Scott Morrison has finally left the Australian Parliament. "What?" I hear you say. "Is he still there?" Indeed, for the past year and a half he has been lurking there in the back row, keeping out of the spotlight as much as possible. Presumably he has been looking for the right job to move on to. Is it churlish to suggest that offers were slow in coming? That perhaps his time as Prime Minister did serious damage to his reputation? The recent ABC documentary, Nemesis, displaying the entrails of the nine years of Liberal/National government, doesn't exactly make him more appealing. His various colleagues and State counterparts range from diplomatic to scathing. Some suggest he did a good job of the pandemic response. Some of them talk about him as decisive, hard working, committed. Yet he is also called a bully, a misogynist, a liar and a hypocrite. The man himself sits through his long interview, leaning uncomfortably forward in his chair, with his cha
Given the likelihood that the 2024 US election will be a repeat of 2020, Joe Biden vs Donald Trump, and Trump has a realistic chance of winning, I've been catching up on Trump 1.0 via the venerable Bob Woodward. He wrote three Trump books. Fear was published in 2017 and dealt with Trump's transition to power and the first nine months of his presidency. Rage was published in 2020 and dealt with most of the Trump presidency, from its early days to the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests. The final book, Peril , cowritten with Woodward's younger Washington Post colleague Bob Costa, deals with the 2020 election, its aftermath and the early months of Biden's tenure. Bod Woodward is a strangely appropriate person to be documenting the Trump and Biden years. He became famous alongside Carl Bernstein in the early 1970s for exposing the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, back in the days when committing a criminal offence was enough to end so