who will listen. Do you agree, and if so, as an ABC journalist/ commentator, do you feel any constraint in saying so?

JB: [Slight pause.] That’s an interesting one. On the show, it is important for us to point out when Trump or anybody does something that is outlandish, outrageous, ridiculous, untrue or inflammatory, historically unparalleled and even dangerous. So I’ll say all of those things. I won’t tend to say that Donald Trump is barking mad. I will happily say that he’s “a f---ing moron”. When I say that, though there are quote marks around it, because that’s, that’s what his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, called him. And I’ll say he’s a “f---ing idiot” because that’s how [Rupert] Murdoch described Trump. I think it is worth repeating that these are the assessments of the people who know him a lot better than I do.

Barron and Chas Licciardello on the set of the ABC’s Planet America.Credit: Brendan Esposito

Fitz: OK. I accept that you cannot fill a 30-minute show with hand-wringing or vicious criticism. But I can say that I passionately hope that Trump is humiliated by Kamala Harris at this next election. Do you share my sentiment?

JB: Do I think more highly of America if Kamala Harris is elected this year than if Donald Trump is? I guess I probably would. Harris is not perfect by any means, but she definitely represents a more optimistic view of the future, with America as the “shining city on a hill”, as Reagan once said. And I think America at its best is like that, optimistic and forward-looking, rather than the angry politics of resentment which is inward looking, negative and wanting to kick out illegal immigrants and many legal immigrants while they’re at it, just because they don’t like them. That is represented by the likes of Trump and before him, Richard Nixon, bitter and twisted characters who brought out that side of America’s nature. So, yeah, I think, like many Australians, I’m more comfortable with the positive, happy America.

Fitz: That is, if I may say, very insightful. But whatever else, Nixon was politically skilled, and not obviously ham-fisted and bat shit crazy. In just 24 hours recently, Trump gate-crashed the sanctity of Arlington Cemetery with garish campaign fare, said he’d sack all the generals who were too “woke” and committed another shocking atrocity that I have now – admittedly typically, because there are so many – forgotten. Like many, I simply do not understand how somebody with his track record, a convicted felon, who continually ticks off new groups of society to mortally offend – can even still be in the race, let alone still close in the polls. Can you explain?

JB: It is hard to explain what has happened to traditional, mainstream Republican conservatives of the Reagan era, and work out how evangelical Christians can look at Donald Trump and say, “Yep, he’s our guy”. But he has come along at a time when Americans are gradually losing their religious faith. The churches that still survive tend to be more extreme. So the kind of comfortable middle class we’re used to, are now filling up their lives with different forms of belief systems, one of which is embracing conspiracy theories and Trump is firmly in that world: anti-government; don’t believe in 9/11; don’t believe in Sandy Hook; the government is our enemy and lies to us; it takes all of our tax money and tells us what to do and then calls us racist. Trump is a prophet, if not a messiah, for that movement – and day to day events don’t change that.

Fitz: That’s fascinating.

Barron was a presenter for ABC News Radio before moving to Planet America.Credit: SMH

JB: I find the whole thing fascinating. The fact that Trump playing a businessman on The Apprentice for 13 seasons was enough of a qualification for the presidency – when previously you had to at least be a war hero like Ike Eisenhower, or have served as a governor or a senator – is amazing. Trump is the first American president not to have previously been a political or military office holder. That also tells you something about what people now value. In troubled times, people throughout history have been attracted to strong political figures, strong men, and that is what he is skilled at projecting.

Fitz: I would say, he used to be. The great TV news and current affairs guru Peter Meakin once said to me that Sam Newman was the most compelling man on Australian television because he was dangerous and you didn’t know what he was going to say next. Trump used to be like that, but I now find him unwatchable, and in the debate, he was a train wreck – a cross between meandering slandering and tightly targeted vile bile. He seems to me to have lost that edge and the whole act is very tired.

JB: I think you’re absolutely right, that element of danger is mostly gone. He reminds me a little bit of late-career Don Rickles. He’s like an insult comedian, who was saying the same things on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show that he’d been saying on The Dean Martin Show decades earlier. It loses impact. On the other hand, Rickles was still selling out Caesar Palace up until his 90th birthday, and there are still a lot of people who can never get enough of that kind of stuff.

Fitz: But the debate was such a disaster for Trump, that it surely should have seen Caesar’s Palace give him a “don’t come Monday”?

JB: It depends on your initial view of Trump. If you think that he is an absolute buffoon then you’re cheering from the rafters to see a strong, intelligent woman like Kamala Harris say the things to his face that you’ve been wanting people to say to his face for almost a decade. But if you’re a Trump supporter, and you move your lips along with all of his catchphrases at his rallies, you just see an image of strength and defiance. You don’t really follow the word salad. You don’t pick the logic. All you see is somebody who you think is on your side and is a fighter and a winner, and he’s going to be better for the economy because he’s rich, and he’s going to make us all rich. That’s the fundamental kind of gut check. So that’s the polarisation of politics, where people are not objective any more, which I guess is where I come back to that’s where we need to stay as objective as possible, and not get carried away by viewing somebody in a completely negative light or completely positive light.

Fitz: Well, I say that anybody who launched “stop the steal,” to try and steal the election for himself, who launched January 6 and all the rest, by any objective measure is a disgrace. And I make no apology for saying one’s journalistic duty is to say so say out loud. It reminds me of that old chestnut, “If some people say it’s sunny and some people say it’s raining, your job as a journalist is not to report both. Your job is to open the window, put your head out the window, and report the truth”, I say that the truth on Trump is that he’s a disgrace.

JB: You might feel that’s the truth. Others would say that’s a that’s a subjective opinion. When it came to Trump’s attempts at overturning the 2020 election, the things that he did in terms of challenging that in the courts were legal. But plenty of Republicans do agree with you that Trump is a disgrace, as do plenty of people who worked with him in the White House, and yet they sit quietly by because they want the power. They want their careers to be extended and opposing Trump in the Republican Party is no way forward.

Fitz: OK, let’s go to the nitty-gritty. When I interviewed Chas Licciardello a year or two ago, he said that if Trump gets the Republican nomination, he’s a 75 per cent chance of winning. Well, we now know he does have the Republican nomination, so what’s your estimate?

JB: It’s very hard to say, Peter. He was successful in 2016 and successful so far this year by running as the grievance candidate. But the thing about Kamala Harris is that since she has come in so suddenly, she has managed to create around her the aura of representing change – so the discontent that people were feeling with persistent high inflation in the United States and concerns about Joe Biden’s fitness, well, those things don’t matter so much with Harris. She’s tapped into more of the mood of 2008 in the Obama election, than, say, 2016 where Hillary Clinton was yet another Clinton – even though there was an historical aspect to Hillary’s candidacy as the first female nominee of a major party. Harris hasn’t tapped into that at all, and she’s not talking about gender, she’s not talking about race. She is talking about the future, with an air of optimism. So she’s suddenly now Obama meets Ronald Reagan – “it’s morning in America”, rather than the cranky old guy who represents the political divisions of the past. For that reason, I would say that Harris is the odds-on favourite right now. But we’ve already been surprised a number of times by Donald Trump’s appeal to lots and lots of Americans, so ...

Fitz: All right. Andrew Denton told me recently that while the count was on for the 2020 election and everyone was saying it was a Trump landslide, he texted Chas in dismay, only for Chas to say, something like, “No, when you cross-reference the votes from Colon-Prod, Idaho, with Redneck, Alabama, Biden’s got this.” And he was hours before the tide did indeed turn. Do you have that same sort of intimate knowledge of the whole enchilada?

JB: [Laughs.] We did feel it was coming. We’d been talking for weeks on the program about how there would be a “Red Mirage” on election day because many states have laws that say you have to count and release the votes actually cast on election day itself before you can start counting pre poll, absentee and postal votes – often done by working-class voters who can’t get away during the actual day – so there would be this tsunami of Democratic votes that would be counted, and that this was going to be particularly acute in some of those battleground states. And that is exactly what happened.

Fitz: All right, last question, let’s see how good you are. It takes 270 Electoral College votes to become the President of the United States. When it’s all said and done, how many do you think Kamala Harris will get?

Fitz: She could run up the score and get around 306 Electoral College votes. But if she doesn’t win Pennsylvania and a couple of others, she could end up with about 262.

Fitz: If Trump wins, do you fear for America and the world?

JB: If Trump wins, it’s not so much a re-election as a relapse. And just like last time – because institutions are strong, allies are strong and alliances are strong – there will be enough resistance to avoid disaster, and I’m not convinced that he will do that much damage.

Fitz: I am. But, thank you.

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