America abandons the free world, enters the Age of Stupid

As Trump attempts to humiliate his ally, JD Vance waits to play his hand, writes Dr Alex Vickery-Howe.

WATCH U.S. Vice President JD Vance.

He’s the one.

President Donald Trump is living in the grievances of his recent past, where Hunter Biden’s laptop is still a major news story. Age is wearying him and relevance is passing him by. JD is the one.

It was JD Vance who demanded that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – the war hero holding Ukraine together with scant resources and dogged will – show fealty to American military supremacy and bend his knee in front of the media. Trump followed his Vice President’s lead because Trump isn’t a leader himself and has never displayed the necessary qualities. Yes, Trump can stir hatred and lead a thirsty rally. Yes, he can play the culture war game and bait overly earnest Democrats. Yes, he won the popular vote.

But Trump is merely a cartoon. Vance is the supreme bullshit artist.

I have been critical of the Left since the lead-up to the 2024 American Presidential Election. That criticism has earned me plenty of criticism in return, whether it’s in response to me pointing out the hypocrisy of our feeble Australian Greens leader, lamenting the cruel treatment of former American President Joe Biden and the overall failure of the Left to connect with working-class voters. 

Or simply pointing out that the Left lives in a bubble universe and is destined to keep on losing, keep on failing, until a major internal shift in policy is finally accepted by the rank and file. I’m not alone. Bernie Sanders shares many of the same views.

I have also recently come to embrace centrism. Not as a midpoint between Right and Left – that is a misconception of centrism as a political movement – but as a set of bipartisan principles that can form the heart of public debate. 

Author Yair Zivan breaks it down like this:

Centrism is not the middle. It's not a search for some point on a map between where the left and the right happen to be at any given time. That just leaves you getting dragged around from place to place by whatever the political winds are. It's not useful as a political idea. It's also not successful as a political idea. 

 

Centrism says, here are a set of core values that we believe should be at the centre of politics.

As an antidote to political extremism (which is currently, as you may have noticed, tearing the planet apart), I find Zivan’s approach interesting. It’s a possible pathway out of a contemporary mess.

I’m not shy about my embarrassment regarding the Left of late. We handed Trump that election. Navel gazing and pompous ignorance, particularly towards people facing material social and economic disadvantage, saw presidential candidate Kamala Harris seeking endorsement from George Clooney and dancing with Beyoncé when the American people wanted someone to notice their hardship.

The cost of living crisis will likely hobble the Australian Labor Party this year, too. In our rabid cancelling of people – often our own people – and our prosecution of every microaggression we can spot, not to mention our invention of new ones, we have lost our core voter base. We won’t ever win again without meaningful introspection and change. I’m not confident that we have the humility to accomplish that anytime soon. I’m not even sure we have the requisite social intelligence or critical thinking skills.

Still, you needn’t rush to intervene: I understand the preferential voting system and I’ll tick the Greens first in the hope that they’ll roll Adam Bandt sooner rather than later, and I’ll give my ultimate vote to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who is also likely to be rolled if only for the crime of being thoughtful in an age where voters want “strong men”.

(Please note the quotation marks.)

The recent public scolding of Zelenskyy was an example of “strong men”. Zelenskyy is actually a strong man. He is fighting for the freedom of a peaceful nation invaded by a loathsome dictator, and he is doing so with dignity, rationality and poise. Trump and Vance are “Strong Men™”. They are the sort of people cowards admire.

The difference between strong men and Strong Men™ is all about character. Strong men are honest, direct, reliable and trustworthy. They make a promise, and they keep it. 

Strong Men™ yell over cogent arguments because the truth scares them, and they treat intelligent debate as a threat. Strong Men™ inflate their confidence by pushing others to the groundand obsess over “status”. Strong Men™ pay porn stars for fake orgasms while neglecting pregnant wives and sometimes face charges and convictions, but too often end up in positions of power because the other Strong Men™ look up to them.

Oh, and Strong Men™ call themselves “alphas” without cracking an ironic smile. They think saying it with a straight face sells the illusion. It does not. Those same “alphas” shoot actual alphas of the animal kingdom with long-range weapons, because they’re so “strong” they must use bullets instead of claws. Just once, I’d like to see a wolf or a lion take Donnie Junior in a cage match. That’d be a lesson in objective strength.

Weapons are, of course, the issue of the day.

Zelenskyy needs support. His country is holding Russia back at tremendous cost. As he said – or tried to say – America has an ocean between them and the enemy, but those ripples will reach the White House if Trump and Vance can’t muster enough strength to face Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin with something other than curtsies and apologies. 

At this point, it’s almost charitable to assume Putin has some blackmail material on Trump because the alternative is that Trump is a toadying wimp who not only flounders on the world stage but wets himself – literally, if rumours are to be credited – when faced with a foreign policy challenge.

Watching the blubber puppet and his weaselly controller – JD is Wormtongue in all but name – berate and attack a man of true strength and integrity should remind everyone why the Left, even at its most cringeworthy and embarrassing, is more ideologically and ethically robust than far-right small d**k energy. And that’s what it is. Small people boasting about their weapons. Men whose penises are their microaggression. That’s it. That’s the substance of their “strength” and “power”.

Pundits will analyse this event and fools will delude themselves that perennially bankrupt Trump, a man of limited literacy and questionable business acumen, was playing “4D chess”. But most clearheaded people will see this buffoonery and posturing for what it is and know that America is weaker than ever before. Weaker, smaller, pettier and sadder. 

It’s hardly “4D chess” to invite a journalist into your war chat. That’s like playing Cluedo with the murderer’s name stapled to your forehead. It’s hardly “4D chess” to cripple your own economy with childish tariffs. That’s like playing Snakes and Ladders but refusing to import any ladders.

Professional turncoat Senator Lindsey Graham was weakness and sadness personified when he fronted the cameras following the aborted White House “negotiation” with Ukraine and publicly insulted Zelenskyy, a man he had previously praised and fawned over, much as he once praised and fawned over President Joe Biden, demonstrating yet again that present-day Republicans have no fidelity, no consistency and no concept of friendship. 

It may not mean much coming from an atheist, Lindsey, but what happened to your soul? Did it slip between the couch cushions? (It’s not safe there!)

The message has been sent: America no longer values loyalty.

The land of the free and the home of the brave has become a nest of vipers, gangsters and cowards. Of course, there are still wonderful people in that country and they may yet reclaim their international reputation, but the irony of the Make America Great Again movement was on naked display when Trump betrayed Zelenskyy and we all saw how horribly reduced – how small, how mean, how vindictive and how ugly – a once truly great nation has become.

And no, it’s not “anti-American” to criticise this sideshow. Anyone who values democracy, who respects American optimism and ingenuity, must lament these events. Fascism is anti-American. Disloyalty is anti-American. Cult rallies, the public humiliation of enemies and brutality against citizens and friends are anti-American. 

All those Republicans who claimed their Second Amendment rights to “prevent a dictatorship” are now attacking judges and entertaining a third term for their lord and master. That’s not just anti-American; it’s a fundamental failure to understand what America is.

Now, we brace for the consequences of Trump’s dummy spit and Vance’s calculations.

European leaders will certainly know the global order has changed, and they cannot rely on this weak and sad America to stand by them.

Chinese leaders will watch this churlish display and think about taking a sneaky cruise to Taiwanese territory.

In the UK, Sir Keir Starmer has welcomed Zelenskyy and pledged to support the Ukrainian people. King Charles has just received Zelenskyy at Sandringham. Meanwhile, Italy, France, Germany, Canada – never to become U.S. territory – Slovenia, Romania, Belgium, Finland, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Latvia, Ireland, Australia, Luxembourg, Croatia, Japan and many other brave nations have come together to support Ukraine and condemn Russia. 

A lonely America squirms in Putin’s pocket. The only appropriate response to presidential cowardice is national shame.

It looks like even Superman got it wrong — truth and justice are no longer the American way.

These are dark days for those who were taken in by Trump’s lies, including his lie that he would make the rest of the world “respect America” again. He took a jerry can to America’s image the moment he pivoted from a beleaguered Ukraine to his own tedious personal grievances. For all his gaffes, Joe Biden never turned a White House press conference into an episode of Jerry Springer. Trump did.

The future is, likewise, bleak for the MAGA faithful. Trump’s idiotic tariffs, coupled with Elon Musk’s systematic dismantling of infrastructure, will cripple American manufacturing, decimate the economy and make the American people vulnerable to everything from a domestic terrorist attack to a plague of preventable disease. It is the Age of Stupid in the USA and the verbal battering of Zelenskyy, while not the first exhibit, will serve as a flashpoint for anyone who was hoping Trump II would be one of those rare sequels that improves on the original.

I hope to see left and centre-left leaders learn from recent mistakes and reconnect with working-class people, who, while they may have voted for Trump in considerable numbers, stand to lose the most from what is currently occurring. They can be won back. They can be won in Australia, too.

I hope to see Europe stand up and defend Ukraine.

I hope to see the world at large push back against the Age of Stupid and close the Overton window tightly enough to exclude the ridiculous and the dystopian. Trump Plaza went broke, so let’s not entertain Trump Gaza; two terms are enough for any angry old man, so let’s not make this a bad trilogy. Putin will not stop if Ukraine falls, so let’s try and remember which side we’re on.

And watch JD Vance.

He’s younger, smoother and in for the long haul.

Trump blusters, but he’s almost 80 years old, incontinent, meandering and losing relevance even within his own regime as Musk upstages him hourly. Vance is the one to watch and the one to be worried about. Remember who chose him.

As Trump himself said to Zelenskyy: “You don’t have the cards.”

We all know the American President isn’t working with a full deck.

JD is the one with the poker face and we all need to look closer.

Dr Alex Vickery-Howe is an award-winning playwright and social commentator. He teaches creative writing, screen and drama at Flinders University.

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