Amid the cacophony and clamour of the Oval Office press conference, the president seemed unworried, even serene.
Leaning forward, hands resting in a diamond shape, Donald Trump appeared happy to ignore the disorder of half-finished interrogatives hurled in his direction.
Then one voice cut through, and the stumble came.
“With the Australians and the Brits” – his interlocutor was British – “will you be discussing Aukus, sir?”
“What does that mean?” Trump responded, apparently not recognising the acronym for the Australia-UK-US security alliance, the subject of thousands of hours of diplomatic and military negotiations, which will see US-built nuclear-powered submarines and submarine technology sold to Australia at a cost of many billions of dollars.
The off-camera reporter responded: “Aukus: the Australia-US defence alliance.”
The moment – and it was just a moment – passed. Trump’s hesitation was gone.
“We will be discussing that,” he said, gesturing towards the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, beside him, referring to their private conversation about to take place (it is unclear if they did in fact discuss it).
“We’ve had another great relationship, and you have, too, with Australia. We’ve had a very good relationship with Australia.”
Starmer added an occasional tepid “yes” in support. And the circus moved on.
But Trump’s stumble, his apparent unfamiliarity with the acronym “Aukus”, was parsed with a forensic intensity by the most junior of the three security partners.
In Australia, the US’s continued support for the Aukus agreement – announced with immense fanfare in 2021 – is seen as a vital element of Australia’s entire security apparatus.
Since Trump’s re-election, there have been persistent concerns, met with consistent reassurances, over the new US president’s interest in and commitment to the deal negotiated by his predecessor.
Australia’s “fear of abandonment” – so termed by the late diplomat Allan Gyngell – by its ally is manifesting most obviously as concern over the fate of Aukus.
Almost as soon as the phrase was uttered, Australian politicians were asked for their views, and they almost universally sought to play down the slip’s significance.
Asked a few hours later about the exchange, the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, excused Trump’s misstep, telling reporters “there are a lot of acronyms in this business”.
“We all get thrown them from time to time.
“Donald Trump went on [and spoke] about the really important and positive relationship with Australia. That is consistent with the discussions that I’ve had with president Trump that included, of course, talking about Aukus.”
The federal Labor minister, Murray Watt, was asked about this exchange on Nine’s Today morning TV show on Friday morning but said he wasn’t “too fazed”.
“Obviously, president Trump has got a lot on his plate and lots to remember,” he said. “And you’ll see that very quickly he was able to make the point about the strength of the relationship between Australia and the US.
“We’ve already seen both the secretary of state and secretary for defense in the US talk about president Trump’s support for the Aukus arrangements, so that’s what really matters, rather than whether someone remembers an acronym in the middle of a meeting.”
Also on Today, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, said he was not concerned.
“Not everyone gets the acronyms, and all the rest of it, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the president strongly supports the alliance between our three countries and strongly supports Aukus,” Dutton said.
“He stated that previously that the submarine deal, which we negotiated when we were in government, when I was defence minister, will underpin the national security of our country for the next century. And it’s an important relationship.”
The only political party to raise an alarm was the firmly anti-Aukus Greens: spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young contended that Trump had “admit[ted] that he doesn’t even know what Aukus is” and thought the president “doesn’t care about it, he can’t be bothered”.
The Aukus pact involves Australia buying at least three and possibly up to five US-designed and -manufactured Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines, to be commissioned in the 2030s.
Ahead of the acquisitions, from 2027 at the earliest, Britain and the UK plan to establish a rotational presence of one Royal Navy Astute class submarine and up to four US navy Virginia class submarines at HMAS Stirling, a Royal Australian Navy base near Perth.
Earlier this month, Australia announced it had made the first of six $US500m ($797m) payments to boost the capacity of the troubled US submarine industry.
Australia is to buy the Virginia-class boats in the early 2030s as it prepares a domestic industry.
But US shipbuilders have long been falling behind their expected production rates – failing to build even the two submarines a year the US government has been procuring itself, let alone producing extra ships for Australia.
Last year, rear admiral Jon Rucker told a naval symposium in Virginia the US had “an exceptionally fragile” military shipbuilding base and would not meet construction rates for its own vessels in 2024.
