Incredibly brave or utterly foolish? Three months ago, when plans for a 91-storey Trump tower on the Gold Coast came to light, it took no time for me to decide.

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Who in their right mind would entertain such an idea? Even if the Gold Coast is Australia's trashiest tourist destination, the prospect of the Trump brand towering over it was nauseating.

And that was before the US president unleashed economic chaos on the world at the end of February with his war on Iran.

Now, the Queensland developer behind the proposal says the deal has been canned because the Trump brand is toxic in Australia.

For its part, the Trump organisation claims it had parted company with the Australian developer, saying it had failed to meet the financial obligations required for the deal to go ahead and denying world events had anything to do with its collapse.

What's curious is that it took the developer so long to realise the Trump brand would struggle to get a foothold on our shores. Trade wars, shooting wars, torrents of insults and petty slights against allies rarely win friends.

Despite the developer's insistence the Trump brand had nothing to do with the president, the two are inseparable in most people's minds.

Recent polling for the Australia Institute by YouGov - the outfit that predicted Labor's landslide victory in the last federal election - revealed more than half of us believe Trump is a bigger threat to global security than Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping.

The big surprise - one local Trump superfan Pauline Hanson ought to take notice of - was that 35 per cent of One Nation voters thought Trump was a bigger threat than Putin.

It's not all about Trump's erratic behaviour on the world stage - for which we're paying the........

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