When the Sex Pistols stormed onto the music scene nearly 50 years ago, one of the slogans their deft manager Malcolm McLaren tossed around was “Cash from Chaos.”
Sound familiar? Lead singer Johnny Rotten’s hair was a shade of orange, too.
McLaren floated the band on a Thames River barge during the Queen’s jubilee playing their version of God Save the Queen, unleashed them on a TV talk show to spew a torrent of dirty words, and toured the band through the redneck U.S. south to antagonize locals.
The band’s only album released during its heyday, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, contains songs like Holidays in the Sun, and New York – both topics that come to mind with Donald Trump. It’s actually true that other songs on the LP are Liar, No Feelings and, of course, Anarchy in the U.K.
Although American thrash metal band Megadeth covered Anarchy in the U.K. and changed the lyrics to make it Anarchy in the USA, we have a new band leader in the White House contemplating his version. He issues threats, mocks people and is a master of self-promotion.
I give you the first punk president.
The Sex Pistol’s music wasn’t that revolutionary – it was basically 50s rock sung through snarls and attitude. But it spawned a million imitators because it seemed to return music from the muso-heights of prog rock to the people. It seemed relatable because anyone could do it.
There’s a parallel here with the politician who has attracted working class Americans away from the Democratic Party even though it may not be in the best interest of their take-home pay if he imposes tariffs on products his constituents like to buy.
But even Rotten, who reverted to his real name, John Lydon, after leaving the Pistols in 1978, has expressed support for Trump. He told British TV several years ago: “I’m working-class English, it makes complete sense to me to vote for a person who actually talks about my kind of people.”
For the mining industry, Trump represents an opportunity to put a thumb on the scales of approvals in favour of getting projects done. The excitement in U.S. mining circles is palpable as Trump exhorts about making America great again, unleashing its power and resources to take on China and the world.
It’s a reaction to a few decades of rising woke-ness and is to be expected. It’s like how Nixon capitalized on Democrat divisiveness over the Vietnam War and middle American outrage over hippie excess to attain the White House in 1968.
And like Nixon, Trump brings to statesmanship the first president since then of openly cultivating the caged madman approach: ‘better watch out! There’s no telling what I’m going to do!’
Only Nixon could go to China, the saying goes, because he was a virulent anti-communist in the 1950s. It remains to be seen where a president like Trump, an open book on all his pronouncements, would go against his own persona like Nixon did. He’s established his anti-environmentalist credentials.
Speaking last month via video to business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland, Trump said he would lower business taxes to 15% from 21%, make emergency declarations for project approvals and suggested Canada could dodge his tariff plan by becoming an American state.
The mood across an ocean and another continent at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference in January was support for Trump to cut red tape and see if it rubs off on Canada, and send more U.S. Defense Department funding north, while BC Premier David Eby was defiant about the potential tariffs. It brought to mind Pierre Trudeau at the Washington Press Club in 1969:
“Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly or even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
Of course, one area where Trump’s detractors are waiting for him to fall into Nixon parallels is corruption. His own Watergate.
But then he was guilty in the hush money sex scandal, found liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, indicted by a grand jury in Georgia for election interference, and undertook an “unprecedented criminal effort” to overturn the 2020 election results, according to a report by Special Counsel Jack Smith. And nothing seemed to stick.
Tricky Dick lasted only 25 months from the Watergate break-in until his resignation in August 1974. The Sex Pistols lasted 30 months before they self-destructed at the end of that American tour.
Trump has 47 months left. Can he make it, and what can he make of it?
Please stick to mining where you might have some insight.
Enjoyable read.