I can well remember the elation I felt when Donald Trump was re-elected in November last year. I knew it would be a wild ride but did not anticipate just how wild it would be.

Trump has refused to make the same mistake he did last time. He now knows that you can’t drain the swamp if you’re knee-deep in it. Nor can you expect the denizens of the swamp – any of them – to do anything but oppose you at every turn. Hence his unconventional approach to filling cabinet positions. Some of these secretaries will fail, some will grow into the job. That would be par for every administration, so let’s not panic at a somewhat chaotic start.

Trump is attacked by commentators on both the left and the right, for abandoning the global rules-based order, for undermining free trade and so on. What these people don’t understand is that Trump is a revolutionary. That is not a bad thing per se. If a system is rotten, it takes a revolution to repair it. And the global rules-based order centred on the United Nations, and the notional free trade regime are both rotten. Most of the conservative commentators who castigate Trump have separately and consistently bemoaned the decline of the West, which is being hastened, indeed enabled, by globalisation. And revolutions always commence by breaking the existing mould. We can be thankful that Trump’s revolution is taking place in one of the world’s most robust democracies. A democracy in which it is a matter of faith that the rights of the individual trump the rights of the state. One in which a bill of rights is enshrined within its constitution. A dictator is inconceivable in the USA.

Governments throughout the West refuse to understand that fiddling around the edges with their own legislative regime will not blunt the power of the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization and various other UN agencies including the IPCC (whose reports incidentally are routinely misrepresented by climate catastrophists and governments alike). They are content with the status quo as long as it assures them of the odd term in office.

But to get back to our conservative commentators. How many of them have lamented the encroachment of woke into our schools and universities? Into our defence force? Trump is putting a stop to all that.

How many of them have deplored the encroachment of identity politics and gender theory into our social fabric? Trump is putting a stop to that. How many of them have decried our slavish devotion to net zero? Trump has put a stop to that. How many have castigated the failure of border control under the Australian Labor party? Trump is regaining control of the US border. How many have called out China for its use of trade to a) undermine our economy and b) coerce us into submission to its agenda? Trump is putting a stop to that. How many have castigated Labor for its grotesque abandonment of Israel? Trump is steadfast in his support for Israel. Incidentally, and with apologies to Monty Python, what has the rules-based order ever done for Israel? This time the question is not intended to be rhetorical.

I could go on, but I need to address the two issues that have particularly exercised our conservative commentators. The first is the Ukraine war. I have to concede that Trump’s handling of this has been clumsy. His use of levers seems to have been overly heavy-handed in relation to Ukraine and softly-softly in relation to Russia. He has not yet achieved the peace he once boasted he would achieve on Day One. But against this, it must be remembered that, despite all their ‘support’ for Ukraine, neither the Biden administration nor Europe ever gave Ukraine enough support to win the war. Just enough to allow them to hang on, all the while expending their own wealth and manpower to weaken Russia which is ultimately to the benefit of the West. A deliberate and very cynical ploy in my view. Trump is the only world leader who has recognised this and is working towards ending a war that Europe regards as a spectator sport. It is willing to cheer on but is not willing to fight, even as it buys more from Russia than it expends on support for Ukraine. Let’s, firstly, give Trump credit for this and secondly the time he needs to achieve his aim.

And now, not being an economist, I venture into dangerous territory – the ‘trade war’. I speak merely as the man in the street. The main argument against Trump’s tariffs seems to be that everyone, including US citizens, will end up paying more for stuff. That is the nature of war. If we are threatened militarily, we eventually come to the point where we realise that diplomacy has failed, and we must resort to war to defend our interests. In doing so we accept that we will pay a price in lives lost, and that we won’t be able to have the comfortable lifestyle we have become accustomed to. We won’t be able to buy that new BYD Atto SUV we had set our hearts on. By the same token, if we believe that ‘free trade’ is now working against us because we have lost all our manufacturing capability, because our adversary is prepared to forego the luxury of our lobsters in order to punish us for our temerity, because we are becoming dangerously reliant on our adversary for just about everything we need to survive as a nation, we might decide that a trade war is better than a hot war. Just as Donald Trump has done. Trump is nothing if not pragmatic. The markets will recover.  They always do.

I notice that a number of  Australian commentators who deplore Trump’s tariffs have also conceded this is the wake-up call we need to get our own house in order. That’s a good thing, right? And if Peter Dutton is looking for a scare campaign to hang around Labor’s neck, there it is all gift-wrapped for him in the proposal to tax unrealised capital gains.   That should resonate during a stock market crash. It may turn out that, on the tariff front, Trump has gone too far. But business as usual was not sustainable. At the moment there are a lot of broken financial eggs, but my bet is that the end result, after all the rodomontade, will be a better omelette.