New book exposes Joe Biden's advisors not giving the then-president a cognitive test
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Sky News AU
a day ago
- Sky News AU
‘Pathetic': Joe Biden tells another ‘tall tale' during rare public appearance
Former US president Joe Biden, during a rare public appearance, claimed he was 'getting calls' from 'a number of European leaders asking me to get engaged'. Former Trump senior advisor Christian Whiton described this as 'pathetic'. 'It's not just unwelcome for the people who are in power; it's unwelcome for Democrats too. They really wish he would just go away,' he told Sky News Australia. 'This is just sort of another Biden tall tale.'
Perth Now
3 days ago
- Perth Now
'Cruel' Trump move to shake Aussies' trust in US
Australians are going to 'see the cruelty' in Donald Trump's bill, says an ex-staffer to Joe Biden. (Lukas Coch/AAP PHOTOS) Australians are going to 'see the cruelty' in Donald Trump's bill, says an ex-staffer to Joe Biden. (Lukas Coch/AAP PHOTOS) Credit: AAP Increasingly US-sceptic Australians might further question their nation's ties to the superpower as the impacts of Donald Trump's signature bill sweep through vulnerable communities. The US president's One Big Beautiful Bill Act cleared Congress on Friday, Australian time, enshrining significant cuts to health programs while funding income tax breaks and adding trillions of dollars to debt. America's wealthiest will benefit most from the bill while almost 12 million low-income Americans would be left uninsured, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and many could see their pay drop due to safety-net cuts. While the bill did not directly impact Australians, it would affect their perceptions of the US, according to Cory Alpert, an ex-staffer to former president Joe Biden. "This bill is going to hurt a lot of marginalised people," the Melbourne University researcher told AAP. "Australians are going to look at this and see the cruelty in it, and I think it's going to further drive this conversation about how close Australia is to the United States. "Where do Australians belong in the global conversation: as a floating aircraft carrier in the south Pacific, or as a more independent nation? How aligned do you want to be with Trump's America?" While Australia has positioned itself as a key US ally, cracks have also begun to show in the relationship. When asked recently if the US remained a reliable partner under Mr Trump's leadership, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said Australia understood he had a "different view of how America is to be in the world". Australians' trust in the United States has already dropped by 20 points since 2024, hitting a new low with just 36 per cent of the public expressing any level of trust according to an April poll published by the Lowy Institute. In a speech to be delivered on Saturday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will reassert Australia's independence in foreign policy while dismissing Trump-style isolationist policies. "Choosing our own way doesn't mean going it alone," he will tell an audience in Sydney to mark the 80th anniversary of the death of former Labor prime minister John Curtin. "Australia did not just join the institutions which created the international rules based order, we helped shape them." The prime minister will draw comparisons between himself and the ex-wartime leader, saying Curtin did not just look to the US but spoke for Australia. The government has already rebuffed calls from Washington to dramatically increase its defence spending by tens of billions of dollars a year. Many analysts believe the Labor government's landslide election win in May was at least partly fuelled by voters' growing discomfort with the US president at a time when some of the coalition's talking points echoed Mr Trump's platforms. "(Australians) don't want to live in a country that espouses those same types of cruelties," Mr Alpert said. The size of Mr Albanese's victory meant he did not face significant pressure to shift his position towards the US president. But Mr Alpert said he would not be surprised if the government publicly supports some aspects of Mr Trump's latest measures, especially as it tries to negotiate an exemption from US tariffs. "We've already seen examples of that in Australia where leaders are trying to come up with positions where they can go to Trump and say, 'look, we're supporting your position, you should give us a better deal'," he said, pointing to Labor's decision to support US strikes on Iran. "That is probably the more dangerous aspect."
Sydney Morning Herald
3 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Trump's big, beautiful mistake will have China licking its lips
China is betting that you cannot halt a technological steamroller or force the world to act against its own economic self-interest. Electro-tech will win in the end because it is massively more efficient. Critics of clean energy love to hurl the laws of thermodynamics at their foes, but they commit two intellectual crimes themselves: they skip over the detail that two-thirds of fossil energy is in aggregate lost to the skies in heat, while roughly 90 per cent of electric energy is used for its final function. They hide behind the fallacy of primary energy demand. How many times have you heard that 80 per cent of our energy still comes from fossils, as if that tells you anything? But when you replace a dinosaur light bulb with an LED bulb you slash energy use by 80 per cent at a stroke. When you switch from a home gas boiler to an electric heat pump powered off the British grid on an average energy mix, you also cut it by about 80 per cent. Bingo. As expected, Trump's omnibus bill guts the Inflation Reduction Act, Joe Biden's Rooseveltian bid to throw the US back into the global race for electro-tech supremacy before the window closes altogether. But it goes further. Loading It actively handicaps those new technologies that fall foul of MAGA ideology. It is not a return to the free market. It rigs the market to defend the legacy status quo, though geothermal is spared, and so is nuclear fusion. 'America's strength has always been that it lets old industries die, but now it is now blocking the Schumpeterian process of creative destruction,' said Ember's Kingsmill Bond. Market commentary has honed in on the US' spiralling debt-to-GDP ratio and the dangers of a compound interest trap, as indeed it should. The omnibus bill – a 'disgusting abomination', says Musk – sets the US on a path of fiscal deficits of 6 per cent to 7 per cent of GDP as far as the eye can see. The US Treasury relies on foreign funds to soak up this debt, and they know that Trump will force the Federal Reserve to slash rates and hold down bond yields by fiat, debasing the coinage in the manner of Henry VIII after he had exhausted his plunder from the monasteries. But there is another question for markets. It will become clearer over the next five years that 'going electric' outcompetes fossils on pure price in most activities. At what point do global investors conclude that the US is making a fatal and irreversible error? When will they judge that it no longer deserves an equity premium, and deserves a discount instead? That fundamental re-rating may not be far off. The bill eliminates tax credits for wind and solar but creates a new tax credit for coal. The federal coal royalty rate is slashed. Fees for wind and solar projects on federal land rise fivefold. The $US7500 subsidy for electric vehicles is axed. Electric vehicles (EVs) will pay a $US250 annual road charge, double what petrol cars pay through fuel tax. Old Auto will get an effective $US2000 subsidy by making car loans tax-deductible. Few EVs qualify because they fall foul of Trump's war on Chinese clean-tech components. The US Post Office has been ordered to sell its EV fleet. You get the drift. The whole thrust of the policy is vindictive. Another generation of US car buyers will be locked into old technology. By the time that is cleared, EVs will have leapt further ahead and Chinese companies like BYD will own the planet. You can take the view that there should be no subsidies, but the problem with this piety is that China already manufactures 80 per cent of the world's solar panels, 75 per cent of its batteries and 70 per cent of its EVs. The US needs turbo-charged incentives to have any hope of catching up. Wind and solar added over 90 per cent of all new power in the US over the last two years. Further projects are the only possible way to meet rising electricity demand for data centres between now and 2030, since there is a five-year supply chain blockage for new gas turbines. Every other option takes too long. Energy Innovation estimates that Trump's bill will deprive America of 340 gigawatts of power over the next decade and push up wholesale electricity prices by 74 per cent. Data centres will not be built because there won't be enough power. You could hardly find a better way to sabotage the country's AI ambitions. The United States has just dropped a big, beautiful, bunker-busting bomb on its own economy. It fritters away America's advantage in industrial costs just as China reaps a mirror-image gain from installing that much new wind and solar every year, at costs that take your breath away. BNEF says the cost of Chinese solar modules fell below 10 cents per watt last year. That is tantamount to free power. The combined 24/7 cost of solar and batteries is already the cheapest form of power for the large majority of mankind in low latitudes. Four-fifths of those people live in countries that are net importers of fossil fuels. These nations have no interest in perpetuating a dependency on oil and gas that drains their balance of payments year-in, year-out. It would be insane for them to invest in new infrastructure that locks them into this wealth loss for the next 40 years, or even to think of buying Trump's LNG at an exorbitant Asian spot price of $US11 per MMBtu. Loading They will buy Chinese solar panels, and then Chinese cars. They will go full electric. The energy trillions of the future will either go to China or those countries that carefully nurture their electrification industries. The United States has just dropped a big, beautiful, bunker-busting bomb on its own economy.
