When Donald Trump signed one of his first executive orders of his second term, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America in January 2025, the world gasped.
It hadn't seen such arrogance since Benito Mussolini declared his ambition to turn the Mediterranean into an Italian lake in the 1930s.
Fast forward to last week and Trump's executive order renaming Lake Ontario "Lake America" was met with a global shrug. Even his musing that he might similarly rename the Pacific or Atlantic garnered a collective 'Whatever'.
Not only has the US president squandered American prestige with his disastrous war with Iran, he's used up his shock value. Flooding the zone with outrageous distractions - Lake America timed to draw attention from the six-month milestone of the Iran war - has worn thin.
Even investors have grown weary of jumping at every bombastic broadside Trump posts on Truth Social. Last month, Business Insider said markets had become numb to the president's social media posts. Wall Street, it said, had come to think of his aggressive missives as background noise.
The wild swings in crude oil prices on the back of Trump's social media posts we saw a couple of months ago have calmed down. Trading houses which signed up for advance notice of Trump posts at great cost must now feel a little scammed.
US voters aren't paying much attention either, with record numbers disapproving of the way Trump had handled the war and the domestic economy. He can rant and rave and rename until he's blue in the face but if no one's paying attention he might as well be the old man shouting at clouds.
London-based financial intelligence website TACT explained why the world has tuned out to Trump: "What began as fearful but intent listening, then morphed into stunned incredulity, has now become dismissal. Statements made one day are brazenly, seemingly without irony, and unapologetically reversed the next. Threats are issued and then diluted. Red lines appear and disappear almost at random. At this point, many governments, markets and foreign observers no longer treat pronouncements from Washington as reliable indicators of policy at all."
There are signs this reality - that few still take him seriously - is slowly dawning on Trump himself. Weeks out from the mid-terms, with support for the Republicans circling the drain, the president is already playing the blame game. If they lose the House of Representatives, he tells anyone still listening, it won't be his fault, it will be theirs.
All reality shows have a shelf-life and Trump's second term is no different. What was once novel has grown stale. The roasts and insults no longer shock. The boasting, bragging and name-calling which once appalled reasonable people now fall on deaf ears. We once shouted at the TV; we now check our phones or hit the mute button. We've heard it all before.
The Trump show has become boring.
But, with 874 sleeps until he leaves office, it still has half a season to run and in all likelihood will become even more tedious as it fights to keep its dwindling audience.
HAVE YOUR SAY: Have you stopped paying attention to Donald Trump? Did his executive order renaming Lake Ontario come as a surprise? Or did you shrug with indifference, just like Canada did? Email us: [email protected]
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:
- Former AFL star Nicky Winmar has been jailed for six months for attacking a woman in a violent assault.
- Property sell-offs and billions of dollars in parcels and services revenue have delivered Australia Post a nearly 70 per cent full-year profit improvement.
- Australia's second-biggest airline Virgin Australia has no immediate plans to reframe its onboard bags policy, as Jetstar prepares to charge travellers to put luggage in overhead lockers.
THEY SAID IT: "Reality TV to me is the museum of social decay." - Gary Oldman
YOU SAID IT: In uncertain and exhausting times we find solace in history, wrote Garry. But we should always be wary of rose-tinted nostalgia.
Stephen asks of Garry's research into William Buckley: "Is this the Buckley of 'You've got Buckley's chance?" Indeed it is, Stephen.
"What history teaches us is that no dominant country or culture lasts forever," writes Barry. "Egypt, the Mesopotamian countries, Greece, Rome, Britain, you name it. It's not a question of if but when. Trump is just accelerating the process."
Span writes about his love of history: "It began as a child, reading Leonard Woolley's archaeology books, and since then I've roamed almost everywhere. Chinese history is one of my special areas of interest - it won me a Big Brass Mug on Hard Quiz. Anglo-Saxon England is another one, and I'm a sucker for biographies. If I could travel in time, I'd like to be somewhere early, where I could see written language appearing, or sit in with the cave painters."
Old Donald would travel forward in time: "I reckon 50 years should do it: by then the horror that shapes this present world must have been either sorted or we've been obliterated. If the former, I can rest in peace. Should the latter have triumphed, well, there won't be anything to see, and the only question will be 'What was it all for?'"
Alison would go the other way, to Australia's precolonial times: "Mary Gilmore wrote about how you could smell the wildflowers while still out at sea, and how black swans were so prevalent around the waterholes that they stampeded the cattle coming to drink. Forget the practical logistics! Give me a magical Indigenous guide who could fly me across this beautiful country."
History was a favourite school subject for Helen: "At the age of 80, I have lived through quite enough historical periods without time travelling back to another one. The after-effects of World War II when many people had strong hatred for the Japanese and there were many war widows and badly injured men about; the long rule of the Liberal government and then the dramatic change of the short-lived Whitlam government. And of course, the Malayan crisis, the Vietnam War, the Gulf Wars, to say nothing of the current wars destroying people's lives all over our planet. I've lived through an interesting, if unsettled period of history."
"I understand your addiction to the past," writes Paul. "Since I retired, I have become the writer of other people's family histories - a ghost-writer in both senses of the term. I was once asked if a family story from the early 1900s of someone getting shot by their dog and then someone at the wake being killed by their horse was true. Believe it or not, I found the story and it was true! Fortunately, people have always been fascinated by bizarre deaths."
