Americans have spoken. Australians will next year

When the United States Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that presidents are entitled to the presumption of immunity for all official acts, it was Donald Trump’s conduct that was at issue. His opponents were quick to foresee nightmare scenarios of a Trump unbound, returned to office as “a king above the law”, as dissenting Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor put it.

Yet Trump has been democratically chosen, winning both the electoral college and (for the first time) the popular vote. Within the US, fears over what he might do with a second term have coalesced around the document known as Project 2025, with its promise to round up illegal immigrants, abolish entire government agencies, dismantle a pro-Democrat “deep state” and wind back the “climate fanaticism” of the Biden years by drilling for oil.

Does Trump really intend to let Elon Musk do to the US public service what he did to Twitter? Will he let Robert F. Kennedy jnr reshape how vaccines are delivered? Will he implement the massive tariffs on imports he has repeatedly proposed, potentially sparking a global trade war? Is this president-elect, as some would have us believe, the end of American democracy?

Or is it possible that the notoriously transactional Trump will jettison some commitments and dilute others? Will Musk and Kennedy eventually join the likes of Anthony Scaramucci, Michael Cohen, Rex Tillerson, John Bolton and Jeff Sessions on Trump’s personnel scrapheap?

Many have expressed shock and dismay at the re-election of a felon convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records, who has been impeached twice and found by a civil court to have sexually abused a woman. Both the pollster Allan Lichtman and the pundit Maureen Dowd have used the word “unfathomable” to describe Trump’s return to the White House.

Yet in the election’s aftermath there were signs key Democrats and their supporters fathomed it all too well. Former president Barack Obama and his wife Michelle tiptoed around it in a patronising way when they posted on X that there was a “feeling that a lot of folks have that, no matter how hard they work, treading water is the best they can do”.

The firebrand former candidate for the Democratic nomination Bernie Sanders was more specific, posting that “real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.” As The Age’s Chris Zappone put it, this election may well have been “less about democracy or freedom … [than an] easier time at the grocery store”.

How this translates into votes for Trump and his inflationary economic policies is moot; what is clear is that not only is there a realignment in how and whether key American demographics vote, but also in how politics in the United States are conducted.

The challenge for Democrats is not to upbraid those constituencies who have slipped away from them but to do the real work of democracy and engage them on their terms. It is not enough to tell people that headline economic data is improving if you are not willing to address their lived experience of hardship, something that can’t be done through celebrity endorsements and memes (“Kamala is brat”, anyone?). As one reporter for a Nashville newspaper put it, discussing the loss of black male voters to Trump, “as long as Dems continue to focus on what should be instead of what is, they will continue to bleed support — whether those voters continue to shift to the right or opt out of the political process altogether”.

Like most nations, Australia will be treading on eggshells for much of Trump’s presidency, hoping that he doesn’t ride roughshod over international trading arrangements, alliances and agreements.

As Chip Le Grand reports, an extraordinary 73 per cent of American voters in an NBC exit poll said they were either dissatisfied or angry with how things were going in their country. Voters unhappy with the status quo will of course look for change. There are lessons there for Australia’s incumbents.

During the Queensland state election, when abortion suddenly surfaced as a campaign issue, then NDIS minister Bill Shorten remarked that “it seems like someone in the LNP swallowed the Trump playbook”. Some on the Right will now see that playbook as a winner.

So many aspects of the campaign have seemed peculiarly American – the assassination attempts targeting Trump, a declining Biden hanging on as long as possible in the hope of a second term – while in mandatory voting Australia has its own peculiarity. But both Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton will have noted the potency of attack lines based on the cost of living and unchecked immigration.

In the end, the key difference may be in the power of the presidency itself. It gives Donald Trump a dominance no politician here can imagine. Its role in shaping all our futures remains to be seen.

Patrick Elligett sends an exclusive newsletter to subscribers each week. Sign up to receive his Note from the Editor.