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Animal Farm is here again, but this time there are several leaders who could lay some claim to the starring role of the chief villain, modelled on Stalin
This month, US President Donald Trump endorsed earlier calls by Russian President Vladimir Putin for a trilateral summit involving the two of them and Chinese President Xi Jinping. According to Trump, the summit would not be about him and Xi handing over a large chunk of Ukraine to Putin. Fat chance of that.
Putin yearns to regain effective control over swaths of Eastern Europe handed over to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at the 1943 Yalta conference with then-US president Franklin Roosevelt and UK prime minister Winston Churchill, when the three leaders carved up the rest of the world for the winners of World War II.
The brutal invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin makes him a lock for the part of Animal Farm’s Napoleon. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a natural for the role of Squealer. AP
Following his experience fighting fascism during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, the famous British socialist and novelist George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, a satirical account of Stalin’s bloodthirsty rise to power in Russia and his ultimate reward at Yalta.
The chief villain in Animal Farm was modelled on Stalin and called Napoleon, an ambitious pig who believed all animals were created equal, but some were more equal than others.
All three leaders at the trilateral summit proposed by Putin could lay some claim to the starring role as a modern Napoleon, but the Russian president’s brutal invasion of Ukraine makes him a lock for the part.
Trump, on the other hand, is a natural for the role of Squealer, the Animal Farm pig who twisted the truth and fabricated history to justify Napoleon’s broken promises and secret life of luxury.
In this role, Trump’s propaganda support crew are the tech bros, formerly a liberal group of IT, social media and AI billionaires, who threw in $US1 million ($1.4 million) apiece to sponsor his 2025 inauguration and have been allowed to regulate their own businesses in the US.
“I suspect a cruel fate awaits Putin’s Squealer and his cheer squads at the hands of a Democrat controlled Congress.”
They have also secured Trump’s support to do the same in overseas countries, where they are now dumping their unpopular data centres. These centres drive up local power and water prices, then repatriate profits back to the US through transfer pricing.
Politically, the tech bros have used social media and its embedded algorithms to promote the more divisive and authoritarian aspects of Trumpism in both the US and overseas, encouraging voters to abandon conventional parties of the centre-left and centre-right in favour of Trump lookalikes.
The tech bros now want to maximise their profits by allowing unrestricted use of algorithms and employing agentic artificial intelligence models to boost profits and deepen community dependence on their social media platforms.
Adding agentic AI to social media algorithms is like combining sugar and fat – they’re pretty hard to resist. Think free deep-fried Mars bars at a school tuck shop.
In Australia, the Trump political franchise is held by One Nation, a party led by Pauline Hanson, whose best mate is the richest person in Australia, Gina Rinehart, a good pal of the US president.
The biggest hit for the tech bros in Australia has been the collapse of the local float of data centre builder Firmus.
One Nation normally pulls less than one in 10 votes from the traditional battlers in the Australian economy – the old, the sick, single parents and welfare dependents on fixed incomes.
During 2026, the One Nation vote has risen to one-in-four, following the limp response of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to the Bondi massacre last December and then a deeply unpopular big-spending budget from Treasurer Jim Chalmers, one that drove up interest rates for young home buyers, slugged aspirational self-employed voters with tax increases and hit older voters with the withdrawal of private healthcare subsidies. It was a dud.
Polling from long-term Labor researcher John Utting shows One Nation voters now harbour an intense personal dislike for Albanese and have lost respect for Angus Taylor’s leadership of the Coalition. Taylor is seen to spend too much time worrying about One Nation policies and not enough time leading debates on traditional Coalition strengths such as spending restraint, economic management and national security.
The biggest hit for the tech bros in Australia has been the collapse of the local float of data centre builder Firmus, which pitched its shares at $11, when valuations from wiser heads put the figure at $1 per share. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has started examining the failed IPO.
The tech bros also stand to lose big time from the Albanese government’s digital duty of care bill, which is now before the parliament. It has passed through the House of Representatives and is awaiting consideration by the Senate.
The bill seeks to regulate and minimise harmful content promoted by social media algorithms and AI chatbots, including the encouragement of eating disorders, pornography, “manosphere” misogyny and bullying.
We shouldn’t be surprised that One Nation opposes the bill, given its rhetoric on social media freedoms has been uncannily similar to that of Trump and the tech bros.
It is surprising, however, that the Coalition leader is also considering opposing the bill, rather than working with the government to tighten the drafting and reduce the bill’s additional regulatory red-tape burden on small business.
Internationally, recent elections in Hungary, Serbia, Brazil and Israel, along with polling in the UK and the US, have not gone well for Trump and Trump-styled fringe right leaders.
Trump is now deeply unpopular among US voters, with a net approval rating of minus 27 percentage points. He is rated by betting site Polymarket as having a 91 per cent chance of costing his Republican Party control of the US House of Representatives next week and a 63 per cent chance of losing the Senate as well. Oops.
I suspect a cruel fate awaits Putin’s Squealer and his cheer squads at the hands of a Democrat-controlled Congress for the next two years, which doesn’t augur well for his antipodean acolytes.
Last week, One Nation’s national primary vote fell below the Coalition in the Morgan Gallup poll for the first time since the aftermath of the Bondi massacre.
I sense Australians are looking for leadership here, from both Albanese and Taylor.
