For many months the federal government has been calming the farm, officials urging us to “just chill” about the possibility of our major ally the United States returning to the control of a misogynist, dictatorially inclined, sexually abusing convicted felon who reportedly said he’d execute political enemies and turn the military on fellow Americans.
And that’s all just for starters. There’s a whole lot more to not chill about. So I won’t be chilling about the most consequential election of my lifetime. Because it is clear that behind the “we’ll work with whoever is elected/it won’t alter the US-Australia relationship” facade, there is a level of Australian diplomatic, military and bureaucratic anxiety bordering on panic about the 50/50 prospect of a second Trump presidency.
Have no doubt that a Trump 2.0 prospect is viewed by the federal government as the embodiment of (in the words of one familiar with the behind-the-scenes war-gaming) “utter chaos” for Australia. The starting point, of course, no matter what is said publicly, is that the centre-left Albanese government is hoping and praying for the election of Kamala Harris. Meanwhile, all its efforts are being invested in trying to build bridges with a possible Trump administration.
After Trump’s unanticipated election in 2016, a “Team Australia’’ diplomatic effort was swiftly launched to build bridges with Trump after eight years of Democrat Barack Obama through well-established Republican party, military, diplomatic and bureaucratic channels. This time, if Trump is elected, it will be much harder: there is no Mike Pence, and the respected senior military personnel central to Trump’s first administration, notably James Mattis and John Kelly, with whom Australia had solid foundations, are now among Trump’s most ardent critics. The American federal bureaucracy is, at the senior levels where meaningful informal country-to-country relations exist between the US and Australia, under the shadow of Project 2025 which would politicise the public service to enable Trump. Such established contacts could become far more tenuous.
Now in Washington, there is, in the words of the person above with such insight, a “very panicky [Australian] shaking of the tree’’ for even the most distant contact with Trump’s people.
Trump, as he has repeatedly let it be known, has a long list of enemies. While it doesn’t necessarily take much to get on this Olympic narcissist’s personal injury list, his enablers in the media have helped somewhat – especially in the case of Australia’s ambassador to the US, former prime minister Kevin Rudd.
In beltway Washington – in the policy thinktanks, among military scholars, at senior levels of the bureaucracy and in the state department – Rudd is, quite rightly, a respected thinker, not least regarding China. But that’s not anti-Washington Trump. And right now just about everyone from across the Australian political divide (including previous Australian Washington ambassadors, business and cultural figures and senior diplomats from other countries) who might help Rudd build bridges to Trump is currently doing so.
Despite the tireless efforts of Rudd and others, and for all their generous words about Trump (former ambassador Joe Hockey, who now runs a Washington consultancy, insisted on the weekend Trump 2.0 would be different to Trump 1.0 and thus “good for us’’ offering “some measure of predictability, whereas Harris will be a little less predictable because she needs to differentiate herself from the Biden presidency” – seriously!), Rudd would appear to be prominent on that enemies list.
Trump himself made this clear about “nasty’’ Rudd back in March, Rudd having (correctly) deemed Trump “nuts’’ and a “traitor to the west’’. The efforts to build bridges with Trump, or at least between Trump and Rudd, appear quite fruitless.
Don’t listen to me. Take the word of Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee who said last week of Rudd: “It’s not my decision, but I do think it would be nice to have a person who appreciates all that Donald Trump has gone through to want to serve our country at this moment ... and maybe we want to choose somebody else.’’
The mere suggestion that Trump would (if even he could “choose’’ our country’s ambassador to Washington) determine Rudd’s ambassadorial tenure, raises serious questions of sovereignty for Australia. The Albanese government would probably do very well to back Rudd to the hilt in the globally unfortunate, perhaps geopolitically disastrous, event of a second Trump presidency.
What happens, we must also wonder, if the felonious Trump 2.0 wanted to visit Australia? Australia, after all, can refuse or cancel the visa of a would-be visitor if they fail the character test – a bar that may not be nearly low enough for Trump to hurdle. Albanese, instructively, has declined to publicly contemplate this.
Remember, too, that Albanese has, rightly, been critical of Trump, saying as opposition leader that, having lost the 2020 election, Trump encouraged the violent 6 January 2021 insurgency – an “assault on the rule of law and democracy’’. In 2016 then shadow foreign affairs minister Penny Wong judiciously said a recently elected Trump should force a reassessment of the Australia-US relationship.
Would this be enough to earn them places on Trump’s vengeful list?
Regardless, the Albanese government would be on an immediate collision course with a re-elected Trump over global climate policy, the former president reportedly having vowed to again quickly withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord.
This would naturally embolden climate change sceptics globally, not least among Australia’s elected conservatives. The policy, electoral and leadership implications here, where the politics of climate change and emissions targets resembles a bloodsport, could be profound.
So there’s no cause to “just chill’’ about the prospects to Australia of a second Trump presidency. Certainly no Australian in Washington DC is relaxed. Even though some are already, apparently, in Trump’s freezer.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
