Canberra is just another place to most Australians. Round-abouts and fountains, a lake, a few museums and a grandiose parliament full of sanctimonious windbags. And no beach.
Compare this to Americans for whom the capital itself is the embodiment of their problems - the rotten core of a political system rigged to serve its own interests.
More World News Videos
Trust Trump... 'if he's not joking'
During a lively exchange with a reporter at Monday's White House briefing, spokesman Sean Spicer says President Trump can be trusted, 'if he's not joking.'
Washington DC is thus the perennial whipping boy of would-be representatives, who, having flogged the populist horse to the finish line, promptly dismount to become part of the problem.
Hence Donald Trump's brilliantly evocative image of draining the swamp.
![Less recognised is the behavioural impact of Trumpist anti-establishment populism on mainstream politics.](/web/20170319130505im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/0/a/q/j/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gv0hmv.png/1489822982349.jpg)
Pulling the plug on Burley Griffin doesn't have the same ring to it – even if it might recover a few more shopping trollies.
The advent of President Trump - an outcome so odd it seemed impossible even after it happened - and Brexit before it, has cracked a decades-long liberal consensus across the western world.
Established norms are worthless. Politics has been shattered. Hard won social and economic advances assumed to be permanent, from a unified Europe to free trade, multiculturalism and the environment, face roll-back.
Uncertainty and anxiety are on the rise.
Much has been written in the wake of the UK and US voter backlashes about the growing electoral power of One Nation and the other parties of protest dotting the margins.
Less recognised is the behavioural impact of Trumpist anti-establishment populism on mainstream politics including declining civility, endemic inconsistency, and rising indignance.
This can be felt across the board - starting on the right and leaching across to the left margins also.
A speech by Greens leader Richard Di Natale to the National Press Club last Wednesday, was notable for its harsh tone towards the media - a favoured target of the right - and for its unguarded assault on mainstream neo-liberalism.
Di Natale had been expected to draw his party towards the centre-ground, to make it more a party of compromises and outcomes, than of principled positions loudly stated.
But his speech instead conveyed a kind of mirror-image populism, only this time from the left, appealing mainly to those who are already on board. Answers to the central problems of the contemporary political economy were scarce. A 6-hour day or a 4-day working week would certainly be popular, but what about the costs? On this, the Greens leader balked.
Nowhere was it explained how this radical change would work, how people could meet their mortgage and rental bills, when faced with a 20 per cent pay cut. He just wanted to start a conversation, he protested.
Clearly any discussion of cutting work hours cannot be expected to progress without some specifics. A threshold question is how to secure the dramatic productivity increase needed to fund it.
Asked if his root-and-branch rethink of work would contemplate weekend penalty rates, there was more obfuscation. Again, this is a pretty basic question albeit one that risks votes.
Accentuating the positive while eliminating the negative is classic populism.
But it is also what delineates the putative parties of government from the pretenders.
Pauline Hanson's antithetically named One Nation party (which pointedly seeks to divide voters rather than unite them) is a serial exponent of this political con, this convenient lie.
Indeed, its leader goes further, telling different audiences what they want to hear and thus sparing supporters the bad news about what they must give up.
Before the Western Australian state election she appeared on Perth's 6PR radio and was asked "Will you, Senator Hanson, help us in Western Australia in this fight, and would you be willing to see the GST share of your home state Queensland reduced so that WA can get a better deal?"
"Of course I will, no problem," she responded cheerily and without hesitation.
Later, she flatly denied making any such statement.
In the US, this truth deficit is itself the subject of a new kind of insider-outsider relativism. As one commentator noted of Trump's wilful Twitter fictions such as the patently false claim that Obama had tapped his phones: "The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally".
Pithy but hardly reassuring. Besides, where does this leave us?
Parties like Hanson's will collapse under these contradictions before long. Trump's administration may last the term or it may not, but his credibility is already irretrievable.
The less obvious but potentially more damaging effect of the new populism is to be felt in the mainstream parties. As their bases crumble, the temptation is to chase the strays.
Bill Shorten's language around foreign workers taking Australian jobs has this flavour, and it is evident in other policies too such as his strident bank bashing.
Malcolm Turnbull's jarring reversal on renewable energy and his emergence as an appeaser of Hanson's absurdist positions are further examples of how lowest common denominator politics is trumping his previous presentations, not to mention those of his party.
The rise of Trumpist populism is not just damaging Washington's standing (which is its central project), it is doing Canberra's credibility no favours as well.
Mark Kenny is national affairs editor.