JAKE THE MUSS vs TRUMPSTEIN: When You Piss Off the Wrong Island
You know what nobody in history has ever said? "Let's go pick a fight with the Kiwis, that'll end well."
Nobody. Not ever. Because people who’ve met New Zealanders understand something fundamental about them. They’re the nicest people on Earth right up until they’re not. And when they’re not? Brother. Go rent Once Were Warriors. Go watch Jake the Muss sitting in that pub, quietly drinking his beer, minding his own business, and then some dickhead says the wrong thing and suddenly furniture is airborne, teeth are on the floor, and grown men are climbing out bathroom windows. That’s not a movie scene. That’s a cultural documentary. That is the Kiwi emotional spectrum: chill, chill, chill, chill, ABSOLUTE CARNAGE.
And right now? Forty-four thousand Kiwis just got told their flights are cancelled because some spray-tanned reality TV host with the sexual ethics of a bonobo and the strategic intelligence of a house brick decided to bomb the country that controls the Strait of Hormuz.
Let me explain this to the Americans in the room, because I know geography isn’t your strong suit. It’s fine, your schools are funded by property taxes in neighbourhoods you can’t afford, I get it. The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow little chokepoint where TWENTY PERCENT of the world’s oil squeezes through every single day. It’s like the bottleneck on the M1 at peak hour except instead of Commodores it’s supertankers, and instead of road rage it’s naval mines and Iranian speedboats packed with explosives.
And Donald John Trump looked at that situation and said: “Yeah, bomb that.”
BOMB. THAT.
That’s like looking at the only bridge out of your town during bushfire season and going “reckon I’ll set that on fire.” That’s like seeing ONE power cable keeping the lights on in your entire street and thinking “bet I can hit that with an axe.” This man saw a chokepoint that the entire global economy depends on and thought “I should start a war right next to it, that’ll definitely go well, I’m very smart, people tell me I’m smart all the time.”
And who’s paying for it? Is it Trump? Is it his mates at Mar-a-Lago? Is it the defence contractors who are literally popping champagne corks right now?
No.
It’s Nana. In Tauranga. Trying to fly to Auckland to see her grandkids.
It’s a grandmother in the Bay of Plenty who’s never heard of the Strait of Hormuz, couldn’t point to Iran on a map, has absolutely zero opinion on Middle Eastern geopolitics, and just wanted to see little Aroha’s school play. FLIGHT CANCELLED. Sorry love. Donald Trump needed a wartime presidency to keep the Jeffrey Epstein client list out of the news cycle and your $89 return to Auckland was the collateral damage.
Jet fuel was sitting at US$85 a barrel. Normal. Predictable. Boring. Now it’s $170. DOUBLED. In weeks. Iran’s defence minister is on television saying the world should prepare for US$200 a barrel. Iraqi security officials are reporting explosive-laden boats ramming fuel tankers. TWO DRONES landed near Dubai International Airport this week. Dubai! The busiest international hub on Earth! Planes are being evacuated in Bahrain. Middle Eastern airspace is being closed faster than Trump’s browser history when Melania walks in the room.
Air New Zealand’s CEO Nikhil Ravishankar had to go on morning television, look the nation in the eye, and say the word “unprecedented.” That’s CEO-speak for “we are completely fucked and I’m contractually obligated to not say that.” He told New Zealand that fuel has overtaken labour as their single biggest cost. Let that land for a second. An airline, whose entire business model is paying people to fly planes, is now spending more on fuel than on the people. The crack spread, that’s the premium to refine jet fuel from crude, is sitting at US$75. That’s not a margin. That’s a mugging.
Domestic flights up $10. Short haul up $20. Long haul up $90. And Ravishankar, bless him, actually said: “Even in these unprecedented times, there’s a limit to what we can pass on to our customers.” Because unlike the tangerine wrecking ball in the Oval Office, he actually gives a shit about the people affected by his decisions.
The airline has suspended its earnings guidance. You know what that means? That means the accountants at Air New Zealand looked at their spreadsheets, looked at the oil price, looked at the spreadsheets again, looked at each other, and said: “We literally cannot tell you what’s going to happen. We have no idea. The numbers don’t make sense anymore because one lunatic in America has broken the global energy market.”
And it’s not just Air NZ. Qantas is hiking fares. SAS is hiking fares. Thai Airways is hiking fares. Japan Airlines is down. Cathay Pacific is down. The US government just revised its average jet fuel price forecast UP by 37 percent. That translates to an extra US$11.6 BILLION in fuel costs for just the four biggest American carriers. Eleven point six billion. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a mid-sized country’s GDP.
But here’s my favourite detail. Here’s the one that should be on the front page of every newspaper on Earth.
Air Chathams.
You know Air Chathams? Course you don’t. Nobody does. Air Chathams is a tiny little airline that flies to the Chatham Islands, which is a rock in the Pacific Ocean, 800 kilometres off the east coast of New Zealand, so far from anything that they have their OWN time zone. Population: 600 people. And some sheep. And probably some seabirds who are equally pissed off.
Air Chathams had to put out a formal statement saying their fuel costs have risen significantly due to the war in the Middle East.
SIX HUNDRED PEOPLE. On a ROCK. In the middle of the PACIFIC OCEAN. On the other side of the PLANET from Iran. They’ve got their own TIME ZONE. They are as far from the Middle East as it is physically possible to be while still being on dry land. And they are paying more for fuel because Donald Trump wanted to play soldier.
That’s the reach of this stupidity. That’s the blast radius of this ego. It went through the Persian Gulf, across the Indian Ocean, past Australia, past New Zealand, another 800 kilometres into the Pacific, all the way to a rock with 600 people and a landing strip, and it STILL hit them in the wallet.
You couldn’t write this. If I pitched this to Netflix they’d say “nah mate, too unrealistic. Audience won’t buy it. A game show host starts a war to cover up his mate’s sex trafficking ring and it cancels flights to an island most people haven’t heard of? Come on.”
AND IT GETS WORSE.
The IEA, the International Energy Agency, just agreed to release 400 million barrels from strategic reserves. Largest coordinated release in history. They’ve NEVER done anything this big. And New Zealand, sweet little New Zealand, population 5 million, clean and green, minds its own business, contributes nothing to global conflict, HAS to chip in. Six days of their own fuel supply. Their Finance Minister Nicola Willis had to pull senior ministers into an emergency meeting. Their Associate Energy Minister Shane Jones went on television and said they’re monitoring the situation “very, very closely.”
“Very, very closely.”
That’s politician for “we are bricking it at a molecular level but the comms team said we can’t cry on camera.” That’s the New Zealand government equivalent of Jake the Muss going real quiet at the dinner table. When Shane Jones says “very, very closely” twice, that’s two “verys” away from someone getting a hiding.
Because here’s the thing about Kiwis. They’re not Australians. Australians will tell you to get fucked before you’ve finished your sentence. Kiwis? Kiwis absorb it. They take it. They’re polite. They’re patient. They’ll offer you a beer and a feed. They’ll say “sweet as, bro” while the pressure builds. And builds. And builds.
And then the table flips.
And Donald Trump is sitting at that table right now. Sitting there in Mar-a-Lago with his well-done steak and his ketchup and his Big Mac wrappers, completely insulated from every single consequence of what he’s done. He doesn’t fly Air New Zealand. He doesn’t fly commercial. He doesn’t fill up his own car. He doesn’t know what jet fuel costs. He probably thinks the Chatham Islands is a resort chain. I mean look at the bloke. He can’t even get his Coppertone face right. He looks like someone tried to colour-match a leather couch to a tangerine and gave up halfway through. The spray tan has a more consistent foreign policy than he does.
His defence contractors are making billions. Raytheon’s laughing. Lockheed Martin’s laughing. The oil companies are swimming in cash. And Nana in Tauranga is rebooking a bus.
A bus.
In 2026.
Because one country away from the most important oil chokepoint on Earth, a man who raw-dogged a porn star while his wife was home with a newborn, who rode on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane, who has the impulse control of a toddler with a lighter, decided that dropping bombs would make people forget about the client list.
You want to know what happens when you piss off a Kiwi?
You remember that scene? Jake’s sitting there. The whole pub goes quiet. Someone made a mistake. And Jake doesn’t yell. He doesn’t threaten. He just stands up. Slowly. And everyone in the room knows. EVERYONE knows what’s coming.
That’s 5 million Kiwis right now. That’s 44,000 cancelled passengers. That’s 600 people on the Chatham Islands. That’s Nana. That’s the whole Pacific. Standing up. Slowly.
Cook the man some eggs?
Nah, mate.
Jake’s standing up. And Trumpstein? He should be looking for the exit. Because the table’s about to flip. And there’s not enough ketchup in Mar-a-Lago to clean up what’s coming.
Most days... I wish Jake would give him a tap on the shoulder. Just a gentle one. A Kiwi hello. See how that spray tan holds up.
Ya the man is a real dirtbag isn't he. And the real scary thing is we still have 3 years left for him to screw things up even worse. I'm praying for a heart attack or stroke fixes that problem for us all...
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