Major loony wins US election

The Sydney Morning Herald is currently giving Donald Trump 264 electoral votes out of 270. It looks therefore as though the American people have done the unthinkable and elected a complete loon to their highest office.

The signs were there from the beginning of the evening, when Hillary started to lose key states like Florida and Ohio. Now, Trump is even looking set to win traditionally Democrat states like Michigan and Wisconsin. He has targeted the rust belt, the areas hit most forcefully by the GFC, where property prices have collapsed and people are trying just to get away, if they can.

Trump's foreign policy looks likely to set the US on a track of aggression against China - he wants a 45% import tax on goods and services supplied from China to the US - and he also wants foreign nations like South Korea and Japan  to pay for more of their own defense. This means that Japan and South Korea will be forced to develop their own nuclear defense programs. As far as Australia goes, it is likely that we will be more responsible for our own defense and the US might even pull its Marines out of Darwin as it scales back operations globally.

At least now we know that Trump was right when he called this pending election "Brexit plus plus plus". This is a backlash of the American white working class against its traditional rulers - the college-educated middle class. And it is a stunning victory, one which noone could have seen coming. We'll have to see if China now decides that it's a good time to invade Australia, but there are millennarian feelings and intimations surrounding current events that make such an outcome seem at least possible.