Like it or not, Donald Trump nails it on immigration and climate
Whether it’s using tariffs to force policy change, occasionally using US military force to devastating effect, or telling the world – bluntly – what it very much needs to hear, he is deploying every instrument in a president’s power to reorient his country and the wider world in what he thinks is a better direction.
His speech to the UN was devastating to the climate activist ecosystem that has enjoyed 30 years of grifting courtesy of taxpayers that it has bludgeoned into submission and the indoctrinated generations that grow in its woke funding pipeline. I doubt there has ever been a more powerful public denunciation of what Trump regards as the two most insidious failures of modern public policy: namely, destroying energy sovereignty in an attempt to combat climate change; and allowing barely controlled mass migration, notionally because of the economists’ Ponzi scheme of “any growth is good”, but in reality because governing elites in the West have become morally queasy about their own Judaeo-Christian foundations.
Trump’s speech wasn’t so much a salvo as it was a bunker-busting bomb at the very epicentre of a global governance structure that is crippling Western civilisation.
It was a direct repudiation of the two policy directions that have been at the heart of the left’s agenda; that have been partially accepted even by much of the mainstream right; and that have massively accelerated over the past decade, especially in the Anglosphere, and including in Australia under the Albanese government.
Perhaps it’s because our Prime Minister senses that his US counterpart is the antithesis of almost everything he holds dear and is working towards that it has taken him so long to arrange any face-to-face contact; in contrast, with his apparent greater comfort with the current leadership of communist China.
First, climate change. Trump skewered the UN on the consistency of so-called expert scaremongering that has become increasingly hysterical over time but rarely accurate. He pointed to the UN’s own 1982 declaration that “by the year 2000, climate change would cause a global catastrophe”. First, he said, it was “global cooling will kill the world, we have to do something, then they started saying global warming will kill the world, so then it started getting cooler, so they called it climate change. And so that way whether it goes higher or lower or whatever the hell happens, it’s climate change. It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.”
Directly addressing the current leaders of the EU, Britain, Canada and Australia, Trump said: “And I’m telling you if you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail.”
Whack!
Second, and as if he hadn’t already pulled off enough of a rhetorical king hit, he continued on the subject of mass immigration: “And if you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail. I’m the President of the United States but I worry about Europe. I love Europe. I love the people of Europe, and I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration. This double-tailed monster destroys everything in its wake and they cannot let this happen any longer. You’re doing it because you want to be nice, you want to be politically correct and you’re destroying your heritage.”
Pow!
Because this was a precision assault on the two great political pieties of our time, there will be a furious reaction. But because what Trump is saying is essentially true, just possibly this could be the wake-up call the West needs. We can but hope.
As Trump said: “I just want to repeat that immigration and the high cost of green renewable energy is destroying a large part of the free world and a large part of the planet. Countries that cherish freedom are fading fast because of their policies on these two subjects. You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.”
Because what Trump has said is so totally at odds with the animating instincts of the Western political establishment, there will be a renewed and even more concerted effort to ridicule the man and to destroy his presidency. Initially, at least, this speech will feed the narrative that Trump is a Neanderthal throwback. But because the so-called green transition is going so badly in all the countries that are taking it seriously and because there are few citizens, particularly in the Anglosphere, who aren’t asking themselves “How is this happening to my country?”, Trump’s speech will resonate.
In the short term, it will present a dilemma for Anthony Albanese, whose government has presided over three years of historically high immigration and who has just announced hyper-ambitious economy-wrecking and society-changing emissions reductions targets for 2035. Almost inevitably, he will say that the problems the President highlighted don’t apply to Australia, even though they clearly do. Given he has only just secured a formal meeting with Trump on October 20, Albanese will not want to jeopardise it by directly disagreeing with the President’s blistering critique of what is Australia’s current policy direction, no less than that of Britain and Europe. And he won’t want to have AUKUS cancelled on the spot by a President disgusted by the weakness of his Australian interlocutor. But whatever the public pleasantries, Trump’s message is at odds with our Prime Minister’s entire public life, and that has grave potential consequences for our US alliance.
But it’s also at odds with much of the Liberal Party, too, and the British Conservatives. After the previous Coalition government initially scrapped the carbon tax and declared that the emissions obsession was over, the Liberals reversed course under Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, eventually adopting net zero on the grounds that it would be damaging to our international standing and harmful to chances of regaining teal seats not to take climate change seriously.
Not only has lurching left failed to make a scrap of difference in teal seats but it also has cost the Libs credibility with conservatives, as the recent 27 primary vote in Newspoll makes plain.
And while the opposition’s disastrous defeat was mostly due to its lack of policy fight, Labor pinning the Trump-lite label on Peter Dutton didn’t help because the Trump style doesn’t often play well outside the American heartland. The Coalition base, already restive at Sussan Ley’s lack of policy direction, will be further fired up by this latest Trump broadside, even though his MAGA movement won’t directly translate into successful politics here, given our somewhat different culture, institutional structures and voting system. But the challenge for the Coalition is to take his message in his words and recraft a platform that’s radically different to the current Labor-lite offering focused on the potent beachheads of energy and immigration.
Still, a fortnight after global conservatism was rocked by the public execution of Charlie Kirk, Trump’s response has been an eviscerating attack on everything Kirk was trying to stop.
Make no mistake, like the man or not, this is a speech for the ages.
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Donald J. Trump understands two things: first, that much of what has been happening in the modern West is economic and societal suicide; and second, that there’s no office in the world with more power to change it than the US presidency. And on Tuesday at the UN in New York he made it patently clear that he’s not going to die wondering whether he could have made a difference.