How unsettling has Trump's behaviour been for the US population since 5 November 2024 and are some people in America looking about for another place to live? Is Australia on their radar?

 

In recent months international news and commentary have been full of Donald J. Trump. Spanning his time as U.S. president-elect from 5 November 2025 through to his inauguration as the 47th U.S. President on 20 January 2025 and up to the the tenth day of his second term in office.

Although the tone of commentary often reflects a sense of disapproval, unease or alarm, I have yet to come across an article or interview that attempts to gauge the mood of the American population in any depth.

I certainly do not have the resources to attempt such a task,

What I did is what most people do when seeking information, go to Google and ask a question and in this case look for that particular question being asked in the United States of America.

Here is a Google Trends graph covering a 7 day period from 3-10 November 2024 which shows a sharp increase in the U.S. of use of the search term "moving to" [using just five countries] with the peak occurring on presidential election day and falling away thereafter but not disappearing completely.

Click on Image to enlarge

A second Google Trends graph created for a 7 day period covering 22-28 January 2025 shows use in the U.S. of the search term "moving to" [using the same five countries] having a sustained level of interest across the board level.

Click on image to enlarge

In the first graph Canada was the preferred destination, followed by Ireland, with Mexico and New Zealand jockeying for third place and Australia coming in fourth.

While in the second graph the destination choice average was first Canada, followed by Mexico, then Ireland, with Australia coming in third and New Zealand a close fourth place.

Compared breakdown by sub-region

The colour intensity indicates percentage of searches across the states.

NOTE: All graphs & map apply only to the particular days chosen and because of the small number of days and searches undertaken cannot be relied on except as snapshots.

Cartoons of the Week

Cathy Wilcox

McToons

 

Kevin Rudd: "Donald Trump may have lit the match that caused his country’s turmoil, but it was Rupert Murdoch who crammed the joint full of explosives"

Crikey, 12 January 2021:

SCOTT MORRISON AND DONALD TRUMP (IMAGE: AAP/MICK TSIKAS)

Donald Trump may have lit the match that caused his country’s turmoil, but it was Rupert Murdoch who crammed the joint full of explosives. 

His systematic manipulation and radicalisation of the American right-wing polity at large, and the Republican Party in particular, should ring alarm bells throughout our nation, including in the office of the prime minister. 

Over the past 25 years, Murdoch has used his Fox News network to unite American conservatives under his banner and shift them from the centre right to the far right with an intoxicating diet of grievance-driven, race-fuelled identity politics. 

By the time Trump announced his presidential campaign, these voters had been indoctrinated into a universe of “fake news”, “alternative facts” and elaborate conspiracy theories. The operational definition of fake news, in the eyes of the Trump presidency, became anything other than Fox News. 

After some initial disagreements, Murdoch backed Trump all the way to the White House. And they kept in lockstep throughout the Trump presidency. 

Trump would often repeat publicly the talking points he’d picked up from Fox. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker, recommended booking interviews on Trump’s favourite shows as among the most effective ways of communicating directly with the Oval Office. And nothing delighted Murdoch’s swaggering ego, hard-right ideology and business tax interests more. 

Fox covered up for Trump’s mistakes, trying desperately to keep track with his shifting claims about the mildness or severity of the coronavirus. 

When Fox’s news reporters found nothing newsworthy in documents relating to Joe Biden’s son Hunter, Murdoch’s New York Post (under the watchful eye of his leading Australian henchman Col Allan) swooped in by pressuring junior reporters to put their names to its dubious front page story.

Like Trump, Murdoch’s news outlets also gave succour to the dangerous QAnon cult, with the devastating consequences witnessed in Washington last week. 

It is now beyond time for Scott Morrison to stand up and denounce QAnon before it can fully take root here in Australia. Even if it strains the prime minister’s personal friendships with members of the far right, he should send the sort of crystal-clear signal that Trump proved himself unable to before it was too late.....

Read the full article here. 

Personally, I believe it is too late to save Scott Morrison from himself. He lacks the ability for genuine self-examination.

Morrison was always attracted to Donald Trump, as one flimflam man often admires another more successful confidence trickster.

SNAPSHOT: Peter van Onselen

Scotty from Marketing has clearly drunk the QAnon-Trump Kool Aid, wrapped himself in his personal closet racism, his foreign Legion of Merit medal and those evangelical & pentecostal contacts he appears to prize above the interests of the Australian nation, so that he is now willingly protecting those members of his own government who are just the sort of greedy, self-interested, ignorant crazies who have driven American society into the ground.