If you have read The Australian recently, you would have discovered that ex-Prime Minister John Howard does not like Donald Trump.

Reading further (and smothering a laugh), Howard revealed that he never supported Trump and had little to say against Hillary Clinton. 

In effect, Howard appeared to harbour a deep-seated jealousy toward the tall man’s popular support; something that is to be expected given Howard’s enduring political love affair with George W Bush after 9/11.

Jealousy is probably to be expected of a Prime Minister referred to by George W Bush as ‘my deputy sheriff’.

You will recall that Howard actually committed Australian troops to Iraq on the strength of Bush’s decision which was, in turn, based on Robert Mueller’s FBI assessment that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Yes! That Robert Mueller. The Robert Mueller who armed himself with 17 Democrat lawyers to investigate Trump’s collusion with Russia, but failed to investigate its source in the Steele Dossier.

When serving as Prime Minister, Howard liked to characterise himself as the defender of the middle class. Yet he was expelled from his blue-ribbon, middle class seat by an ex-ABC journalist after Howard sold out his base with the Work Choices legislation.

If you were looking for a true champion of the middle class, you would go no further than Donald Trump. It is easy to confirm that he appeals to the middle class given the sorts of behaviour Democrats engage in as they attempt to do whatever it takes to prevent Trump from running for office.

Despite Howard’s opinion of himself, all that can be said of his time in office is thank goodness for the minerals boom. Howard had no idea of how to make Australia ‘great again’ because he firmly believed in the industry policies of Bob Hawke which led to the destruction of our manufacturing – policies that turned a large percentage of the country’s workforce into garden maintenance workers, coffee baristas, and carpenters.

Howard claims that his poor opinion of Trump is based on Trump’s refusal to accept the result of the 2020 election. This is a bit of revisionist justification for his originally low 2016 opinion of the man: ‘I never liked Trump.’ It doesn’t take a genius to know that first impressions are the worst possible impression on which to form an opinion of someone’s character.

Many people do not like Trump – either because of his vulgarity or the perceived inarticulateness of his speech over the duration of his presidency. If, however, we put his vulgarity to one side and look at what he sought to do for America – and more importantly, what he accomplished – you will be forced to examine his policy successes both domestically and internationally. Soon after, even the sceptics will have to admit that he did precisely as he promised. And, more importantly, that his policies were successful.

Despite being President, almost everything Trump said – regardless of the topic – was contradicted by economists, military personnel, intelligence officers, diplomats, politicians, and every legacy media pundit. In defiance to their verbal protests, his China policy, which combined diplomatic initiatives with tariffs on Chinese exports to curtail the theft of American intellectual property, resulted in the regrowth of manufacturing industries in the rust belt States bordering the Great Lakes.

Trump’s trade policies were designed to prevent corporate America from shifting production to low-cost Asian alternatives or the slave labour camps of China. In the interest of fairness, he renegotiated trade agreements with Mexico and Canada, which saw companies relocating to America.

Internationally, the Abraham Accords brought about peace between Israel and Middle Eastern Arab nations for the first time. He abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Nuclear Agreement with Iran, that would have given that country nuclear weapons by 2025, by applying diplomatic and economic pressure to end Iran’s enrichment program.

Apart from saving the lives of American soldiers by abandoning the military’s addiction to war, Trump restored middle class American loyalty to the nation’s flag, the Constitution, and republican virtues leaving left-wing academics to foolishly challenge the very necessity for that virtue or whether it actually ever existed.

Like Australia, it was the middle class in America that suffered the most when internationalism captured the imagination of academic theories. Yet Trump knew intuitively that the strength and stability of the America depended most of all on restoring pride in that nation while promoting the skills and financial interests of the middle class with job opportunities.

Look at those rust belt States and you will see that the plight of the people and the death of their industries went unchallenged by the Democrat administration, even while the party was supported financially by various trade unions. Trump’s success attracted the people in those States to his vision of a strong America, but it also challenged the competency of the Democratic Party and their aligned trade unions.

While Trump was fighting to restore the American dream, his success among the working class threatened the base that the Democrats had claimed for themselves. Silicon Valley, despite its wealth, embodies all the worst traits of democracy (hypocrisy, sanctimony, and double standards). It moved quickly to mute Trump’s message in the hope of containing it.

Trump did not accept the election result in 2020 and any person who has paid sufficient attention to that election cannot have any doubt that it was, if not fraudulent, then corrupted by the influence of hundreds of millions of private dollars which financed Democrat voters with, inter alia, private ‘drop boxes’, harvested ballots, and inaccurate voter rolls.

To this, we should add the media’s refusal to cover the corruption at the top revealed on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop computer.

It is easy to understand why Howard does not like Trump. Trump achieved in four short years, more than George W Bush achieved in eight. And Howard is still George W Bush’s Deputy-Sheriff…

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