New Trump book reads like it was written for a left-wing dinner party

Bruce Wolpe is too keen to call the US President a racist; he is silent on how his own party’s stale identity politics made Donald Trump’s historic second term possible.

Bruce Wolpe is too keen to call the US President a racist in his new book, What Trump’s Second Term Means for Australia.

If you’re asked to review a book about what Donald Trump means for Australia and its back cover carries the endorsement only of ABC-teal types, would you expect a robust engagement with arguments across the political spectrum?

No, neither did I.

Bruce Wolpe, “Australia’s leading expert on US politics”, according to the front cover, worked for Barack Obama and then for Julia Gillard. His first boss gave us the Age of Trump, his ­second Tony Abbott and nearly a decade of federal Liberal ­ascendancy.

The failure of left-wing politics in both nations, which the ­Pacific-hopping Wolpe has a deep lived experience of, is something he wants and needs to wrestle with, but ends up mostly eliding in his latest book. Far better to chide Trump, offer commonsensical, but hardly revelatory, ways of dealing with him and hope the Democrats can get their act together.

He has written an engaging instruction manual for the Trump rollercoaster which, for a second time, we have just been strapped aboard. But there is little here to challenge progressive stereotypes of the 47th president and even less on the Democratic excesses that made his second term possible.

Bruce Wolpe, “Australia’s leading expert on US politics”.

There is a working definition of Trump – as erratic, unhinged, chaotic, arrogant, historically illiterate, and “completely transactional” – which even his supporters would embrace. Wolpe also defines “the four pillars of Trumpism” – nativism, protectionism, isolationism, and nationalism – and the Trump playbook – “deny, denounce, discredit, defame”.

This typology is mostly accepted, helpful even. But because it frames the whole book, Wolpe never gets to grips with Trump’s appeal – to Americans or Australians. We are all just duped or have failed to see the wisdom of the Democratic alternatives Wolpe has been promoting for decades and which Americans rejected in 2016 and even more decisively in 2024.

The author confounds his central, titular claim – that Trump portends “shocking consequences for us and the world” – by observing that Australians did pretty well under the first Trump dispensation.

So why all the doom and gloom about a second?

The book has an uneven feel. Long quotes, from rhetorical titans like Trump, Biden, Turnbull, and Albanese, are too frequent. Why not summarise their speeches for the reader? Chapters vary in length. The longest is reserved for his wife, Lesley Russell. This becomes a parody of how the Australia-American left continue to fetishise lockdowns and the big government overreach of Covid-19. That, apparently, is what the masses want and need.

“The integrity of the World Health Organisation” is surely an oxymoron?

His finger-wagging over race elucidates very little. Black is capitalised, white isn’t. Am I alone in finding that jarring? The analogy of the voice referendum result with Trump racism does not confect the racial unity the author supposes. Rather, it highlights how different the racial histories of both nations are, despite Wolpe’s efforts to claim a common struggle.

The problematic racism of the Democrats is not detailed by the author. A party that imprisoned African-Americans on plantations, then, after Republicans had freed them, proceeded to lock them out of its schools, before locking them into welfare dependence and identity politics, partly explains why more people of colour voted against Wolpe’s Democrats in 2024 than have done so since 1932.

Biden’s picking his vice-president on DEI grounds was a disaster for his party. She lost Star County, Texas, which is 98 per cent Hispanic, by 16 points. The first black woman to win the presidential nomination of her party saw her GOP opponent win 1/3 of voters of colour. Wolpe is too keen to call Trump a racist; he is silent on how his own party’s stale identity politics made Trump’s historic second term possible.

Biden’s picking his vice-president on DEI grounds was a disaster for his party. Picture: AFP

Wolpe’s prescriptions for the US rely on his having imbibed a certain style of Australian condescension: if only Americans could be more like us. It would make them so much more virtuous. If they could only be more pro-abortion and anti-guns … If only they could understand that racism is a right-wing phenomenon … If only they could grasp the wisdom of compulsory voting and how people really love mask mandates … If only they could emit less carbon … I paraphrase, but not too unfairly.

There’s an over-reliance on Norman Ornstein, a Never Trump conservative scholar. Wolpe presumes his inclusion will appease conservative readers. Ornstein was persuaded to contribute a patronising epilogue: “A letter to Australia from an American friend.” But he is the lone conservative voice here. The book is otherwise an example of how progressives talk to themselves. And thus, unintentionally, how they managed to talk themselves out of power. Apart from Ornstein, Wolpe’s sources are exclusively left-leaning legacy media. I’m not asking the author to take out a subscription to The Australian, watch Sky News after dark, or occasionally consult the National Review. But there is no evidence here of Wolpe ever engaging with serious conservative arguments at source. Everything is refracted through an ABC-NYT-CNN-Guardian-Tingle lens. The book has no foil.

The author and I both enjoy campus-based jobs. I’m not sure how things are at USyd, where Wolpe is based. I’d wager that the consequences for his university of a progressive hegemony in the United States – from anti-Semitism to ideological uniformity – have been greater than anything Trump has wrought.

I like Wolpe. He is decent, intelligent, loves this country and his native America. But his prediction that American democracy won’t survive the next four years is a pessimism unanchored in the US experience. It’s not balmy – Trump may really screw things up. But it is deepening a caricature of American fragility and decline that makes the Australian alliance harder to manage.

Like Wolpe, I have the privilege, as an immigrant, of a career explaining America to Australians. The first thing I tell my students is to stop watching ABC’s Planet America. A co-host of the show, John Barron, endorses the book (he’s the one slightly ill at ease with the show’s jocular style). Wolpe has been tempted into a Planet America version of Donald Trump: Republicans are silly, but some are racist. Boo! Democrats sometimes get it wrong but are on the right side of history. Yay!

I think this approach reveals more about his opponents than it does about Trump. I left the book knowing more about Democrats – and their dinner parties – than I did about Republicans and their current leader.

Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.