The Trump effect in Australian politics has been reversed. There will be many twists and turns with Donald Trump, who is intensely and intentionally unpredictable.
His new “Liberation Day” tariffs are the latest episode in what is going to be an exhausting global dramedy. Managing Trump will be a high-order challenge for whoever wins our election. But don’t let the theatre blind you to the substance.
Trump will also affect our politics. Six weeks ago the Trump effect looked like a plus for Peter Dutton. Now it’s a small minus and a corresponding plus for Anthony Albanese. The big question, beyond this election, is whether Trump permanently transforms the deep, structural pattern of America’s role in Australian politics.
Six weeks ago in London, former British Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg told me a successful Trump presidency would be a huge boost for centre-right politics around the world. Cost-of-living increases were causing incumbent governments to be thrown out all over the place. Albanese looked next.
Trump’s triumph showed a tough, no-nonsense, plain-speaking tribune of the thoughts and beliefs, and indeed the resentments, of the common man and was the natural leader type for these troubled times.
Then Trump and his Vice-President JD Vance berated, abused and humiliated Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in a bizarre White House press circus that, incredibly, went for nearly an hour. The world reassessed Trump.
An example: I dined with a group of friends recently, salt-of-the-earth folk, middle-aged, middle class, much concerned with family, moderately conservative. They’re well educated but politics is far from their first interest.
They’re Australian, so don’t vote in US elections. Whereas they had concluded Joe Biden was hopeless and thought it a good thing America changed to Trump, when we caught up recently they’d changed their view totally, mainly because of the Zelensky episode. They now thought Trump a bully, a braggart, unstable and unreliable.
There would be tens, hundreds of millions of people like these in America and around the world. Trump needlessly alienated a huge segment of natural allies – moderate conservatives.
Of course, Trump could conceivably reverse this. But in highly polarised political environments, parties wildly over-interpret narrow victories. Trump’s election was incidentally a rejection of woke. But it wasn’t a wholesale embrace of every vulgarity, obsession and nastiness of the MAGA fringes.
Nearly half the voters supported woke Kamala Harris. Americans moved away from identity politics and campus Marxism but didn’t necessarily embrace the total spiritual sensibility of World Wrestling Entertainment.
No one seriously thinks Dutton an Australian Trump. That’s absurd. But the vibe for hard-headed conservative tough guys has been disrupted. When Dutton promised to cut public service numbers, Albanese accused him of copying other people’s policies, obviously referencing Trump.
Albanese didn’t use Trump’s name because he’s scared of provoking a reaction from Trump. Despite Trump’s unpopularity in Australia, that would be dangerous for Albanese. Historically, Australians distinguish presidents they don’t like from the US alliance, which they love. Mark Latham attacked George W. Bush and the Iraq commitment when both were unpopular. That was disastrous for Latham. John Howard increased his majority at the next election.
Gough Whitlam, by far our worst prime minister, and several of his cabinet attacked Richard Nixon and the Americans over Vietnam. Whitlam was crushed in the biggest electoral landslide in Australian history in 1975, and did nearly as badly when he ran again in 1977. Bill Hayden, for whom this column has the greatest respect, as opposition leader flirted with a New Zealand-style ban on visits by nuclear-powered, or nuclear weapons capable, ships. Anti-nuclear was all the rage. But that would have killed the alliance. Australians decisively stuck with the alliance.
Does Trump change this? Right now Trump is, perversely, politically helpful mainly to anti-Trump politicians. In Canada, the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, every romantic tween’s ideal of the perfect national leader, were trailing the Conservatives by 20 points. Trump imposed unfair and capricious tariffs on Canada, partly because Trudeau occasionally rubbished him. This transformed Canadian politics. The Liberals are resurgent.
The manly response is to talk back to Trump, not take his nonsense. That’s OK for commentators and ex-politicians, it’s no good for national leaders.
As Trudeau and Zelensky demonstrate, Trump may have elements of the buffoon but he’s the world’s most powerful man and can do a nation enormous harm if he chooses to.
Managing Trump successfully requires constant, personal flattery at every interaction.
Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, has made concessions to Trump personally and presented them as triumphs of Trump’s deal-making. He has softened, a little, to Mexico as a result. Panama’s government made substantial concessions over the Panama Canal, with little effect. It made the concessions to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Trump needs constant personal attention and feels neither engaged nor necessarily bound by agreements made by cabinet secretaries.
Vladimir Putin is a dark genius in handling Trump, notwithstanding Trump’s seemingly tough comments this week. Putin commissioned a portrait of Trump. He offers Trump the prospect of all kinds of long-term deals and flatters Trump as a statesman and negotiator.
It’s still difficult to predict and interpret Trump, who can change course radically and abruptly. Trump desires to be always the centre, always holding the destiny of nations, if not the world, in his hands in an endless series of moments of drama and peril that only he can solve. He relentlessly dominates the media.
Thus he says a million different, often contradictory, things.
Can he really believe he will conquer Greenland, or that the Gaza Strip can become the new Riviera? Or are these statements an element of his “genius” in a completely different fashion? They are effective stratagems to dominate the public square, but he may not think them any more possible than they really are. In which case they might be absurd, but still rational, provided you can interpret Trump’s Byzantine psyche at any given moment.
The way Albanese began his campaign indicates he might have learnt something from Trump. Calling an election early Friday morning, after Dutton’s budget reply speech on Thursday night, ruthlessly ensured Labor flooded the zone. These are dangerous days for Dutton. A campaign is like a football match. The hardest thing to get, and the hardest to stop, is momentum.
Trump may become so unpopular in Australia that publicly opposing him becomes politically advantageous. That would be very dangerous for Australia. We have two core interests with Washington. The first is the preservation of the US-Australia alliance. Without it we are literally defenceless. The second is the continued deep involvement of the US in the security, politics and economics of the Indo-Pacific, for there is no benign natural order in this region without the Americans. For the moment, we need Trump. That’s the truth.
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