Think the past will protect Australia from Trump’s future? Think again

It’s been a week.

Just as he promised, the 47th president of the United States has wasted no time. As soon as he was inaugurated, Trump began a well-planned process of unwinding the legacy of his predecessor and radically reshaping both American life and the US’s role in the world.

Donald Trump mused on imposing tariffs on Mexico and Canada as he signed executive orders in front of journalists in the Oval Office.Credit: AP

On inauguration day alone, Trump signed more than 20 executive orders and rescinded 78 signed by Joe Biden. The signed orders cover almost every aspect of US government and life: withdrawing the US from the World Health Organisation, pardoning January 6 insurrectionists, encouraging oil drilling, attempting to undo birthright citizenship, restoring participation in international anti-abortion pacts, declassifying records about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.

There isn’t much point in listing all the executive orders, and not enough space anyway. By the time of publishing, it’s likely that more will have been signed. This is a tactic Trump and his backers have employed since the beginning.

In 2018, one of the most important architects and ideological leaders of Trump’s MAGA movement, Steve Bannon, said: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” As we are seeing, Trump is once again flooding the zone. But this time, there’s more purpose. More discipline.

It might seem chaotic, but every move Trump has made so far has been meticulously planned. As a recent analysis by Time demonstrated, two-thirds of the executive actions coming out of the White House are drawn directly or indirectly from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s radical plan for Trump’s second presidency. These early moves are all designed to reward the movement that swept Trump back to power; materially, politically, and culturally. They reinforce his ownership of the base, further locking them in.

Trump has learnt a lot since his last go-round. He has handed the far-right of the US a generational victory and it will not waste the opportunity.

While we here in Australia shouldn’t get sucked into the flood, we also can’t ignore it. It doesn’t respect the neat, fictional barriers we like to draw between domestic politics and what happens in the rest of the world. It is already lapping at our feet.

Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords is one of the least surprising moves. It is perhaps of less material consequence than his commitment to increase fossil fuel production and use. Australia has a long history of hiding behind convenient American recalcitrance on international climate action, but the stakes are higher now than they have ever been.

Elon Musk speaking at the presidential inauguration parade in Washington on Monday.Credit: Bloomberg

As California burns, one of the very few things about our relationship with the US that actually makes us safer – our longstanding exchange of firefighting personnel, equipment and knowledge – is collapsing in real time. Fire seasons are merging across hemispheres. Trump’s ideological commitment to accelerating the cause of that catastrophe is an active and direct security threat to Australia. And lack of response from us – or, worse, craven complicity – risks both our national security and the dramatic destabilisation of the Pacific.

That risk sits alongside direct threats to public health, as the Trump administration gets to work dismantling public health communication and critical vaccine development and rollout programs that extend internationally. The State Department pause on almost all US foreign aid, announced over the weekend, is an orchestrated global catastrophe of almost unimaginable scale – one that will have immediate flow-on effects in our region. A pause on US aid to the Pacific has significant geostrategic implications, not to mention the material impact on Pacific lives.

This brutal and vindictive withdrawal, alongside Trump’s very effective retail politics, has led many to conclude that the president is an isolationist. In fact, he is not. He just has a very different vision for the exercise of American power: one that involves the revival of naked American imperialism. His talk of re-taking the Panama Canal and annexing Greenland is both cringeworthy and entirely serious. Alongside far-right members of his inner circle like “Nazi-style” salute-giving Elon Musk, Trump is busy building a version of violent imperial power that extends beyond even this planet.

The Australian government likes to talk about the “rules-based international order”. Much of that talk has assumed that the US, as the historic architect of that order, is genuinely committed to it. As the Biden administration’s support of Israel has demonstrated so clearly, it hasn’t really ever been. But Trump – as he so often does – highlights that in such hyper colour, it becomes undeniable.

What might that mean for our flimsy commitment to that same order? Asked if Australia would support Trump’s attacks on the foundations of international law – a unilateral takeover of Panama, or annexation of Greenland – the best response Defence Minister Richard Marles could come up with was that “our alliance with the US is really the cornerstone of our foreign policy, it’s the cornerstone of our national security”. He did not answer the question. That, in itself, is surely answer enough.

As Trump sets about dismantling what little is left of the rules-based international order, destabilises the US and global economies, deliberately accelerates catastrophic climate change, undermines public health, increases already rising inequality and unleashes white supremacy at home and abroad – exactly as he told us he would – we need better answers. And we need them quickly.

Australia can find them if we choose to. We have considerable power and agency. Yet, we consistently underestimate and undermine our own influence by refusing to acknowledge what we have and by refusing to consider what we might do with it.

We do not have to succumb to the flood; we do not have to let it wash over us. But that requires building something real, not meaningless and cowardly gestures towards a kind of “national security” that is, in actual fact, no security at all.

Dr Emma Shortis is director of international and security affairs at The Australia Institute.