‘Don’t worry’: Australia shouldn’t fret about Trump’s tariff plans, says top Republican adviser

Project 2025 mastermind Kevin Roberts says AUKUS could be a model for Donald Trump’s relations with allies, as he defends his controversial right-wing manifesto from Democrats’ attacks.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts with former president Donald Trump on a private plane in April 2022.

Australia’s strong and growing defence relationship with the US should shield it from Donald Trump’s plans to dramatically hike tariffs on all US imports should he be re-elected, one of Washington’s most influential conservative leaders says.

As US voters head to the polls early in record numbers in what is shaping up to be the tightest presidential election in decades, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said he would be a “huge proponent” of bilateral deals that could carve Australia out of any unilateral tariff increase, and lauded AUKUS as a “model for American-Australian relations” that should be expanded, dispelling concerns a future Republican administration might cool on the deal.

Mr Roberts is the head of the largest and most influential US conservative think tank and the mastermind behind the controversial Project 2025 – a hard-right policy manifesto crafted by former Trump advisers that Democrats have demonised and relentlessly sought to link to the Republican nominee’s campaign.

Mr Roberts said he believed the former president would “crush” Kamala Harris and win more than 300 electoral college votes, as polling averages show Mr Trump eroding Ms Harris’s small lead nationally and in swing states and the race essentially becoming a coin flip.

In an exclusive interview with The Australian, the Heritage Foundation president expressed shock that Australia had banned nuclear energy – “that’s crazy” – and encouraged conservative movements in Australia, Canada and Britain to be more explicit about their plans, and eschew “small-target” strategies.

Mr Trump has promised to impose at least a 10 per cent tariff on all imports into the US, well beyond the China-focused tariffs he imposed in his first term, prompting fears of another 1930s-style global trade war that could damage economies such as Australia’s, which critically depend on free trade.

Members of "Steelworkers for Trump" pose with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, at the weekend. Picture: Jim Watson / AFP)

Despite fears tariffs could have large ramifications for the Australian and global economies, Mr Roberts said he expected a future Republican White House would consider Australia’s overall military and national security contributions to the US when ­assessing mutual trade arrangements.

“If I had to speculate, Trump will see those as being part of the ingredients of the same ­recipe, which is Australia is a friend, and if there’s going to be some tariff policy that seemingly harms [Australia], particularly harms their ability to defend themselves, against China, for example, then let’s negotiate,” he said.

“I would be hopeful that the work that Heritage has done for many years on bilateral trade agreements can be one that not only mitigates [damage to Australia] but perhaps makes that flourish … of all of our allies, we care very, very deeply about those in the Anglo-American sphere,” he added.

Mr Roberts is expected to be a major player in Washington if the former president returns to the White House and he told The Australian in an exclusive interview that “no American can question the importance, the centrality of Australia to Americans’ wellbeing”.

“Not just because of what you’re doing, but just your commitment to the world view that we have,” he said.

Donald Trump arrives at a campaign rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Picture: Getty Images.

Mr Roberts, who left the Texas Public Policy Foundation to lead Heritage in 2021, said he expected Mr Trump would strike a more adversarial relationship with the World Trade Organisation, recasting US policy along more self-interested lines as the EU and Japan have done for decades.

“I’ve not yet in my lifetime seen anything that’s called free trade, and none other than Ronald Reagan would make this observation. And so why can’t we just have the conversation?” the 50 year-old former academic historian added.

“It is stupidity for the conservative movement to say we’re just going to talk about the free market as if it solves everything,” he added, arguing that Republicans’ past deference to free trade had caused “damage to millions of Americans”.

Democrats from Ms Harris down have claimed the Heritage Foundation’s 920-page, 30-­chapter Project 2025, written by around 400 conservative scholars, would ban abortion, track pregnancies and slash public spending on health and pensions, which he condemns as “mischaracterisations so beyond the pale”.

Abolishing the federal department of education was “the only thing they have been honest about”, Mr Roberts said, as he urged conservatives everywhere to stand up for their values.

“Tactics need to be different in each place and in each cycle, and we’ve learned some lessons about that, but No 1, people want to know what you stand for,” he said.

“The Democratic Party, which used to be a working-class party, is leaving and it’s become the party of bi-coastal elites who believe that boys can be girls and girls can be boys.”

Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts.

In July, Mr Trump began to distance himself from the manifesto and went so far as to describe some of its contents as “ridiculous and abysmal” after US President Joe Biden and then Ms Harris ramped up attacks on a document that Democrats have made central to their election campaign.

“I get the politics of it, and I ascribe the best of intentions there … obviously philosophically we’re aligned in terms of policy, and we’re three weeks from flipping the page from the political season to the policy season, the policy season is our season,” Mr Roberts added.

He said the Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, who has penned the foreword to his forthcoming book Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, was “absolutely the future” of the Republican movement.

There was “no going back” to the pre-Trump Republican Party, regardless of whether Mr Trump lost or won next month, Mr Roberts said, extolling Heritage’s role in shifting the Republican Party away from its earlier proclivity for foreign military interventions to spread democracy, including in Ukraine.

“If Donald Trump is elected president … this war is going to come to an end in 72 hours,” he declared, arguing the US should prioritise its limited resources in defending Taiwan against China: “There’s a more serious prospect of a domino effect if Taiwan were to fall than if Ukraine were to fall.”

“If Ronald Reagan had been able to be alive to this day, he’d be so happy with the Trump fans, this is the natural evolution of things, I see a lot more continuity than I do discontinuity,” he said.