One look at US President Donald J Trump's guests at his inauguration last week reveals where his priorities lie, and it's not with the everyday people who thought they were going to Make America Great Again when they cast their votes in his favour.
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The three wealthiest people on the planet - Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg - took front row seats to watch their fellow billionaire club member take the oath of office last week. This got me wondering: is this the new Machiavellian Oligarchy?
Between the November presidential election and now, there appears to have been a fairly steady flow of the new ruling elite to pay homage to Trump as newly crowned king of the world (or so they'd have us believe).
Our own Gina Rinehart and Anthony Pratt placed embarrassingly saccharine full-page ads in the newspapers in Trump's home town and James Packer popped in for dinner.
And is it any wonder? Trump's last stint in the Oval Office saw him cut corporate tax from 35 per cent to 21 per cent, and income tax cuts resulted in billionaires paying a lower tax rate than the working class for the first time in the US. Ever.
A trend he has promised to continue.
If, as the Lowy Institute suggests, Trump's administration was and will again be "animated by egomania and narcissism" fuelled by regular heavy doses of flattery, it appears that the billionaire's club have his number and have all put their best foot forward to "kiss the ring" of the new president.
However, as with most megalomaniacs, what we have here is a bully of the highest order who has brought his brutish business disregard for any sort of moral code to work with him and planted it in the Oval Office with aplomb.
Trump's inner circle effectively owns the "public square." We have their phones in our pockets, their apps on our devices, their news streaming live. We are driving their cars, shopping on their websites and reading their papers and magazines. They are quite literally controlling the narrative.
After all, when your biggest supporters control social media and mainstream media, you're set, right? Although propaganda studies will not look back on this period of US history favourably
To say I am "alarmed" would be a gross understatement.
Looking at his presidential approach, it's like he sees the American people as his employees and the corporate class as his senior management. In his last presidency, to maximise economic "growth" on paper, he cut social safety net programs, allowed employers to pocket workers' tips, and he enacted a law that denied overtime pay to millions of low-wage workers if they made more than $35,568. Overall, his last presidential approach was designed to cut healthcare, food and housing programs, as well as labour protections for poor/and working-class Americans, while delivering significant deregulation and tax relief to the top 0.1 per cent.
MORE ZOE WUNDENBERG:
This is all well and good, you may say, but what's this got to do with us, here in Australia? Well, I'm glad you asked.
Apart from the obvious global trade and alliance implications for us, our own right-wing appear to be holding Trump up as a messianic answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything (despite everyone knowing it's actually 42).
The rising cost of living, housing crisis, and the growing inequality between the "haves" and "have-nots" (to resurrect the abhorrent Morrison phrase) in Australia appears to have lulled the Liberal Party into lumping its eggs into the Trumpian basket. Party leader Peter Dutton appears quite enamoured with the Trumpesque political bent, adopting some of his populist strategies like the "anti-woke rhetoric" and a harder line on immigration, as well as copying Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency" portfolio.
Furthermore, Dutton's deputy, Sussan Ley, made headlines by comparing the arrival of the First Fleet to Elon Musk's efforts to colonise Mars, in her Australia Day speech, seemingly implying that Australia was terra nullius (belonging to no one) when the First Fleet arrived, and bizarrely placing the far-right supporting Musk at the centre of our Australia Day presentations.
Only 29 per cent of Australians said they would vote for Trump if they were participating in the US election in November last year, and given his elitist politics, I'm not surprised by this. My question to you is: if you wouldn't vote for Trump, why would you vote for his cronies?
- Zoë Wundenberg is a careers consultant and un/employment advocate at impressability.com.au, and a regular columnist for ACM. She occasionally volunteers for Voices of Farrar but her opinions are her own.
