Fascism? You're soaking in it.

The news cycle ate my homework. Hand on my fucking heart, I was totally going to do this week’s column about whether Trump should be an issue in the Australian election, and it was going to be so cool, guys. I was going to be so far ahead of Das Kommuntariat that I would enjoy the entire winter smug-hugging myself for being so absolutely right, so totally fucking early.

Yet here we are, Friday morning, and here I am the only pundit in all of Vegemiteland who has not yet done his Trump bit.

Where do I even start?

Perhaps by pissing a tiny rainbow into your pocket.

This week just gone might be the week we look back on in years and say, “That’s when Peter Dutton lost it.”

Until now, I had good folding money on the horror spud winning in April or May because I hate myself and I hate life, but the median Australian voter seemed to be increasingly enthused by the prospect of electing a semi-sentient root vegetable that learned to mimic two or three basic human emotions from watching VHS tapes of 1980s action villains.

But then—jump scare!—Donald Trump emerges out of the local billabong like a bloated orange tentacle monster to ravage the humble village folk of Australia’s aluminium cottage industry.

And the talking tuber blames Albo.

Now, there is an elegant sufficiency of no good, terrible, very bad things for which one might blame Albo. But the hostile blob of rancid hamburger grease now squatting on the nation’s beloved aluminium shoppes—where, for generations, sun-kissed Aussie artisans have lovingly coaxed molten metal into shimmering ingots, pausing only to sip billy tea and reflect wistfully on last night’s farnarkling quarter-finals—yeah, that ain’t one of them.

And Dutton is a fucking idiot if he thinks otherwise.

I am open to the possibility that Peter Dutton is a fucking idiot. But more than that, I suspect this particular strain of viral stupidity is highly transmissible among subject populations vulnerable to status anxiety, authoritarian nostalgia, and algorithmic rage.

As the Trump wave collapses from the high energy potential of fascistically fucking around to the grim, consequential end game of finding out, the culture war grifters who fattened themselves on its rise refuse to let go. Everyone who treated him as a righteous disruptor—imagining they could make bank off it—is now stuck playing defence for a lunatic whose presidency is fast evolving into an extinction-level event for liberal democracy, for the global economy, and possibly for life on Earth.

Trumpism was always more useful in prospect than reality. As an idea, as a cultural force, it crackled with dark, roiling energy—the thrill of burning down everything and dancing in the flames. But once the flames take hold, they don’t warm and sustain anymore. They devour.

And Dutton’s promise? “Only I can cut a deal with the crazy arson guy.”

Good luck with that, Dutts.

Australian politics hasn’t gone full Canadian murder beaver yet, but you can feel it starting to accelerate down the slipway.

I don’t think Dutton will be able to keep up. At the moment, he’s not even trying to. He’s been fighting a culture war for so long—Make Australia Great Again— that it’s quite possible, he didn’t actually notice this week that we are now in a trade war started by his MAGA mentor, with more attacks to come.

The delay in calling the election—a delay occasioned by yet another climate catastrophe, whoops—can only make things worse for him.

There are more tariffs coming for Australia – and for everyone else, but specifically for us because, unlike Americans, we enjoy cheap, often life-saving pharmaceutical treatments courtesy of the PBS.

American pharma giants hate it and want it gone.

So that fight’s coming, and I don’t think anybody is going to buy Dutton’s assurances that he can make it all better because Trump will have some fundamental conservative sympathy for his cause.

There is no conservative cause anymore.

According to the World Values Survey, Trump’s America now aligns much more closely with Putin’s Russia and Erdoğan’s Turkey than they do with any former Western allies.

Trump is not a political challenge.

He’s the enemy, and anybody aligned with him can only be presumed hostile. Until this week, I thought that both sides of Australian politics would conspire to ignore this grim reality, but maybe I was less right than usual. The authoritarian attempt now underway in the US was always naked, radical and dangerous, but now it might cost us a couple of bucks, too.

That’s gonna make it increasingly easy for any normie candidates chasing your vote in May to campaign against Trump. Anyone except Dutton, who’s spent the last two years cribbing his notes from Temu Hitler.

One final happy thought.

As things get worse, like crazy worse, in America, as the stock market craters and prices rocket up, as unemployment grows and mass protests spread, Trump will try to suppress dissent by using force.

But more importantly, if everything starts falling apart, and he can see himself losing control of the House and the Senate, and thus losing the moat that protects him from impeachment and imprisonment, he will reach for something more.

He’s a dictator, and when dictators are in trouble, they do not just repress their internal opponents; they seek outside enemies on whom they can focus and amplify the rage and fear of their followers.

Like an Argentinian general contemplating the distracting promise of las Malvinas, Trump is exactly the type to order ‘his generals’ to do something insane, like occupying Greenland or even seizing part of Canada.

And that will be the end of everything.

Including Dutton, if it happens before May.