We Missed You, America!

Contra Trump

愛屋及烏

IFLA (I Fucking Love Australia) writes about America and its Pacific cousin on Substack. In his inimitable Australian style of prose, IFLA chronicles the saga of a benighted America, although in this chapter of Contra Trump, he finally has something to crow about.

IFLA is based in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, my ancestral homeland.

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In this chapter of Contra Trump, we reproduce a third love letter from IFLA to a country that he has loved since childhood. For his first and second letters, see:

The rubric of this chapter — 愛屋及烏 ài wū jí wū, ‘to love a dwelling, including the ravens nesting in its roof’ — repeats that used for IFLA’s earlier essay. It is an expression that draws on the Book of Documents《尚書大傳·大戰》, where the full passage in which it first appears reads:

武王與紂戰於牧之野，紂之卒，輻分，紂之車，瓦裂，紂之甲，魚鱗下，賀乎武王。紂死，武王皇皇，若天下之未定，召太公而問日：入殷奈何。太公曰：臣聞之也，愛人者，兼其屋上之烏；不愛人者，及其胥餘。何如。武王日：不可。

In modern Chinese, 愛屋及烏 means to love something or someone including, or despite, their flaws.

IFLA’s essay is followed by ‘Aussie-to-Yank Word Wizard’, an idiosyncratic glossary of the Australianisms favoured by the author.

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Despite his exuberance, IFLA is as cautious about the future as many other commentators. As he observes, for the international friends of the United States ‘trust comes back one election at a time’. Meanwhile, we enjoin readers to enjoy the fruity sobriquets formulated by IFLA to refer to ‘the Brain Fart Generator of Pennsylvania Avenue’, aka Donald J. Trump, 47th President of the United States of America.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
5 November 2026

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We Fucking Missed You, America!
We Thought We’d Lost You!
Welcome Back!

IFLA

5 November 2026

 

Righto, you lot of jubilant little bettongs, you absolute legends. I’m writing this at midnight on a cold verandah in the Blue Mountains with the dog asleep on my feet and the first proper exhale I’ve had in two years still leaving my chest. It wasn’t just me. Somewhere around breakfast your time the whole planet let one out at once, from Ottawa to Berlin to a kitchen table in Fiji, and if you listened hard enough you could hear it under the sound of the useless wankers at Fox News being blamed for everything by the very prick who’d been paying them to lie for him.

You did it. Bloody oath, you did it. Call it the Great American Toilet Flush. Seven Senate seats flipped, the House gone back blue, Texas voting a Democrat into the Senate for the first time since 1988, and every one of those results sent the same message to the rest of us, and a much louder one to the piece of shit in the VETO cap: deep down, you weren’t putting up with that doddering old fuckwit any more than we were.

THE UNCLE WE STOPPED INVITING

Every family has one, and in the family of nations ours was Uncle Sam. The uncle who turned up at Christmas and started a fight with the neighbours over the fence line, set fire to the shed trying to prove a point, told the kids the moon landing was fake and then borrowed money off your nan. For two bloody years that was him. Tariffs on the people who’d lent him the ladder. A war he started before the entrée, the prick. A new conspiracy every time somebody passed the gravy, and a sulk if you didn’t nod along.

Eventually the rellies stop inviting him. Nobody says it out loud. The invitations just stop, the chairs get rearranged, and the family quietly learns to live without him at the table. That’s what the world had done with Uncle Sam. We’d stopped setting a place. Carney counted the days left on the lease and said he’d wait for a new president before signing a thing with the bastard. The Europeans fast-tracked Canada through the side door. The Dutch flew their gold out of New York before it could be pawned. Half of Europe is building its own fucking satellites so one wanker with a rocket company can’t flick the switch. Every bit of that paperwork was done on the assumption that the Uncle Sam of 2008 and 2020 wasn’t coming back, and that the crazy was permanent.

And then Tuesday night happened, and it turned out Uncle Sam was never the crazy one. He had a crazy bloke living in his head with the remote, a doddering old arsehole who’d spent two years shouting at the telly and calling it foreign policy. On Tuesday the rest of the house got up off the couch, took the fucking remote off him, and locked him in the shed he’d been trying to burn down.

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NOBODY ASKED FOR ANY OF THIS

Think about what the world has had to absorb from one man in two years, you magnificent bastards, because you’ve been living inside it and sometimes the view is clearer from the footpath, the way you can see a mate’s house party better from outside once the host starts setting fire to the curtains.

Trade wars with your best friends. Fifty per cent tariffs on Canada, a country that sends its firefighters south every summer and asked for nothing back but a thank-you and maybe a snag. Factories packing up for Ontario like it was moving day at a share house. Farmers sold a bailout the size of a Band-Aid for a wound the size of a paddock, by a prick who’s never had dirt under a fingernail that didn’t come off a golf course. Diesel through the roof, groceries through the roof, and a 38 per cent approval rating that 89 per cent of you told CBS was about the cost of living. Thirty-eight per cent. A bout of gastro polls better than that in most households.

Then the war. On the first morning of it, a missile landed on a primary school in Minab in southern Iran, and the count of children dead in that one building ran past a hundred on every tally that came out of the country. I’ll say that in a straight voice because it needs one. Nobody voted for that. Nobody in Ohio or Kansas or Texas put their hand up and said yes, bomb the schoolgirls, I’ll pay extra at the pump for the privilege.

The world was already hard enough without the Brain Fart Generator of Pennsylvania Avenue wandering the Oval Office at 80 years of age, doddering and dithering and coming up with a new catastrophe before lunch, every one of them landing on millions of people who never got a say. Our power bills, our grain contracts, our kids’ futures, all of it hanging off one unhinged old dope’s mood that morning and whether the cockwomble had got his dozen Diet Cokes in before the first meeting. The Doddering Dope of the Oval Office had the whole planet on a group chat and nobody could fucking leave.

On Tuesday you kicked him out of the admin role, deleted his number, and changed the bloody Wi-Fi password.

WHO GOT OFF THE COUCH

Here’s the bit that made me put the glass down, and I don’t put the glass down for much.

The Democrats who sat 2024 out, who protest-voted or didn’t vote at all because they were cranky with their own party, got off the bloody couch. More than 61.7 million of you voted before election day even arrived, a record for a midterm by a country mile, and NPR reported the early surge was heaviest among Black voters and young voters. Sixty-one million early, and the fuckstick in the White House was still promising a red wave to anyone holding a microphone.

The Republicans who stayed home are a win too. Harvard’s youth poll going in found half of young Democrats were definitely voting against 34 per cent of young Republicans, and that gap has more than tripled since 2022. Those kids didn’t change sides. They just worked out that the Ayatollah of Amateur Hour had lied to them about the economy, the war and the files, and they stayed in bed rather than vote for the old bastard’s party. Sometimes the most powerful thing a disappointed voter can do is sweet bugger all, and millions of them did sweet bugger all with the precision of a bloke who’s just heard his ex is at the pub.

And Gen Z turned up. NBC’s exit polls had under-30s voting Democrat 72 to 25, up from a near-even split in 2024. Seventy-two to twenty-five. He lost the kids worse than a Boomer trying to explain TikTok. AP had it at seven in ten. Latino voters went 62 to 35. The two groups the Republicans spent two years crowing about winning walked out the door together and left the pricks standing in the hallway holding the balloons.

Put those three together and you get the scoreboard: Ohio, Iowa, South Carolina, Maine, North Carolina, Kansas and Texas flipped in the Senate, Collins done like a dinner after thirty years of deep concern, Abdul El-Sayed the first Muslim ever elected to that chamber, and the House back with CNN counting 231 seats and rising. That’s not a swing. That’s Uncle Sam staging his own fucking intervention and the whole street turning up with home cooked casseroles.

THE SIGH

I grew up under the Cold War, which meant my generation learned to duck under a desk and wait for the flash, as if a laminated bloody school desk was going to do a thing against a Soviet warhead, and we carried that dread into our forties and fifties like a crook back that flares up every time some prick on the news mentions missiles. Then a gormless galah in a red cap handed the whole shithouse arrangement back to us with the nuclear codes attached, the way a drunk mate hands a toddler the car keys and tells it she’ll be right. For two years I’ve gone to bed wondering which friend the mongrel would tariff or which country he’d bomb while I slept, and after a while you start checking the news the way a smoker pats his pockets for a lighter, every ten minutes and hating yourself a bit more each time, because the bastard had turned the whole planet into a pack of nervous wankers waiting for the next brain fart.

Tonight that dread has dropped ten bloody notches in the space of one election, and I’ll put my head on the pillow in an hour and have the first decent sleep since the inauguration. I know I’m not alone, because the markets did exactly the same thing. Stock futures dipped when the first flips landed, the way a bloke flinches when the pub goes quiet, then were back up by your breakfast once the money worked out that a Congress with a spine is good for business and a dickhead with a veto pen is not. Even the bastards who profit from chaos exhaled, the hedge funds included, and when the vultures look relieved you know the carcass had started biting back.

Uncle Sam can come home now, and about bloody time. The bloke in his head hasn’t gone anywhere yet, he’s still got two years on the lease and he’s sulking in the back room with a new hat like a fifteen-year-old who’s been grounded for setting fire to the bins, but the uncle’s got the fucking remote back and that’s the bit the family was waiting on. The chairs are going back around the table and the place is being set again, and if the drongo in the back room wants to come out and join us he can sit at the kids’ table with a plastic fork. Carney will keep his shirts on the hanger a while longer, because trust comes back one election at a time and he’s not an idiot, but the door is open. Good on ya. You beauty.

STILL ROCKY, STILL WORTH IT

Nobody’s pretending it’s over. The road ahead is a flogging goat track in the wet.

The Landslide That Wasn’t on the Ballot spent Tuesday night blaming his own candidates, Greg Abbott, petrol prices and a cable news anchor’s voice, then posted a photo of a red cap that said VETO. 

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The Milliner of Mar-a-Lardo has two years left on the lease, a pen, and a Senate that still needs thirteen Republicans to grow a spine before it can remove him. January 3 is still on the calendar, the clerk still holds the gavel until the new House is sworn in, and the smiling deadbolt from Louisiana has not found a conscience overnight. The subpoenas start in January. The impeachment follows. Removing that doddering, dithering, dope-headed cunt from the building is the next job, and it’s a big one.

But the hard part was never the paperwork. The hard part was finding out whether enough of you still gave a shit, and I don’t mean you lot reading this, you’ve been giving a shit on this masthead for two bloody years, I mean the millions who’d gone quiet and let the pricks think the silence was consent. On Tuesday they answered that in Kansas and South Carolina and Texas, with a war on and guzzoline at record highs and the Justice Department sending monitors to watch them do it.

You’ve got your spine back. You’ve got your morals back. You’ve got the rest of us back, and we’ve got you.

I fucking love you, my brothers and sisters of America. Welcome home, Uncle Sam.

IFLA ~ Setting a Place for Uncle Sam Again ~ Gman

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THE AUSSIE-TO-YANK WORD WIZARD:
THE GREAT AMERICAN TOILET FLUSH, PHRASEBOOK EDITION

For our American readers, the exchange rate is still terrible but the words are free. Twelve this week, because you’ve earned a bonus round.

  • Bettong: A small hopping marsupial, roughly rabbit-sized, that spends its days digging for truffles and looking pleased with itself. You lot, as of Wednesday.
  • Bloody oath: Emphatic agreement. The Australian for “absolutely”. Used above with full sincerity.
  • Chuck a wobbly: To throw a tantrum. See also: blaming a cable news anchor’s voice while your party loses the Senate.
  • Cooked: Finished, ruined, beyond saving. The Republican Senate map by about 11:30pm Eastern.
  • Dickhead: An idiot, usually one who’s being loud about it. The bloke who’d been living in Uncle Sam’s head.
  • Done like a dinner: Comprehensively beaten. Thirty years in the Senate, gone in one night.
  • Good on ya: Well done, sincerely. One of the few things an Australian says without irony.
  • Guzzoline: Petrol, as pronounced by the Mad Max universe, canonical Fury Road spelling. Not street Aussie, but it is the single most successful export of Australian English ever staged: an entire American generation learned that our word for gas is a growl with an engine behind it. In a country where the apocalypse itself runs on the stuff, the bowser was always going to get top billing.
  • Hiding: A thrashing. The biggest midterm one this century, if the numbers hold.
  • Mongrel: A low, contemptible person. Also a term of admiration for a footballer who plays hard. Context decides. The enablers are the first kind.
  • Rellies: Relatives. The family of nations that quietly stopped inviting Uncle Sam.
  • Shed: The backyard workshop every Australian bloke retreats to. Sacred ground. Setting fire to one is grounds for exile from the family.
  • Telly: The television. The box. Where your nan watches the news and yells at it, and where roughly half the country now watches a 79-year-old man yell at a journalist and then stomp on his own microphone. Live telly is the unforgiving kind: no edit suite to save you from yourself.
  • You beauty: An exclamation of pure, uncomplicated joy. Reserved for grand finals, rain after drought, and Tuesday night.

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