Step away from the bathtub gin, Mister Sheridan.

I hope you people appreciate this. I read Greg Sheridan’s column so you didn’t have to. And I edited the enormous load of old cuntswallop because apparently nobody at The Australian was up for the gig.

A Donald Trump victory would be better for Australia than a Joe Biden presidency.

JB to GS: I think this needs a definitive: ‘There I said it!’

This counter­intuitive view is widely, if semi-­secretly, held in Australian national security circles, and it is ­almost certainly right.

HAHAHAHA. No. Greg, I lurk on the fringes of ‘Australian national security circles’ and they uniformly believe another Trump victory would be a disaster of biblical proportions. Like, wrath-of-God stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky. Rivers and seas boiling. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - MASS HYSTERIA! But okay. Gimme the counter­intuitive view. Go wild.

On foreign policy, despite the crazy tweets, frantic and destabilising turnover of key administration personnel, frequent bouts of boorish personal behaviour from Trump, and numerous outright mistakes, the Trump presidency has been significantly more successful than Barack Obama’s. And much better for Australia.

NOT THAT WILD, YOU IDIOT! WE’RE STILL TRYING TO LOOK LIKE WE HAVEN’T GONE ALL IN ON QANON!

A Biden presidency would likely reprise Obama, but in a weaker and more woke fashion.

Sigh. Greg, ‘woke’ is the new latte. We need a better lazy shorthand slur for people Rupert doesn’t like because they’re never gonna subscribe.

These judgments are provisional, on-balance judgments. Either Trump 2 or Biden 1 could go in several different ways.

The question might seem academic, given how far ahead Biden is. But don’t write Trump off quite yet.

The election still depends on turnout, and Trump voters are more enthusiastic than Biden voters.

Fair point, but enthusiasm for playing banjo with your toes and wetting your bellend in your cousin’s gene pool probably don’t count.

The Republicans have been registering more new voters than the Democrats.

Yeah, but not ten million of them, mate.

And consider this: at this point four years ago, the Access Hollywood tapes were disclosed revealing shocking remarks by Trump regarding his private behaviour. In reaction, there was hardly a cricket team’s worth of people in the whole of the US who thought Trump would become president.

Yet he won. That doesn’t mean he’ll win this time, but don’t count your chickens too early.

Hmm. Interesting point, but as a counterpoint Putin dropped Hillary’s emails into the wild a couple of hours after the pussy-grabbing story broke. It was a great in-kind contribution from the GRU. I don’t think Julian Assange is gonna be nearly as much help this time around.

On Trump versus Biden, the arguments are strong that Biden would be more problematic for Australia.

Ooh, exciting! Lets hear those arguments.

On bilateral issues, Trump has been a very good president for Australia.

Hahahaha. Oh, wait, you’re serious? Are these the arguments now?

There is not a single issue where Canberra could have asked for much more.

Dude, he forgot to send us an ambassador.

This reflects well on Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, the two PMs who have dealt with Trump, and on our diplomacy. It also reflects well on Trump, and the standing Australia has within the US system. Congress and the US bureaucracy supported Australia throughout Trump’s term.

Greg, they had to. Cheeto Benito wanted to nuke the Barrier Reef after that phoner with Turnbull.

Trump honoured Obama’s deal to take asylum seekers from Manus Island, even though he hated it. He levied tariffs, including on steel and aluminium, on many nations including US allies, but not on Australia.

And as soon as he saw the Chinese fucking us in the farm trade freckle he offered to sell them a big Hawaiian pineapple to make it hurt more.

Intelligence co-operation could not be closer. Trump went to great lengths to be a lavish host for Scott Morrison’s visit last year...Though it started off under Obama, the US marine rotations in the Northern Territory continued to grow.

Uh, that was always the plan; Obama and Gillard’s plan. Trump sees US overseas military commitments as a paid subscription service at best, and a massive shake-down opportunity at worst. “Nice little country you got there. Be a pity if anything happened to it. Why don’tcha buy some protection?”

OK, Trump critics would concede he has been pretty good to Australia bilaterally but has trashed US standing internationally and hurt multilateral institutions. This ultimately damages Australia’s interests.

FINALLY!

But this is not quite true,

Wait, what?

...or at least there are two sides to it. Trump has done much better in Asia than in Europe.

GAH! GREG! ONLY BECAUSE KIM JONG UN CATFISHED HIM LIKE A BITCH.

Much of what is labelled global disgust with Trump is actually ­European hostility, plus The New York Times and Hollywood.

What? Hollywood? Are you trolling me? Did you just write that for real? Holy wrinkled fuckballs. You did!

But a global outlook that doesn’t include Asia isn’t a global outlook at all.

The Trump administration, though it prefers deals to institutions…

ROFL. Oh man you got that right. Oh... Hang on. You’re not talking about Trump Tower Moscow and the Russian money laundering deal are you?

...and unilateralism to multilateralism…

Greg I know that you know what those big words mean, but we both know that Donald Trump doesn’t.

...will build institutions, especially in Asia, where it’s useful. This week in Tokyo, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue had its second foreign ministers’ meeting. ... This development of the Quad owes a great deal to the statecraft of Pompeo and US diplomacy.

Not really. But do go on, I’m sure the Indian and Japanese foreign ministers will be fascinated by this.

As ever, Asia prefers a Republican administration in Washington rather than a Democrat administration.

WTF? You’ve seen the Tik Toks of these guys with Trump, right?

Many of Trump’s most ardent critics in Australia demonstrate the narrowly derivative and inadequate nature of their inter­national outlook by slavishly replicating the trans-Atlantic critique of Trump, while displaying no appreciation of the Asian view…

…Asian nations are, like Trump, characteristically much more concerned with results than with process. Trump himself is concerned with what nations do more than with what they say.

Trump himself is mostly concerned with snorting mountains of crushed up Adderall off the boobs of Miss Universe contestants, but sure, whatevs.

Australia, partly because of our increased defence effort and our straight­forward political style, has achieved a unique closeness to the Trump administration — certainly much greater closeness than we ever achieved with Obama.

I don’t know that we should be pointing out that he likes us because we’re racist.

Southeast Asia, too, has generally found the Trump administration quite OK to deal with.

I think we’re gonna need some proof of this. You’re not writing Andrew Bolt’s column. You can’t just make shit up.

The other area where Trump has manifestly done much better than Obama is the Middle East.

Oh God, no. Don’t.

Trump has midwifed two new peace treaties between Israel and Arab nations. Everything Obama touched in the Middle East turned to absolute dust. Trump has been a force for stability in the Middle East, while Obama was a force for chaos — as in the fallout of the Libyan intervention and, earlier, the Arab Spring. Biden would re-adopt all the destructive elements of the old-think Obama paradigm in the Middle East, including ­recommitting to the plainly in­adequate Iran deal.

*Deep breath*

Okay.

We don’t really have time for this but, here we go. Trump’s ‘triumphs’ in the Middle East include selling hundreds of billions of dollars worth of high tech weaponry to the Saudis who used them against poorly armed insurgents in Yemen, leaving millions of refugees wandering around the fucking desert on the brink of starvation. Even with all the high tech splodey goodness, though, the useless fucking House of Saud still got its arse handed to it by the Houthi militia, who straight up slaughtered hundreds of them, and captured thousands more at the Battle of Najran, one of many, many humiliations in that quiet little war. While that ‘triumph’ was unfolding, Trump’s close friend and personal autobank, Prince Mohammed bin Salman was busy despatching a fifteen man wet work squad to Turkey where they killed and dismembered the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, because he wrote mean things about Prince Murder bin Suspect. Trump’s response was to make himself an accessory-after-the-fact by aggressively shutting down any suggestion that bin Salman might have to answer for his crime. Trump famously betrayed the Kurds in Syria while speed-stroking his small but willing murder-boner trying to manufacture a war with Iran. He sent Jarad to fuck up the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, a job which, for once, Jarad proved himself capable. In no fucking way was he ever a force for stability. I could go on, but what would be the point?

On China, Trump has been ahead of the US political leadership class. He has been erratic at times, and has certainly made some serious missteps, but he has understood the profound ways in which Beijing flouts international norms, and the depth of the challenge it poses to the US and its ­allies. If these issues are now more widely understood, this is partly because of Trump’s advocacy, even as Trump has not been able to make a comprehensive and ­coherent case.

Ugh. You see my editorial note on the Middle East? Imagine something about a hundred times longer and insert it here for China. Because I can’t even. To the extent that this drug addled moron has a China policy, it’s the confused and sweaty nightmare shrieks of a delirious shitgibbon with yellow peril fever. The one coherent message Trump did manage to deliver to Xi was that he was totally cool with the CCP building giant concentration camps for a million Uyghurs. If this motherfucker gets re-elected, or more likely just steals the election, he’s a good chance to get us all killed, and not with big wet COVID tongue kisses at one of his super spreader rallies.

Tom Clancy understood.

What about Biden? In some ways, the future trajectory of a Biden presidency is unknowable.

He might make Rupert pay some tax. Do we need to say more? Not as far as Rupe’s concerned. So lets skip to the end.

SNIP!

Biden gives every sign that he will be a dithering and weak president. He often tells friends that all politics is personal. Kam­ala Harris said at the vice-presidential debate that Biden told her foreign affairs is not complex, it’s just relationships.

In this, Biden betrays the same conceptual confusion as both Trump and Obama, to think that personality will seriously influence geopolitics. But it is surely London to a brick that Beijing will seduce Biden with some nonsensical falderal on climate change, and in return face significantly ­reduced geostrategic pressure from Washington.

I like the use of falderal there, Greg. It’s very C. Montgomery Burns. But for our audience, lets just go with hoax. Also, you know it confuses our content management system if you type ‘climate change’ and you don’t add the word ‘hoax’ immediately after.

The third Democratic Party foreign policy tradition is the “new left” wave of woke activism, which is where all the energy in the contemporary Democratic Party resides.

Uh, yeah, sure. That’s why all the ‘woke’ candidates lost to Sleepy Joe.

Biden and Harris are both committed to cutting US defence spending, which means probably an inferior US presence in Asia.

Maybe if Rupert paid some more tax they could afford to…Okay! Sorry. I kid! I kid!

Taken altogether, this all likely means trouble down the track for Australia. Obama sandbagged former prime minister Tony ­Abbott with a viciously partisan speech at the G20 summit in Brisbane. It was the most blatant US interference in our domestic politics in decades, and it was done without notice or consideration for Washington’s Australia ally.

Hmm, I think Dubya’s reach-around for Johnny ‘The Man-of-Steel’ Howard was pretty blatant.

The hyper-partisan Democrat activists who produced that monstrosity, on fire with self righteous zeal for their pet causes, are influential in Biden’s camp today.

A second Trump administration, on the other hand, would likely be a somewhat moderated version of the past four years. Trump has much more experience now. He will still be constrained by the fear of im­peachment and all the normal checks and balances of the US ­system, plus the normal loss of authority a president experiences in his second term.

Jesus fucking Christ, Greg. I’m gonna send housekeeping around to remove the bathtub gin from your filing cabinet. Please don’t resist. It’s an intervention. It comes from a place of love.

Anchored as we are in Asia, not Europe — even less Manhattan, Hollywood or Silicon Valley — Trump Mark II would likely be better for Australia than Biden.

Strange, but true.

Seriously. Bro. Step away from the gin tub.