Donald Trump is torching America. Albanese needs a new plan

Having devoted his first term to reassuring alienated voters that government could be trusted to understand and address their concerns, Prime Minister Albanese revealed today that his second term, off the back of a colossal majority and the demolition of his opponents, would be devoted to… reassuring alienated voters that government could be trusted to understand and address their concerns. Major reform, of the kind that will upset powerful interests and cost political capital, will be left for later… very later.

That’s the message of Albanese’s National Press Club address, to be delivered today in Canberra, but handed, in the political class’s nearest equivalent to kabuki, to select political journalists beforehand to make today’s papers, in exchange for flat, uncritical reports of the contents, all lumbered with clunky “Albanese will say” grammar.

What Albanese’s office wasn’t to know when it planned this was that Donald Trump would invade California with both marines and (likely illegally) federalised California National Guard units on the pretext of insurrection — a thing Trump knows all about, since he fomented one in January 2021 — and demand the arrest of California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Albanese’s “steady as she goes” speech now looks like a Leslie Nielsen moment, as Trump continues to torch the rule of law in the United States and moves another step closer to dictatorship. Even the normally both-sides-of-both-sides fencesitters of The New York Times editorial board warned that Trump was abandoning the rule of law and the principle that the US military serves the constitution, not the president.

This is the military Albanese has integrated Australia’s capacity to defend itself into far more than any prime minister since World War II, with a large and growing US Marine and Air Force presence in northern Australia, the integration of US officials within Australia’s intelligence and foreign affairs operations, and the establishment of US military storage facilities. And we haven’t yet mentioned the AUKUS debacle.

The risk now is that Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles have integrated us not into the US military but Trump’s vast private militia, in effect the world’s biggest and best-armed Mafia enforcers. How many marines being dispatched by Trump to Los Angeles have trained in Darwin?

Albanese has gotten away with a policy of studied, almost ostentatious, indifference to the growing obscenities of Trump. His initial policy of refusing to comment on every brain fart and outrage-bait tweet by the mad king in fact was sensible, and played in the end to his “safe pair of hands” pitch that was so electorally successful. But as Trump’s acts, rather than words, have mounted up, and it’s become evident that he is fulfilling all of the visions of fascist autocracy predicted by his detractors, Albanese’s position has become harder and harder to credibly maintain.

It didn’t matter during the election campaign, despite the Trump administration’s demands for a huge increase in defence spending by Australia in March. Though voters recoiled from the chaos on display in the US and flocked to Albanese, the change in Australia’s strategic circumstances never surfaced as an election issue. Even when the Chinese regime offered to “join hands” with Australia — a remarkable offer for a country that only recently slapped tariffs on us, and aggressively spurned by Marles — and the Europeans demonstrably moved into a post-US phase of strategic positioning, Albanese successfully sold a “nothing to see here” narrative.

Perhaps he and his advisers think it will all be over by early 2029 when Trump — theoretically — leaves the Oval Office, which is before those Virginia class submarines that aren’t being built rapidly enough are due to be considered for dispatch to Australia under AUKUS. Malcolm Turnbull succinctly dismissed this Pollyannaish thinking: “Look at the young men including the vice president said to be the future of the MAGA movement. We should not assume that America First, Trump style, is going to evaporate any time soon.”

Until recently the debate around the impact of Trump on Australia’s strategic circumstances has been dominated by the basic question of whether we can rely on America anymore. The answer from the major parties is a resounding “yes” even as Trump as repeatedly demonstrated he can’t be relied on even to keep his signature policies for five minutes. But as Trump propels his country further and further toward fascist autocracy, the question will increasingly become a moral and political one: can Australia continue to enthusiastically embrace such a dangerous regime? And at what point will Australian voters be offered a choice?

As the Europeans are demonstrating over and over, there are real options for countries to pursue separate from the United States, including in our own region. Emmanuel Macron was in Indonesia and Singapore only recently. Too bad Albanese didn’t have the foresight to invite Macron to visit Darwin and provide him with pointers. But that would have been a dangerous breach of business as usual.