Labor True Believers, Political Analysis and Satire

01/09/2026

01/09/2026

Freshly minted NEM data shows solar-charged batteries discharging at record levels, helping lower wholesale prices and steadily reducing the grid’s dependence on peaky and expensive gas generation.

01/09/2026

Some inconvenient truths about Trump’s Iran war

By Walt Zlotow

The United States effectively lost the war with Iran within the first three days, when the attack that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei failed to bring about the collapse of the Iranian regime.

Bombing Iran for 39 days was a catastrophic military failure. Iran’s retaliatory defense decimated all 20 US Gulf State bases inflicting over 750 US casualties, including 18 dead.

Running out of both offensive and defensive missiles, Trump blinked first and called for a ceasefire on April 8, war day 40.

The June 17th signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was essentially a US surrender document.

Realizing the MOU signaled his defeat, Trump simply ignored it, implemented a blockade and resumed periodic bombing. Both utterly failed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to resume the critical flow of oil to prevent worldwide economic calamity.

Having been sucker punched with bombs twice by Trump during negotiations, Iran has signaled it will never negotiate with Trump during his remaining 2 years, 5 months in office.

Trump’s statements that Iran is negotiating surrender on Trump’s terms, the Strait is open, and will become US territory, the blockade is a resounding success, the oil is flowing, are so detached from reality one must ponder Trump’s sanity.

Refusal to capitulate is spreading the war within the region to Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, West Bank, Iraq, Syria, possibly even Turkey v. Israel.

If Trump’s last gasp is to utterly destroy Iranian infrastructure, Iran will retaliate and destroy the entire Gulf States oil infrastructure and possibly Israel’s infrastructure as well.

Unlike for the US, Trump’s war is an existential threat to Iran’s existence. They have been preparing for the US-Israeli tag team war machine to destroy them for decades. They are and will prevail regardless of the cost.

Israel will do whatever is necessary to keep Trump in the war to destroy Iran. Trump’s only way out is to sever ties with Israel and capitulate to Iran’s sensible terms. Given Trump’s history, the chances of that are nil. Removing Republican control of Congress in 9 weeks may be only chance for America to avoid economic collapse.

But only if a Democratic Congress has the wisdom, decency and good sense to end the most self destructive war in America’s 251 years.

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL

01/09/2026

FULL REPORT -AUSTRALIA'S BROKEN POWER INDUSTRY

(5 minute read)

We Were Promised Cheaper Power. Instead, We Sold the Family Silver — It’s Time to Take Electricity Back

For more than 30 years, Australians have been sold the same economic fairy tale: privatise the electricity industry, introduce competition and household power bills will come down. Governments were told that private companies would be more efficient, competition would drive prices lower and consumers would be the big winners. At the same time, governments could pocket billions from selling public assets and use the money to pay down debt or fund other priorities. It was presented as economic common sense, and anyone questioning the sell-off was often dismissed as being stuck in the past.

But after three decades, Australians have every right to ask what happened to the great promise of cheaper electricity.

Because the electricity market we ended up with is hardly the efficient, competitive paradise that was advertised. Australians face complicated power bills, confusing retail plans, network charges, wholesale-market volatility and prices that can place enormous pressure on household budgets. Governments still have to regulate the industry, intervene when markets fail, provide assistance when electricity becomes unaffordable and invest heavily in the infrastructure required to keep the system operating.

Meanwhile, private companies continue to make money from an essential service that every Australian household and business is forced to purchase.

At some point, we have to admit that the experiment deserves to be reconsidered.
We sold public assets and then watched the bills continue to rise

Let’s be honest about what privatisation actually means. When governments sell an electricity generator, network or other public asset, the Australian public receives the sale proceeds once. The government gets its cheque, the money can be used to reduce debt or fund other spending, and politicians can announce that they have delivered a successful asset sale.

But the asset doesn't disappear.

It continues producing electricity. It continues generating revenue. It continues charging customers. It continues to have economic value for decades.

The difference is that after privatisation, that income no longer belongs to the public.

Instead, some of the money paid by Australian households and businesses can ultimately become private revenue and shareholder returns.

That is the part of the privatisation debate that has too often been ignored. Governments were happy to celebrate the billions received when the assets were sold, but Australians should also ask how much income those assets could have generated had they remained publicly owned.

We didn't just sell power stations and electricity networks. We sold future income.

And once those assets were gone, buying them back became far more expensive.
Electricity isn't an ordinary commodity

The defenders of privatisation often talk about competition as though electricity is the same as buying a television, a pair of shoes or a takeaway meal. If one retailer charges too much for those products, consumers can walk across the road and buy them somewhere else.

Electricity doesn't work like that.

You cannot decide to have a different set of power poles outside your house because you don't like the price charged by the company operating your local network. You cannot build your own transmission network to compete with the existing grid. In many parts of the system, consumers are effectively dependent upon infrastructure that functions as a natural monopoly.

That should have been a warning before these assets were sold.

Instead, governments created a system where private businesses could own critical infrastructure while governments remained responsible for regulating them and consumers remained responsible for paying them.

We then built an enormous regulatory framework around the private market to try to make sure those companies did not abuse their monopoly position.

Think about how absurd that is. We sold the public asset, handed control to private interests and then created an army of regulators to make sure the private owners behaved in the public interest.

Perhaps the original idea was flawed.
Where is the promised competition?

The electricity retail market has certainly produced competition between retailers, but competition between retailers is not the same thing as competition over the infrastructure itself.

Australians can spend hours comparing electricity plans, searching for discounts and trying to understand complicated tariffs, but underneath all those competing brands sits the same physical electricity system.

The poles are still the poles. The wires are still the wires. The transmission infrastructure is still the transmission infrastructure.

What has changed is who owns it and who receives the financial return.

And this is where the ideology of privatisation runs into the reality of essential services. Private businesses have every right to seek profits. That is how capitalism works. But when the commodity being sold is something every household and business absolutely requires, governments have to ask whether maximising private returns should really be the overriding objective.

Why should the Australian public have to pay private shareholders a return simply for accessing infrastructure that was once owned by the Australian public?

That is a legitimate question, and it deserves a serious answer.
The consumer was supposed to be the winner

The great political justification for privatisation was always the consumer.

We were told that private companies would compete for customers, reduce costs and innovate. Lower costs would supposedly flow through to households and businesses.

Yet when Australians open their electricity bills, many are not thinking about the wonders of competition. They are thinking about how they are going to pay the bill.

Of course, not every dollar of a modern electricity bill can be blamed on privatisation. International fuel prices, the transition away from coal, renewable investment, transmission infrastructure, weather events and broader energy-market conditions all matter. Anyone claiming otherwise is oversimplifying a complicated industry.

But that is not the point.

The point is that privatisation was sold as part of the solution.

If private ownership was unable to deliver the cheaper electricity Australians were promised, then why should we continue treating private ownership as the unquestionable answer?
Look at what happened when governments kept ownership

Australia provides an interesting comparison because not every state followed exactly the same path.

Some states went much further in selling electricity assets than others, while Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania retained significant public ownership in parts of their electricity systems. The experiences are not identical, and there are plenty of factors beyond ownership that influence prices, but the differences demonstrate that Australia did not have to follow a single privatisation model.

That matters because it destroys the idea that selling electricity infrastructure was inevitable.

It wasn't.

It was a political choice.

And if it was a political choice, it can be reconsidered.
The energy transition gives us another chance

There is now an even bigger reason to rethink the ownership model.

Australia is entering a massive transformation of its electricity system. Coal-fired power stations are ageing, renewable generation is expanding rapidly, batteries are becoming increasingly important, transmission networks need enormous investment and governments are planning for an electricity system that will look dramatically different from the one we inherited.

Billions upon billions of dollars will be invested over the coming decades.

The question Australians should be asking now is who should own the infrastructure of that future?

Do we want to repeat the mistakes of the past by allowing strategic public infrastructure to be transferred into private hands, only to spend decades regulating it and watching the revenue flow elsewhere?

Or do we finally learn the lesson and make sure Australians retain ownership of the infrastructure being built with enormous amounts of public money?

This is where governments have an opportunity to change direction.

Instead of simply subsidising private investment, governments can build public renewable-energy projects, expand publicly owned generation, invest in storage and retain strategic ownership of transmission infrastructure. They can create publicly owned electricity corporations capable of competing in the market while operating under strict transparency and performance requirements.

The energy transition could become the beginning of a new era of public ownership rather than another round of asset sales.
Bringing power back into public hands doesn't mean confiscation

There will inevitably be people who hear the word "nationalisation" and immediately imagine governments marching into private companies and taking their assets.

That isn't what a sensible policy needs to mean.

Australia could progressively rebuild public ownership over decades. Governments could purchase strategic assets when they come onto the market, acquire infrastructure when existing concessions expire, establish new publicly owned generation capacity and use public investment to build the electricity infrastructure Australia needs for the future.

Assets could be purchased through negotiated transactions rather than confiscated.

Yes, it would cost money.

But so did privatisation.

The difference is that instead of spending billions simply subsidising or supporting private infrastructure, the public would acquire assets that continue to generate economic value.

We would be buying something that Australians could own for generations.
Imagine if the profits stayed in Australia

Imagine an electricity system in which a greater share of the returns generated by generation, transmission and distribution remained in public hands.

That money could help finance new infrastructure. It could support investment in renewable generation and storage. It could strengthen the national grid. It could reduce the need for taxpayers to continually provide subsidies to private projects. And, with the right policy framework, it could ultimately put downward pressure on the cost of providing electricity.

Instead of asking how much profit can be extracted from Australian electricity consumers, governments could ask how much value can be returned to Australian consumers.

That is a completely different philosophy.

It changes the purpose of the electricity system from "How much money can this asset make?" to "How much value can this asset deliver to Australia?"
This isn't about socialism. It's about common sense.

The argument for public ownership should not be dismissed as some ideological battle between socialism and capitalism.

Australia already accepts that certain essential infrastructure should have a strong public role. Governments build roads, hospitals, water infrastructure, schools, ports and other strategic assets because they understand that some things are too important to leave entirely to the pursuit of private profit.

Electricity belongs in that conversation.

Private businesses can still play a role. They can build projects, manufacture equipment, develop technology and compete for contracts. There is no reason to eliminate private enterprise from the electricity sector.

But ownership of strategic infrastructure is a different question from participation in the market.

Australia can have private companies competing within an electricity system while the Australian people retain ownership of the infrastructure that is too important to surrender.
The great privatisation experiment deserves a verdict

For decades, politicians told Australians that privatisation was necessary because government was supposedly incapable of running modern businesses. We were told that private ownership would bring efficiency, competition and cheaper prices.

After decades of experience, we should stop treating those promises as economic scripture.

The evidence does not show that private ownership automatically produces cheaper electricity. It certainly does not justify the claim that selling public electricity assets was some guaranteed pathway to lower household bills.

And if the promised benefits never materialised to the extent Australians were told they would, then there is nothing radical about reconsidering the policy.

What is radical is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.

Australia has already sold much of the family silver. We should not make the mistake of selling what remains.

Instead, governments should develop a long-term strategy to rebuild public ownership of strategic electricity infrastructure, particularly as Australia spends enormous sums constructing the energy system of the future.

The objective should not be to create another inefficient government bureaucracy. It should be to create a modern, commercially disciplined public electricity sector that operates transparently, competes where appropriate and ultimately answers to the Australian public rather than shareholders.

Because when an Australian family turns on the lights, they shouldn't be thinking about international shareholders, corporate profits or complicated market structures. They should be able to expect something much simpler: reliable electricity at a price ordinary Australians can afford.

For three decades, we were told privatisation would deliver that.

It hasn't delivered enough.

So perhaps it is time to stop defending the experiment and start learning from it.

Australia is a wealthy, resource-rich nation. We have the sun, the wind, the technology and the resources to build one of the world's great energy systems. What we need now is the political courage to ensure that system belongs, at least in its strategic foundations, to the people who ultimately pay for it.

We were told selling the electricity system would make Australians better off.

After 30 years, perhaps the time has come to buy back what we should never have sold.

31/08/2026

Pauline Hanson Can Dish It Out — But Apparently Can’t Take It

Pauline Hanson has discovered something rather inconvenient this week: free speech applies to her political opponents too.

After Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers used speeches to attack One Nation’s politics as “dangerous”, “divisive” and “dishonest”, Hanson immediately reached for the alarm button crying foul , claiming their words could incite political violence.

Really, Pauline?

Is this the same Pauline Hanson who has spent decades building a political career by telling Australians exactly what she thinks about Muslims, migrants, multiculturalism, political correctness, governments, activists, unions and anyone else who happens to wander into the firing line?

The same Pauline Hanson whose Please Explain series of videos had a video mocking the NDIAS with offensive depictions of people with a disability which was condemned, with advocates calling for Hanson to remove the video and apologise. In another video she has falsely accused Penny Wong of organising voter fraud, claimed dead people were voting, and that postal votes being stolen out of letterboxes causing the AEC to lodge complaints about the video with leading social media companies saying there was no evidence of that the level of apparent multiple voting has ever been sufficient to overturn the margin in any one contest.

Apparently free speech is a wonderful thing when Pauline Hanson is using it.

But when the Prime Minister exercises exactly the same right and criticises her politics, suddenly the rhetoric is dangerous, and somebody needs to call the authorities.

That isn't a defence of free speech. That is free speech with conditions attached: Pauline gets to speak, everyone else gets a muzzle.

And perhaps Ms Hanson needs reminding that criticism is not incitement, but with her lack of education she wouldn't know that.

Calling a political movement divisive is not an instruction to attack its members. Calling political rhetoric dangerous is not a declaration of war. Politicians in a democracy are allowed to criticise each other — sometimes very harshly. Indeed, they should be.

If Hanson genuinely believes that words have consequences, then perhaps she should apply that principle to her own words.

Because this is the same One Nation leader who has argued that Australia should become a monoculture. A monoculture, apparently, is preferable to the messy, complicated and wonderfully diverse Australia that actually exists.

And what exactly is divisive about telling millions of Australians from different cultural and religious backgrounds that their Australia isn't the Australia Pauline Hanson wants?

Of course it is divisive.

If a mainstream political leader stood up and declared that Australians of a particular religion or immigrant background didn't belong in the national community, Hanson would almost certainly be among the first to complain.

Yet when Hanson does the political equivalent herself, it is somehow rebranded as “telling the truth”.

Sorry, Pauline. It doesn't work that way.

You cannot spend years throwing verbal grenades into Australia's political debate and then suddenly discover the virtues of sensitivity when one comes flying back in your direction.

This is becoming something of a pattern.

Hanson says something inflammatory.
People object.
Hanson is criticised.
Hanson declares that she is being attacked, silenced, persecuted or misrepresented.

And then comes the familiar retreat — from the political warrior who wants to take on Canberra to the wounded trembling voice suggesting that everyone is being terribly unfair to her.

Ms Hanson, politics is not a padded room.

If you want to occupy the political battlefield, expect to be challenged. If you want to make provocative statements, expect journalists to scrutinise them. If you want to accuse established political parties of betraying Australians, expect those parties to fight back.

And if you want to tell Australians that immigration is destroying the country, that multiculturalism is a failure and that Australia should become a monoculture, don't suddenly clutch your pearls when somebody describes those positions as divisive.
You don't get to define the rules of political debate simply because you're Pauline Hanson.

The Prime Minister is entitled to his free speech.
The Treasurer is entitled to his free speech.
The Labor Party is entitled to criticise One Nation.
The Coalition is entitled to criticise One Nation.
The Greens are entitled to criticise One Nation.

And, yes, the National Herald is entitled to criticise One Nation too.

That's democracy.

Hanson's suggestion that political criticism somehow creates a pathway to violence, but her denigration of different migrant groups doesn’t, is particularly dangerous in itself because it risks turning legitimate political criticism into something that should be feared or suppressed.

There is a world of difference between robust political argument and encouraging violence.

Australia's political system has survived passionate disagreements, brutal parliamentary debates, savage election campaigns and politicians calling each other some fairly colourful things for generations.

The answer to political disagreement is not to demand everyone shut up.

The answer is more political debate, not less.

So perhaps the question Pauline Hanson should ask herself is a very simple one:

Is she prepared to practise what she preaches?
She demands free speech.
Fine.
Then she must accept the consequences of free speech.
She demands the right to criticise politicians.
Fine.
Then politicians have the right to criticise her.
She demands the right to question multiculturalism and immigration.
Fine.
Then Australians have the right to question her views.
She wants to tell Australians what she thinks is wrong with the country.
Fine.
Then Australians have every right to tell Pauline Hanson what they think is wrong with her politics.

That's how democracy works.

The One Nation leader may have won a remarkable by-election victory in Western Australia, and her party may be enjoying a surge in political attention, but electoral success does not place anyone beyond criticism.

Nor does it make every criticism an act of persecution.

And here's another inconvenient fact for Ms Hanson: the polls she cites as evidence of political momentum don't exactly show Australia lining up behind her. The latest figures put Labor slightly ahead nationally, with One Nation's primary vote falling three points to 28 per cent.

Perhaps that is why the political temperature is rising.
But if Hanson wants to be taken seriously as a national political force, she needs to develop something every successful politician eventually learns:

a thicker skin.

You cannot spend a political lifetime dishing out criticism and then demand protection from receiving it.

So, Pauline, get used to it.
There will be criticism.
There will be scrutiny.
There will be disagreement.
There will be journalists asking uncomfortable questions.
There will be politicians attacking your policies.

And there will be editorials pointing out the contradictions when your actions don't match your rhetoric.

The National Herald will certainly be there.

Because if Pauline Hanson wants the freedom to say exactly what she thinks about Australia, we intend to exercise exactly the same freedom to say exactly what we think about Pauline Hanson.

And unlike One Nation, we're not asking anyone to be silenced.

We're simply asking Ms Hanson to listen to the criticism she so enthusiastically dishes out to everyone else.

Free speech, Pauline.

It works both ways.

31/08/2026

Why America’s political system has failed to contain Trump

Donald Trump’s political dominance reflects more than one man’s power. Hugh White writes that deep public discontent and failing institutions have left America vulnerable to a second political revolution.

America’s system of government, and the constitution on which it is built, was created in different times and for different circumstances and purposes, and it has changed very little since then.

Many of its components, such as the way elections are conducted, are battered and worn from centuries of use and abuse. So it would not be surprising if America faced a second revolution, 250 years after the first. This may be the best way to understand what is happening today.

Ever since that day in 2015 when Donald Trump announced his intention to run for president, he has been by far the most important figure in American politics. It is a remarkable record.

Since George Washington, no figure in American history has dominated US politics so completely for so long except Franklin D. Roosevelt. But FDR worked his political magic through artful manipulation of Washington’s constitutional machinery and norms. Trump has dominated American politics by flagrantly and gleefully challenging and violating them.

That is what gives his ascendancy the feeling of a second American Revolution.

This revolution is also the product of discontent in the US electorate, fragility in key political institutions and turmoil in American conservative ideology.

But Trump is at the heart of it. His remarkable character is the catalyst that gives those other factors their power and effect. And character is what the Trump phenomenon is all about.

Taking Trump seriously

Trump’s primary concern is not the policy outcomes that flow from his actions – their real-world consequences – but how they make him look.

It is, in a sense, all about performance, as was underlined by a revealing remark Trump made to a journalist early in the Iran war.

“I hope you are impressed,” he said. “How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better. How do you like the performance?”

It is hard to fathom the frank acknowledgement of irresponsibility implied by these remarks.

Over time, with endless repetition, Trump’s transgressions become familiar and cease to shock. But if we are to understand the world we live in, it is important not to lose our sense of bewilderment and dismay that this person leads, inspires and controls – indeed constitutes – a political movement which has seized control of the key instruments of national power in America and to which the US political system has, it seems, no effective antidote or response.

He defies all we thought we knew about that system, and indeed about the whole way electoral democracies work around the world.

Is there any precedent at any time for a person like Trump being elected and re-elected anywhere in any functioning democracy? Perhaps the closest precedent is Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, but he pales beside Trump. Berlusconi proved to be little more than an ageing party animal. Trump is leading a revolution.

Plainly, Trump has some extraordinary talents. His capacity to intimidate and humiliate is obvious. His ability to charm and disarm those he meets is more surprising but perhaps just as important. Many people who meet him attest to it. Even Kamala Harris, his eventual Democratic rival in the 2024 presidential election, found herself susceptible to his flattery.

But while many politicians depend on the impact they have in person, Trump’s political power seems to flow overwhelmingly from the image of himself he so relentlessly projects, through mass media and social media, to the public at large.

It is hard to imagine a politician who more completely, compellingly and convincingly projects his character and personality to his political audience. He does so with astonishing energy – and energy is always attractive in a public performance. And in a strange way he does it so honestly.

The most beguiling paradox of Trump’s unique political persona is simply that the most brazen and transparent liar in the history of a famously dishonest profession has built his remarkable success on his capacity and willingness to display himself to the world with disconcerting honesty, exactly as he is.

His is perhaps the most exposed personality in history. It is a triumph of titanic self-belief, and a reflection of his sociopathology. He loves to show himself exactly as he is, because he cannot imagine that anyone else would not find him as appealing as he does himself.

Trump defies so completely our conventional ideas of what political leaders are and how they behave that even now it can be hard to take him seriously.

In his first term, his supporters sometimes criticised his opponents for taking him literally, but not seriously. They said the right way to take him was seriously, but not literally.

Now that advice seems out of date. We need to take him both literally and seriously.

Taking Trump literally means recognising that what he offers Americans is nothing less than a revolution in the way the United States is governed and the way it relates to the rest of the world.

Taking him seriously means recognising that he seems to be in a position to achieve that revolution. How can that be so?

A system failing Americans

The more Americans have got to know Trump, the more they have been willing to vote for him.

More people voted for him in the 2024 presidential election than in 2020 in over 89 per cent of America’s 3,112 counties. Those people surely knew whom and what they were voting for. They knew what he’d done in his first term, how he’d acted when he lost in 2020, and what he promised and threatened to do if re-elected.

Apparently, it does not matter to his voters that the revolution he offers has no coherent objective. It is conjured entirely from myths and prejudices, with his own personality the only credo. That this seems to appeal to so many Americans tells us how profoundly they are dissatisfied with the old American political order.

That can only mean deep forces are at work – economic and social trends that over decades have undermined Americans’ confidence in and commitment to the old vision of America that long underpinned the policies of both parties.

The economic trends driving that dissatisfaction are clear enough. One is stagnating household income. From 1970 to 2000, median income increased by an average of 1.2 per cent per year. From 2000 to 2018, growth slowed to an average of only 0.3 per cent per year.

The other is growing inequality: between 1989 and 2022, US households in the top 1 per cent gained at least 101 times more wealth than the median household, and at least 987 times more wealth than households in the bottom 20 per cent.

Not surprisingly, this affects the way Americans see themselves. Over the past decade the proportion of Americans who describe themselves as middle class has dropped from 85 per cent to 54 per cent.

It also affects the way they see their country. Most Americans believe the United States is declining in global power and influence, and nearly two-thirds say China’s power now equals or exceeds that of the US.

Trump and his supporters blame all this on the loss of good old-fashioned jobs in manufacturing to lower-cost countries like Mexico and China, which they blame on the old Washington political establishment. The reality is certainly more complex.

A shift in the global distribution of manufacturing jobs was to some degree inevitable as economic development in Asia brought massive new industrial workforces into the global market. But America’s political system has plainly failed to manage the consequences of this and other shifts for most Americans.

Either way, a political system which for two centuries delivered real opportunity to a large majority of Americans now fails to do so. It is not surprising that a lot of them want big changes.

The social trends driving voter dissatisfaction are harder to pin down, but unease with immigration seems a big factor. Behind that lurk age-old anxieties of identity and race, which progressive identity politics, no matter how well-intentioned or morally valid, seems to have only exacerbated.

No doubt his adroit dog whistling to simple racism is part of Trump’s appeal, but strong swings to him in 2024 among Black and Hispanic voters suggest that this is not the whole story. Perhaps the best one can say is that many Americans, for many different reasons, are not comfortable with the makeup of US society today. They blame Washington, and they vote for Trump.

These economic and social trends may coalesce in the long-term decline of Americans’ trust in government. According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of Americans who trust their governments to do the right thing all or most of the time has fallen from over 75 per cent in the early 1960s to 17 per cent today.

Most striking is the collapse in trust between 2001 and 2011, from 51 per cent to 15 per cent, with the numbers flat-lining since then.

That is reflected in possibly the most striking feature of Trump’s political success. It is not just a result of the number of Americans who are willing to vote for him; it is also due to the number who cannot be bothered to vote against him in defence of the old political order.

This was clear in 2024, when the key to Trump’s re-election was a huge drop in Democratic voter turnout. While Trump received 2.8 million more votes in 2024 than he did in 2020, Harris received 6.8 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020.

Of course, Trump is not immune to the tides of political fortune. Like almost all presidents, his standing in the electorate declined over the first year of his current term. But 18 months into his second term, after countless absurdities and disasters, close to 40 per cent of Americans still approve of his presidency. That is only slightly below the approval rating of the ineffective but inoffensive Biden at the same point in his presidency.

And the evidence suggests that what drives negative sentiment about Trump is not his assault on American institutions and values but his failure to deal with bread-and-butter issues like the cost of living.

A minority of American voters find Trump inherently repellent. A bigger minority seems to find him compellingly appealing. Between them lies a plurality that seems passively to accept him and his agenda, revolutionary though it is. That is perhaps the strangest thing of all about US politics today.

Return to normal?

Where does it all go from here? We do not know how resilient and robust the institutions of American government will prove to be in resisting and containing Trump’s revolution. It is still possible they will deliver him a decisive check.

But the odds are against it. Ever since Trump’s era began in 2015, most of us have overestimated the capacity of those institutions to contain him.

The Congress, the courts, the bureaucracy, the states and the media have at times been able to slow or deflect him, but they have been unable to stop his assault on the American state and its constitution and restore some semblance of normality to the conduct of American government.

It therefore seems prudent to expect that in some form or other Trump’s revolution will continue.

We can glimpse what this means by looking ahead to the 2028 presidential election.

By keeping alive the myth that the 2020 election was stolen from him, Trump is preparing the ground to resist any future loss. We saw how far he and his supporters were willing to go in 2020 and 2021, and it is clear he was much better prepared to go even further had he lost in 2024. How much more prepared and more determined will he be in 2028? The stakes then will be much higher.

Republicans will be even more driven to prevent or overturn a loss for fear that a Democratic president will attack them just as Trump has attacked his adversaries. Trump’s ‘revenge presidency’ has set an example they fear victorious Democrats would follow, so they are even more motivated to do whatever it takes to keep them out of office.

What are the chances, then, that Trump’s mysterious and momentous conquest of the American political system will be defeated at the ballot box? It is an extraordinary fate to befall what was one of the most robust and successful political systems the world has ever seen. Meanwhile, Americans suffer from a national government that is both cruel and incompetent.

For the rest of the world, all this implies that we cannot expect America to return to anything like normal – to the America we have known – for a long time, if ever.

This is an edited extract from Hugh White’s new book, Hard New World: Australia’s Post-American Future (Black Inc).