Trump is a false idol and his local franchisee is dumping the brand

November 7, 2026 — 4:04am

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Barnaby Joyce was planning to make the pilgrimage to the Mar-a-Lago shrine to Donald Trump midyear. He’d been invited on an all-expenses-paid trip. His wife, Vikki Campion, had another idea. Woolbrook Public School was due to hold its community barbecue at the local Bunnings and Barnaby and Vikki were rostered to work it.

“Your children go to Woolbrook Public School,” Barnaby recounts Vikki telling him. “You’re not going.” He cancelled the trip to the US.

Now that the American electorate has repudiated Trump, the decision is looking especially smart. The national swing against his Republican Party across all House elections tallied to 8 per cent, according to the News24 numbers man Tom Connell. For scale, that’s double the size of the swings in the previous three US midterms. The last time there was a swing of 8 per cent was in reaction to the economic devastation of the global financial crisis, when Barack Obama was in the White House.

It’s only the fourth time since World War II that both the US House and Senate have flipped from one party to another in the same midterms.

Donald Trump suddenly is more radioactive than an Iranian nuclear reactor. Across the world, right-wing populist parties are backing away from him. In Australia, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation quickly and quietly removed from its website an article offering itself as the local franchisee of the Trump brand: “Want Trump’s action and style, then it’s One Nation you need”, ran the headline.

Reinforcing the close identification was a photoshopped picture of the two great leaders, Hanson and Trump, together. Oops. It must have seemed so clever and exciting at the time it was published, January 23, 2025, the week Trump was inaugurated for his second presidency.

The midterms pronounced a harsh verdict on Trump’s affiliated billionaires, too. The Republican billionaires on the ballot, Vivek Ramaswamy in Kansas and Rick Jackson in Georgia, lost to Democrats. And Elon Musk’s record campaign funding for Republicans of some half a billion dollars was powerless against the popular will. Musk proved more useful to the Democrats as a loathed campaign target than to Republicans as a........

© Brisbane Times