Australians have already had a taste of the turbulence of dealing with Donald Trump, courtesy of a leaked 2017 phone call between the newly inaugurated president and the then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.
“I think it is a horrible deal, a disgusting deal that I would have never made,” Trump said as Turnbull implored him to honour a refugee resettlement agreement made with the Obama administration.
Turnbull had used their shared backgrounds as businessmen to emphasise that a deal is a deal, but Trump described it as a “stupid” agreement that would “make me look terrible”.
The Trump administration honoured the deal, but the president wasn’t pleased about it – and he raced to end the introductory phone call with his Australian counterpart.
“As far as I am concerned that is enough, Malcolm. I have had it,” said Trump, according to the transcript published by the Washington Post.
“I have been making these calls all day and this is the most unpleasant call all day. Putin was a pleasant call. This is ridiculous.”
Now, as the Australian government contemplates the possibility of Trump returning to the White House, local analysts say his impulses “run counter to Australians’ instincts” and could be “damaging”.
The Trump assassination attempt, the pressure on Joe Biden to pull out of the race, the subsequent coronation of Kamala Harris have all received extensive media coverage in Australia.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s live news channel interrupted Australia’s own parliamentary question time to air Biden’s speech to the Democratic National Convention.
A YouGov poll in August tested Australian views on the contenders. When asked who they would vote for in the US election, 67% of Australian respondents said they would vote for Harris and 33% said Trump.
It’s not just the personalities that have grabbed attention but also the realisation that as a US treaty ally, Australia would be tangibly affected by the election outcome.
Michael Fullilove, the executive director of the the Lowy Institute, a foreign policy thinktank based in Sydney, says a Harris administration “would likely hew pretty closely to traditional US foreign policy positions”.
“Donald Trump is a different matter,” Fullilove says.
“Trump is sympathetic to isolationism; Australians are inclined towards internationalism. Trump swoons over autocrats and strongmen; Australia is an old democracy and a free society.”
Most of the speculation has been focused on the Aukus deal, under which the US will sell Australia at least three Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines in the 2030s, before a new class – to be called SSN-Aukus – starts rolling off South Australian production lines in the 2040s.
While the sale of submarines is not scheduled to occur during the next presidential administration, there is concern in Canberra over Trump-fuelled unpredictability.
The Australian ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, and other Australian officials have been working to entrench support for Aukus on both sides of politics.
Rudd, a former prime minister, once described Trump as “the most destructive president in history” but since joining the diplomatic frontlines has been working to mend fences.
The Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has insisted the US alliance runs deep and Australia will be able to work closely with whoever wins the election. But Trump would probably be unimpressed to learn that Albanese in 2021 took aim at the then conservative prime minister, Scott Morrison, for failing to condemn Trump strongly enough for inciting the Capitol riots. It all adds up to potentially challenging and unpredictable diplomatic encounters.
Canberra is also concerned at the prospects of Trump ramping up the US-China trade war by imposing new tariffs on imported goods, causing spillover economic effects.
“Trump is hostile to free trade,” Fullilove says. “The new tariffs he promises to introduce would be extremely damaging for a trading nation such as Australia.”
Fullilove warns that Trump’s “settling point” on China remains unclear and many are concerned that the Republican nominee “would be overly combative”.
“But equally concerning is the possibility that Trump would seek a grand bargain with China, perhaps trading away the security interests of the United States and its Indo-Pacific allies in return for trade concessions,” Fullilove says.
And on climate, the differences are stark: while the Biden-Harris administration has labelled climate cooperation a key pillar of the alliance with Australia, Trump has threatened to once again tear up climate policies.
Emma Shortis, a senior researcher at the Australia Institute, a progressive thinktank, says a Trump victory would “encourage already ineffective climate policy to get worse and give the Australian government another convenient scapegoat for our own inadequate policies”.
Shortis, who challenged the foreign policy consensus in her 2021 book Our Exceptional Friend: Australia’s Fatal Alliance with the United States, says the looming election raises big questions about the relationship.
“A Trump victory would be catastrophic for American democracy and make for a radical reshaping of America’s role in the world – not to isolationism, as is widely assumed, but to something much more aggressive. The implications of that for Aukus, and for Australian sovereignty, are deeply worrying.”
Shortis believes a Harris victory would represent “something quite different”. In part, she says, it would continue the status quo, “but there are hints – in Harris’s choice of Tim Walz as running mate and the tenor of the campaign – of the possibility of generational change in American politics”.
