Now that the unthinkable has become the undeniable, Australia waits helplessly to see what is real.
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How much is hyperbole? Trump spoke oceans of adolescent nonsense as 45th president but his policies themselves were sometimes negotiable.
The new game looks appreciably harder. Dangerously more organised.
Since 2020, the folksy promise to "Make America Great Again" has developed a harder culture war edge with the apparent objective to "make America hate again".
Divisive rancour has become official policy. Scoffing contempt for science. Frontal hatred of diversity and inclusion, migrants, feminists, journalists, non-Christians, "woke" corporates.
Punishing trade tariffs loom. The World Health Organisation and the Paris Agreement have been disavowed. Global leadership and international cooperation abandoned.
Being one of Washington's most fawning of allies may help like it did when Malcolm Turnbull circumvented US steel and aluminium tariffs in 2018. Alternatively, it might count for nothing under Trump's fanatical "America first" rubric.
If the waiting weren't bad enough, Anthony Albanese, Penny Wong and Kevin Rudd will be called on to endorse the madness and play down a clear fascistic capriciousness in which anti-democratic criminal insurrectionists are hailed as brilliant hostages and fully pardoned.
To date, we have relied on an old bromide: "Australia and America have fought together in every major conflict over the past hundred-plus years. The bilateral relationship is based on shared values and is far stronger than any one individual".
Under Trump 45, it was at best, residually convincing. COVID had made everything strange from trade and travel to the economy and domestic politics. It helped that Americans themselves turned decisively in 2020, opting for a return to orthodoxy. And when the freshly ousted president fomented a deadly riot at the Capitol it was clear that he was finished.
Except he wasn't. The (now) 47th president secured a majority of votes nationwide, all seven swing states, and control of both houses of Congress. He can even rely on a stacked Republican-friendly Supreme Court.
The scale of America's rejection of democratic politics is neatly encapsulated in 47's undisguised abuses of power. Just days before his inauguration, Trump issued a cryptocurrency - that is, a meme coin based on nothing but its appreciation potential. Already, it is estimated that his personal holding of the majority stake has netted him more than $60 billion!
Forget the usual forced divestment expected of elected leaders, Trump is flagrantly enriching himself based directly on the presidency. And he is enriching other billionaires in what is the very definition of oligarchy. Vladimir Putin must feel greatly vindicated.
More than 100 years ago, the American essayist and intellectual H.L. Mencken caustically predicted such a populist descent, "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
Remind me, are these the sacred values we share?
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast.
