“While Peter Dutton’s Opposition will happily accept the Trump presidency, we can expect the Labor government to contort itself to meet the challenge. And not in a good way,” says The Gadfly columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.

We recently celebrated the way our electoral system differed from the horror story the Americans are facing in a presidential choice between a cartoon clown in Donald Trump and doddering Joe Biden. 

One week later, along comes our own bulbous jester splashing into the mix. And there, bobbing in his wake is the former Trump fan, the American blatherspout, Tucker Carlson.

The jester is, of course, Clive Palmer, though his name is absent from the page one ads in the country’s daily press. The revelation is only a step away in Google-land where Palmer’s sponsorship is writ large as the owner of Mineralogy, the financier of the Tucker Carlson lecture series. 

In fact, Clive says he will personally accompany Tucker to performances in Cairns, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra where they will occupy our Hyatt Hotel on June 25.

They are the classic “odd couple”. We all know Palmer as a political rapscallion with so much money from his mines that he’s happy to waste it on silly attempts to seek a balance-of-power in a divided Senate. 

It doesn’t even bother him that if his candidates are elected, they usually denounce and depart his banner.

Tucker Carlson is in a slightly different category. Using his baby-faced charm – and an infatuation with Donald Trump – he climbed the ratings ladder on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News before departing last year to produce his own show, Tucker Carlson Tonight on Twitter (later X). 

It began with fair ratings but when he produced such oddities as a fawning, and seemingly endless, interview with Vladimir Putin, viewers turned back to the raw conservative meat on Fox. Then along came the Aussie moneybags and Tucker was back in the gravy. 

Though he’s never actually been here, he says: “I’ve admired Australia all my life and watched carefully from across the world as its government became authoritarian during the covid insanity. I could hardly believe it. I still can’t. I know many Australians feel the same way and I’m excited to meet them.”

As we all know, that was under Scott Morrison, one of the more conservative PMs we’ve endured, and while the national cabinet was not without its faults, we did get through the covid crisis in reasonably good shape. So, if that’s the theme of the Odd Couple’s Canberra leg of the Aussie barnstormer, there’s probably no need to book a seat at the Hyatt.

The real problem is that the clever folk at Penny Wong’s DFAT have decided that the object of Tucker’s former infatuation, Donald J Trump, is looking like a winner of the presidential race against doddering Joe. And with every passing day that his Israeli friends continue their ravaging of Gaza’s Palestinians, Biden’s support is waning in vital States such as Michigan and Nevada. By June 25 it may well be that Trump’s lead is looking insurmountable.

While Peter Dutton’s Opposition will happily accept the Trump presidency, we can expect the Labor government to contort itself to meet the challenge. And not in a good way. For all his apparent weakness, Anthony Albanese is a democrat to his bootstraps and Penny Wong is no less committed to Biden’s “rules-based order”. 

Nevertheless, Ambassador Kevin Rudd would have to be withdrawn and Trump’s wild excesses would put their leadership up for grabs. 

Minister Bill Shorten has scratched himself from that race by his description of Trump as “barking mad”; but one man in the Labor hierarchy would slip nicely into the role. What are the odds of a Richard Marles government by year’s end? Pretty good, I’d say.

robert@robertmacklin.com