The new blog site from Bassett, Brash and Hide has barely gotten underway when Don Brash reveals the unworldly naivety that destroyed his political career.

In his column, The US is in a dangerous place, Brash, after waxing lyrical about his times in the USA from when he was a young man to when he was working there, ended with a flourish:

What depresses me is not that Trump is an evil bastard but rather that there are still tens of millions of Americans who think that he is God’s gift to creation, and that he is the last bastion against communism. The US is in a very dark place.

As one of our commentators noted after reading this:

I find Brash’s lack of empathy for Trump especially galling.

I had to chuckle about that, given that much the same people who despised and destroyed Brash are among those who hate Trump, and for much the same reasons. Ever the academic, Brash never was much of a politician in making such judgements and as a result will be mystified by Chris Trotter’s latest column, Trump’s Surprisingly Large Army Of New Zealand Supporters, where he speculates on where the dangerous Brash would have taken this country had he won the knife-edge election of 2005:

Brash could very easily have become prime minister. And what a prime minister he would have been! The National leader and his party were committed to returning the Treaty of Waitangi to history’s glass case. The Maori seats were marked down for abolition, and all race-based references were to be expunged from the statute books. In the parlance of present-day “progressives”, Brash’s would have been a “ neo-colonialist”, “white supremacist” government.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, all hell would have broken loose.

It does not require too large a slice of the Devil’s imagination to envisage Brash and his allies being left with little alternative but to mobilise their “silent majority” of supporters against the fury his policies had unleashed in the streets. Protest action that resulted in serious property damage or, even worse, to loss of life, would have left him with even fewer choices. Calling-in the military to support the civil power would likely have become necessary quite quickly – with all-too-predictable results. A snap election, called to provide ex-post-facto validation for the emergency powers taken by the government to quell the unrest (as happened following the 1951 Waterfront Dispute) would, almost certainly, have delivered National a stunning victory. New Zealanders would have struggled to recognise the angry mess their country had become.

Chris’s lurid imagination always flies back to 1951 when talking of NZ, in exactly the same way he can never escape his teenage Boomer joy at Norman Kirk’s election and his horror about Pinochet. And I note that this is his second post in row to bang away about the potential threat of Trumpism in NZ. Ironic given how often Trotter has warned of the dangers of the Left abandoning the traditional working class.

Meantime, poor old Don will eventually read that Trotter piece and be left sputtering at his being compared to “an evil bastard” and classed as the now inevitable “White Supremacist“. But that was always Don’s fate, he never realised it and he apparently still doesn’t. In a world where he claims that you should see past skin colour and not judge people on that basis, Don has not realised that in the Nineteen Eighty Four world of Critical Race Theory such is what is now described as racism.

Could be worse. He could have been compared to You Know Who. Most other Right Wing politicians are sooner or later.