In the real world, Donald Trump appears to have unlawfully retained boxes of classified — and in some cases top secret — documents beyond the inauguration of US President Joe Biden last year. He ignored multiple attempts by the US National Archives to retrieve them, and then turned over some, after which he insisted he had no more to give. Finally, concerned at the risible lack of security at Mar-a-Lago, the FBI searched his Florida home and unearthed yet more boxes of classified, secret and top secret files.
It’s a crime that potentially carries a jail sentence of five years for each offence. Trump should know — he signed a law increasing the sentence from one year when president.
In the world of Fox News, however, Trump is the victim of a deep state conspiracy. On Sunday, Newt Gingrich told Life, Liberty & Levin on Fox that “the Justice Department is corrupt, the senior FBI is corrupt; they’ve been waging war against Trump for at least five years … This is part of a deliberate, vicious, ongoing struggle, which I predict will lead them to try to indict president Trump in a DC jury. These people are playing for keeps. They have no interest in procedure, no interest in precedent and no interest, frankly, in the law.”
Gingrich is not some wacky outlier unencumbered by the responsibilities of holding political office. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told another Fox program the same day “there is a double standard when it comes to Trump … If there is a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information after the Clinton debacle … there will be riots in the street.” Hilariously, Graham added: “I’ve never been more worried about the law in politics as I am right now.”
In the world of Fox News, it is not Trump who has broken the law — the entire US government is broken, with a corrupt Justice Department and FBI, double standards at best and perhaps no rule of law at all, all directed at Trump. In that context, “riots in the street” become the only logical and reasonable response. In Fox World, there’s no point voting, because elections get stolen, as that network told us hundreds of times in the aftermath of the 2020 election. And there’s no justice, because elites have corrupted key institutions.
What’s a red-blooded patriot to do if he wants to stop this elite conspiracy against their leader?
The conspiracy theories, the awarding of victimhood status to the man who incited an insurrection and stole classified documents, the subtle justification for violent protest — all are persistent tropes at Fox. In peddling these narratives, the network continues, more than 18 months on from its role in whipping up a right-wing frenzy over the lie of a stolen election, to destabilise US democracy and undermine key institutions. No wonder armed right-wingers are attacking FBI offices when Fox guests explain that the FBI is corrupt.
While the 2022 midterms are the next major election, and the Republicans and their media backers expect to take back the House and, perhaps, the Senate, the longer-term goal is the 2024 presidential race, for which Trump remains heavily favoured as the GOP nominee. Reports that Trump is losing his grip on the party can be laughed out of court given the defeat of Liz Cheney in the Republican primary in Wyoming.
The reelection of Trump would be a disaster for Australian foreign policy. It would restore a profoundly destabilising figure to the White House at a time that will make the geopolitical circumstances of 2017 look reasonably benign. The election of a Trump-like figure like Ron DeSantis would be nearly as bad. Still worse would be a descent into widespread civil disturbances or domestic terrorism in the US by the right if Trump is prosecuted for some of his many crimes, or defeated again, leaving the US inwardly focused on its own stability rather than the global strategic environment.
The nightmare scenario is if a reelected Trump or a DeSantis-type figure learns the lessons of Trump’s first term and goes for broke in smashing US institutions and constitutional checks, pursuing an authoritarian agenda designed to entrench themselves in power permanently.
In normal times, that would leave Australia and other US allies in a grim dilemma of trying to maintain a close relationship with the United States or distancing themselves from an authoritarian regime.
At the moment, given tensions with a more belligerent China and the need to contain and confront Vladimir Putin, it would be far worse. Indeed, a reelected Trump would be likely to promptly abandon Ukraine and reembrace his friend in Moscow.
If anything, Australia has made itself an even greater hostage to fortune by abandoning its submarine deal with France for the perhaps illusory goal of the US or the UK building nuclear submarines for us at some point in the 2030s. Could a returned president Trump be trusted to honour any deal made before 2024 by Biden?
Above all, how would Australians feel about relying on a right-wing autocrat being our security guarantor?
That’s why the lies, fabrications and conspiracy theories peddled on Fox News and intended to polarise Americans and stir hatred and extremism on the right directly matter to Australians, now more than ever.
