America can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.
– Winston Churchill
The first half of that Churchillism can’t be relied upon any more, which means Australia is going to have to rethink its foreign policy and defence strategy.
The Australian task is not as urgent or wrenching as the one facing Europe now that the transatlantic alliance seems to be dead, but the government will have to decide whether to sign up to America’s alignment with Russia and, more broadly, with Donald Trump’s distinctive version of democracy.
It’s impossible to know for sure now whether America will come to the defence of Europe, if attacked by Russia, or Australia, if attacked by China.
Europe should be OK: its economy is 10-times the size of Russia’s, and it has nuclear weapons, or at least France does (albeit only 290 warheads versus Russia’s 1,700, ready to go).
But Australia would have no hope against China, as Beijing reminded us last week with live warship drills off the NSW coast.
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Echoes of history
There’s more to the challenge presented by a Trump presidency than foreign policy and defence. Along with the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, the US president is dismantling or seizing control of the institutions and apparatus of the US state, like all revolutionaries have done throughout history.
The end game with this American revolution is unpredictable. It should just last four years, but Trump is already talking (often) about running for an unconstitutional third term. What is the official position of the Australian government and opposition about that?
Like most democracies, the US government was a machine that cranks on no matter who is in power, largely because close to half the population didn’t vote for the temporary leader and must be protected from oppression by the narrow majority.
It goes further in the United States because so much of the government is outsourced, especially financial decision-making: Treasury is usually run by someone from Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, the “Fed”, is independent and the founding fathers gave Congress control of the budget.
Also, the constitution gives the American judiciary the power to make decisions that are elsewhere reserved for politicians.
Trump and Musk are taking control of the money and either gutting, closing or taking control the bureaucracy, and at the same time they are defying the judiciary.
There was a telling moment on Friday when President Trump was addressing state governors and he clashed with Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, over his transgender policy.
She said: “I will obey the law”.
Trump replied: “We are the law”.
A week ago, Trump posted a quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte on his social media site, Truth Social: “He who saves his country does not violate any law“.
He then also posted it on X/Twitter and then the official White House account also posted it next day, making it clear this was not a passing thought, but a considered one, to be taken seriously.
The specifics of the Trump revolution were no better exemplified than by Memorandum M-25-13, issued by the US Office of Management and Budget a week after his inauguration.
It instructed all federal agencies to pause, within 24 hours, all financial assistance — totalling $US3 trillion — and required them to review all programmes “consistent with the president’s policies and requirements”.
“Career and political appointees in the executive branch have a duty to align federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through presidential priorities.”
And to be more specific: “The use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve”.
The memo was rescinded after a federal judge temporarily halted it, which was later supported by a second restraining order, but White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declared it was a “rescission of the OMB memo, NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze.”
In a monologue delivered in the White House, Elon Musk said: “All we’re trying to do here is restore the will of the people through the president. And what we’re finding is there’s an unelected bureaucracy … a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the president and the cabinet. And if the bureaucracy is fighting the will of the people and preventing the president from implementing what the people want, then what we live in is a bureaucracy and not a democracy.”
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There are weaknesses in America’s great democracy
Election winners always claim a mandate, no matter how narrow the victory, although it’s usually reserved for policies that were announced before the election.
In the 2024 US presidential election, 63.9 per cent of those eligible to vote actually voted, or 155.2 million people. Of those, 77.3 million voted for Donald Trump and 75 million voted for Kamala Harris, so the split in the popular vote was 49.8 per cent to 48.3 per cent.
The percentage of eligible voters who voted for Donald Trump was 31.9 per cent. What is the will of the 87 million people who could have voted but didn’t? No one knows.
It’s the will of the 77.3 million who did vote for him that now prevails, although many are having buyer’s remorse, having lost benefits, and even their jobs if they worked for the government, and Trump’s disapproval rating is now well below 50 per cent.
But that’s the way democracy works, of course — the majority at an election prevails.
In most democratic countries, the split between major parties is usually around 50/50, with a few percentage points of swinging voters in the middle who flip the parties every few years, which is why a largely independent civil service and a representative parliament are important for continuity.
In Australia, the split in 2022 was 52/48 (two-party preferred), and the latest polls suggest this has flipped already, although the declining vote of both major parties suggests that neither will have a majority at the next election.
If Peter Dutton won this year and then, say, Gina Reinhart tried what Trump and Musk are doing, they would be quickly stopped and sacked. Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull were all sacked for far less.
It turns out America’s democracy may not be as easily defended as Australia’s.
Alan Kohler is finance presenter and columnist on ABC News and he also writes for Intelligent Investor.
