Trump for Dummies

The biggest threat to Australia’s security might not be its Keystone Cops military industrial complex, or its failing energy sector, but the misreporting, deliberate or otherwise, on its key security partner, the USA, and its Commander-in-Chief, Donald J Trump.

The media; public intellectuals and gas bags; and the she, it and he leaning on the water cooler; all seem determined to recycle Democratic Party talking points, with the result that there has been a precipitate decline in favourable perceptions of the US. That’s a problem when they provide you with security insurance.

According to the Lowy Institute Poll 2025, only 36% of Australians “trust the United States to act responsibly in the world”, and 72% have no, or not too much, confidence in Donald Trump, statistically indistinguishable from Xi Jinping who scores 71%.

Recent evidence of how malign this is can be found in the deliberately biased editing of footage of Donald Trump by the ABCwhich framed him for the violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2020. Perhaps only to be expected after the National broadcaster’s recycling, back in 2018, at enormous expense, of the Russiagate Hoaxby their perennially wrong, Walkley Award-Winning, head girl, Sarah Ferguson.

If your citizens don’t trust your principal ally and see them as equivalent to your real security threat, then you will be in a mess if something blows up.

Part of the problem is that those paid to analyse the US situation accurately are just as clueless as those with the biggest mouths. I recently watched a panel discussion involving an economist and three foreign affairs specialists, one with a particularly personal reason to abhor the Chinese CCP regime who couldn’t make sense of Trump and his policies.

It reminded me of Donald Horne’s quote that “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck”.

There were three major criticisms of Donald Trump – one that he is stupid; another that he is erratic and a third that he has no plan.

These combine in an argument that Trump is a buffoon running the largest economy in the world who is destroying it and the international order. With China revving-up its belligerence now is a good time to revisit those propositions.

There are some things I think most people can agree on about Trump, like him or loathe him. He’s a businessman, a promoter, and a wheeler-dealer. He cares more about outcomes than processes. And he’s been closely acquainted with existential threats. Financially least 4 times businesses he has been closely associated with have had to seek bankruptcy protection, and personally there was the bullet that almost liquidated him.

While most leaders believe the status quo will hold, Trump knows just how quickly disaster can unfold. He views the USA as a business as much as a country, and he brings the company doctor’s sense of urgency to an entity on its way to bankruptcy and irrelevancy.

The America that bought Trump in the 2024 election is one that has overpromised and overgeared. Debt is out of control, and housing has become unaffordable. Graduates drown in student debt which has proved a poor investment in higher incomes. Meanwhile universities, had become infected by gender and race ideology, failing in their role as the producers of empirical knowledge.

The US spends more on health per capita than any other country but is ranked 33 out of 50 OECD countries for life expectancy.

Crime was out of control in certain cities, with judges and prosecutors refusing to enforce the law. International borders were porous to a flood of illegal immigrants who were almost waved over the border by the authorities.

There was political violence, and suppression of free speech, and the country is still traumatized from COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates. The security agencies had also been weaponized against opponents of the Democratic administration, as well as some of the law courts. Business was being slowly strangled by regulation, particularly environmental legislation, and the country was deindustrializing leaving pockets of hopelessness throughout the country.

Added to that internal environment, in the external one the US was in a “hot cold war” with China, as well as a hot war with Russia in Ukraine, and Iranian proxies in the Middle East.

Mercantilist China, which has abused the rules of the free trade world to strip the West of manufacturing power, is its greatest threat and has been waging a grey war against the rest of the world for at least a decade.

It has cornered the market in high tech materials, like rare earths, which it wields as a weapon of coercion. It supplies the pharmaceutical precursors that allow the drug cartels to eat the heart out of the generation that would have to fight a hot war. Cyber war is unceasing, and technicians find imports of Chinese products like solar panels equipped with trojans capable of overriding controls.

Theft of intellectual property is endemic, and influence is exerted over universities via funding, and diasporas via agents of influence.

What does the recovery specialist do in this situation?

He needs to either rein in spending or increase income, or both. Company morale and culture has to be recovered. The armed forces need to be made fit for purpose again. The drug-addicted generation resisted, and the casual invaders repelled and repatriated. And the country has to start making the products its competitors won’t sell it.

The promoter would call this “Make America Great Again” and his corporate enemies would call it isolationism. But the word “great” signals it’s not isolationism, just a recognition that if the US wants to be great again, it has to recalibrate.

Trump is also a game show host, and there is a game show element to this. In the peculiar ways that US politics works, Trump has at most 24 months to get all this done before he loses control of the Congress, piling urgency upon urgency. The clock is running down.

Do Trump’s policies make sense to you now?

The first thing he did was close the borders to the illegal immigrants, but that is only half the job. There is somewhere around 40 to 50 million of them in the US. What percentage of these need to be belligerents for the US to have a problem? So the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is going to repatriate as many as it can. In the event of a hot war you don’t need domestic insurgents opening up a second or third front.

The next was to cut costs. There was the DOGE exercise which signalled seriousness, although it appears to have had limited success. Just like the Romans he is trying to withdraw troops from the regions, which is behind the drive to end the “forever wars”. If Ukraine gets an icky deal, it might be because of the need to preserve stockpiled weapons for another conflict closer to home.

The counterparty to demanding that other countries increase their defence spending has always been that there will be far fewer resources available from the US than there is now. An utterly reasonable, and internationalist, point of view from the US. They do not have infinite national resources.

On the income front Trump has promised to cut taxes. This is a gamble that lower taxes will increase economic activity and ultimately total income. He has also introduced a new indirect tax via tariffs but convinced the public that it is being paid by competitors. The tariffs are also meant to perform the function of returning manufacturing – the sinews of war, plus a stabilizer of working class communities – to the USA.

Tariffs are one of the areas where Trump does look truly erratic. The formula used to levy them in the first place is loopy. This is where the dealmaker comes in. Trump is anchoring in a world he sees like a Middle Eastern bazaar. Nothing too much is to be read into opening bids – ridiculous figures get bandied around in an attempt to decrease, or increase, the price as much as possible. But you have to have a rationale, even if it is not a good rationale, and the formula was the rationale.

There is no intrinsic value, just the ultimate price paid by a willing buyer and a willing seller. If a 50% tariff collapsed to 20% plus significant investment in the US makes the counterparty feel better, then 50% was the right initial tariff no matter how irrational the original justicication.

Withdrawing from the Paris Accord makes sense when you are measuring yourself not against your cultural confreres but your strategic rival who doesn’t have to worry about Paris until 2060, if then.