Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood When blackness was a virtue the road was full of mud
B Dylan, Shelter from the Storm
It is fifty years since the end of the 21 yearlong Vietnam War, the great war of my generation. Our friends Marianne Harris, partner of acclaimed photographer the late Tim Page and photo-journalist Ben Bohane have been in Cambodia and Vietnam along with many photographers and journalists who covered the conflict on all sides of the lines.
In reality, the conflict in Indochina began in 1946 when British forces handed the former French colony back to France, and the nationalist Viet Minh forced the French to surrender and withdraw in 1954. The Americans call it the Vietnam War but to the Vietnamese, it is The American War because it was the USA that came, saw and failed to conquer. No one really knows how many people perished. Civilian deaths range from 1.3 to 4.5 million, of which over 80% were Vietnamese and 7% Cambodian. American soldiers dead numbered 58,220 and wounded,153,303. The number of Vietnamese and Cambodian wounded is inestimable. An account of the war from Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey is republished after the following poem.
On this anniversary, one which has been almost ignored in mainstream media, we remember all those lives lost, and the devastation inflicted on countries that were once “faraway places with strange sounding names”, as the old song goes.
A silent wall shouting for peace
The anniversary reminded me of an almost forgotten book that was published in the US back in mid ‘eighties as one of an excellent series entitled “A Day In The Life of … “ which chronicled in pictures the lives of ordinary people in major cities around the world. Uniquely, one of these was dedicated exclusively a monument, The Wall, the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington DC – two black granite walls completed in 1982 engraved with the names of American service members who died or remain missing as a result of their service in Vietnam and Southeast Asia during the war. The book is poignant gallery of images and messages left at the memorial by loved ones and comrades, the emotional debris of that almost forgotten war that although long gone, reaches out through history with an admonishing finger: “Shadows in search of a name for victims we’ve left far behind”.
One of many anonymous notes left on the memorial pierced my heart and inspired the following poem and song:
“I shut my eyes and wouldn’t listen when they came with morning and told me that you had slipped away. I closed my mind against my thoughts, not wanting t believe you’d gone. Not dragged off, captured in the bright day’s savage madness, not overwhelmed by the dark blind angers of night, but here within the sight and sound and smell of the sea, and salty spray on gentle winds so near”.
When I read it, I thought immediately of the 19th century English poet Matthew Arnold’s On Dover Beach: “We are here as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night”.
Shadows in Search of a Name
Echoes of honour and shame,
Phantoms of glory and fame,
Shadows in search of a name
For victims we’ve left far behind.
And all is not quite as it seems
In the dark corridors of his dreams,
In the silence of his senses,
The violence of his mind.
Storms that thunder and rain,
Lights that waver and wane,
Winds that howl out in pain,
Visions from a great height.
Time for the turmoil to cease,
A silent wall shouting for peace –
From the bright day’s savage madness,
Blind angers of night
You are the ice in my veins,
You are the age in my bones.
You are the flames in my heart
Raging out of control.
You are the blood on my hands,
You are the lies on my tongue.
You are the cries in my ears
And the eyes of my soul.
Echoes of honour and shame,
Phantoms of glory and fame.
Shadows in search of a name
For victims we’ve left far behind.
A ship is waiting for us at the dock America has trouble to be stopped We must stop Communism in that land Or freedom will start slipping through our hands. I hope and pray someday the world will learn That fires we don’t put out, will bigger burn We must save freedom now, at any cost Or someday, our own freedom will be lost.
Johnny Wright, Hello Vietnam
The Twentieth Century’s “Thirty Years War” was waged in South East Asia initially by the colonialist France, and then by neo-imperialist America. France’s war ended in defeat and ignominy for French arms and prestige, and a partition that was but a prelude to America’s Vietnam quagmire.
in his masterful documentary, The Vietnam War, acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns narrator intoned: “America’s involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy. It ended, thirty years later, in failure, witnessed by the entire world. It was begun in good faith, by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation. And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions, made by five American Presidents, belonging to both political parties”.
America’s War has since been defined as chaos without compass. It was inevitable that acclaimed historian Barbara Tuchman would chose it as one of her vignettes in The March of Folly, her celebrated study of débacles through the ages characterised by what would appear to be a single-minded determination amounting to tunnel vision that is akin to stupidity.
As Tuchman saw it, exceptionalism and manifest destiny are historically proven folly. Self-belief in American power and righteousness has historically created delusions of grandeur, obstinate attachment to unserviceable goals, stubbornness, and an inability to learn from past mistakes or even admitting error – a wooden-headedness that often sees the US persisting on erroneous paths that lead to loss of blood, treasure, reputation and moral standing.
Why did the US’ experience of backing the wrong horse in China in the forties not provide an analogy and warning in Vietnam in the fifties? Why did the experience in Vietnam not inform the it with respect to Iran right up to the fall of the Shah in 1978? And why hadn’t it learned anything when it stumbled into Salvador in the eighties? And then, of course, we arrive in the 21st century with no-exit, never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Middle East that end in retreat and betrayal with the ‘freedom-loving’ USA still backing the wrong horses by supporting autocrats and tyrants against their own people.
But, back to Vietnam …
As historian Per Yule noted in The Long Shadow: Australia’s Vietnam Veterans Since The War, the Vietnam War was based on an assortment of unproven assumptions and half truths. It wrongly identified a dictatorship as a democracy a civil war as an international conflict. Our armed forces were sent to fight in support of a corrupt military regime which received solid support only from the catholic minority and the small landowning class. Few willingly fought for the regime.
Many in the US military reckoned that if given a free hand by the administration of President Johnson, they could have prevailed against North Vietnam – by destroying it utterly with overwhelming firepower. But the US had backed the wrong side and no amount of support could make the South Vietnamese fight and die hard enough for their corrupt, incompetent, puppet government. We hear a similar rationale with regard to the the Afghan army’s rapid collapse and the US’ shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan
The US wanted to convince the North Vietnamese that they couldn’t win on the battlefield. The North Vietnamese wanted to convince the American people that the cost in blood and treasure was too high. Both sides continued to believe that they could improve their positions through escalation and both continued to focus on military rather than political means to end the conflict. And so we were left with an almost certainly unwinnable strategy of bombing the enemy to the negotiating table when that enemy shows no willingness to negotiate under duress. The bombing campaign, code name Rolling Thunder, was described by a commentator in Ken Burns’ documentary The Vietnam War as “the dumbest campaign ever designed by a human being”.
The many names for a war lost before it began
All we need is a little determination; Men, follow me, I’ll lead on. We’re waist deep in the big muddy And the big fool says to push on.
Pete Seeger, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy
Vietnam has been called the pointless war and the needless war. In a scene in Apocalypse Now Redux, Francis Ford Coppola’s recut of his seventies epic, Having denounced his country’s folly in being surrounded and defeated in the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which precipitated the end of French colonial rule and the beginning of US involvement in Indochina, expatriate patriarch Hubert de Marais declares to his American guests: “You are fighting for the biggest nothing in history”.
It was certainly a costly war. The butchers bill was horrendous. No one really knows how many people perished. Civilian deaths range from 1.3 to 4.5 million.of which over 80% were Vietnamese and 7% Cambodian. American soldiers dead numbered 58,220 and wounded,153,303. The number of Vietnamese and Cambodian wounded is inestimable.
As for the American forces, it most certainly “the poor man’s war” – most who were perished or were maimed were not rich folks, and a disproportionate number were black. Amd the more who died, the more were sent to replace them. And like here in Australia, thecdraft caught mainly the poor and unconnected. Even as soldiers started going home, actual or attempted murder by enlisted men of their superiors increased alarmingly.
As to the monetary cost: an estimated $1 trillion in today’s dollars. But that is doubtlessly an understatement – what about the rebuilding, the rehabilitation, the recompense? Vietnam was the most heavily bombed country in history. More than 6.1 million tons of bombs were dropped, compared to 2.1 million tons in WW2. U.S. planes dumped 20 million gallons of herbicides to defoliate VietCong hiding places. It decimated 5 million acres of frostbite and 500,000 acres of farmland.
It has been called “the helicopter war” because choppers were the primary mode of ground combat and transport, and also “the television war – it’s triumphs (few) and tragedies (many) were beamed Into American homes nightly, fuelling the public’s confusion and unease about this Asian war, and eventually, the anger that forced the US government to eventually withdraw over half a million soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors and abandoning South Vietnam’s puppet government, its demoralised and abandoned army, and its unfortunate, battered and bloodied people to the tender mercies of the hardline and heartless ideologues in Hanoi.
Vietnam was also, notoriously, a pharmaceutical war. In its final year’s, as raw and reluctant draftees made up an increasing proportion of the US forces, indiscipline and substance abuse transformed, in the words of one professional soldier, an officer, a fine army into a rotten one. Alcohol, marijuana, acid, coke, heroin, and a cornucopia of pills were freely available on base, on leave in Saigon, and often, in the field, and many soldiers actually made it a business. The press too were sucked into the machinery.
And, it was a promiscuous war. So far away from home and loved ones, like warriors in all wars since time immoral, US solders took comfort and solace where they could find it. Historians, memoirists, veterans of both the French and American wars in Indochina write and talk of the beauty of the Vietnamese women. Economic deprivation and social dislocation create a flesh market supplying lonely, frightened strangers in a strange land.
It was chemical warfare – not the mustard gas of older wars, and the Zyklon B of the Nazi death camps, nor the recent wars in the Middle East, in the first Gulf War, between Iraq and Iran, and in Syria – but the broad-acre use of chemical defoliants designed to deny the enemy of jungle and forest concealment that left behind a bitter harvest, a legacy of disease, deformity and death that ricochets to this day.
And, in the United States, it was a war that divided a nation. The protest movement emerged during 1965. It grew and grew, and by the Moratorium of October 1969, it became the largest outpouring of public dissent in American history. The moratorium movement was massive and unprecedented – and peaceful. Nationwide, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people across the US were marching. The children of politicians and officials and soldiers were also marching. They were marching not about winning or losing the war but demanding an end to the war.
It was a journalists war too, and the photographers’ War. The military had a relaxed and tolerant attitude towards the press that would seem profligate and foolhardy in today’s tightly managed and manipulated combat media. Journalists and photographers would be permitted and indeed invited along on patrols and sweeps, carrier landings, on helicopter “dust offs” (a euphemism for evacuating the wounded and the dead), and the controversial “search and destroy” operations that destroyed so many fields, villages and lives. Needless to say, the coopted fourth estate were often in harm’s way. They were taught how to use weapons and often actually did use them in self defence and, sometimes in anger. And like the officers and men with whom they worked, many were wounded and slain. More than two hundred would die covering the fighting in South East Asia.
And English photojournalist Tim Page, who ran away from boring ‘sixties Britain to the exotic East at the age of seventeen, taking the ‘overland’ route that decades later would be called ‘the Hippie Trail’, washed up in the war of our generation, and left it critically injured and indeed clinically dead in a medivac chopper.
The Vietnam War’s echoes reverberate to this day. In the United States, it has taken more than 50 years for such a traumatic defeat to fade. The deepest scars, inevitably, belong to those who suffered most. Author and Vietnam veteran Philip Caputo in the preface to his memoir A Rumor of War wrote:
“I came home from the war with the curious feeling that I had grown older than my father, who was then 51,” writes. “A man saw the heights and depths of human behaviour in Vietnam, all manner of violence and horrors so grotesque that they evoked more fascination than disgust. Once I had seen pigs eating napalm-charred corpses – a memorable sight, pigs eating roast people.”
The scars on Vietnam itself were much deeper and long lasting – on its politics, still a authoritarian communist regime; its people – millions died, were wounded or suffered long term psychological and genetic damage; and its environment – the effects of broad-acre defoliants and the damage and debris of war.
British archaeologist, academic and historian David Breeze has argued that “the study of history best proceeds through controversy”, suggesting that scholarly debate and differing interpretations of historical events are vital for a deeper understanding of the past, that that confronting alternative perspectives, reinterpreting evidence, and engaging in critical analysis can lead to more nuanced and accurate historical narrative.
This is particularly relevant with regard to the study of the historical and contemporary relationship between Australia and its indigenous minority.
I’ve written often about the indigenous history of our country. The following passage from my piece on Australia’s The Frontier Warsencapsulates my perspective:
”There is a darkness at the heart of democracy in the new world “settler colonial” countries like Australia and New Zealand, America and Canada that we struggle to come to terms with. For almost all of our history, we’ve confronted the gulf between the ideal of political equality and the reality of indigenous dispossession and exclusion. To a greater or lesser extent, with greater or lesser success, we’ve laboured to close the gap. It’s a slow train coming, and in Australia in these divisive days, it doesn’t take much to reignite our “history wars” as we negotiate competing narratives and debate the “black armband” and “white blindfold” versions of our national story”.
The historical truth, elusive and subjective, lies in the wide no man’s land between them – a view subscribed to by economist and commentator Henry Ergas in an informative tribute to the role of the recently deceased historian Keneth Wind
shuttle in The Australian. Ergas maps the topography of the history wars, marking out the battle lines between the so-called “revisionist” historians who are said to see no good in our history as it related to indigenous Australians and those, often on the conservative side of Australian politics, who ostensibly see no evil.
He begins by citing the nineteenth century German historian Leopold von Ranke who held that the historian’s highest calling was to write about the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen” – “as it had really been”. To achieve that task, Ranke had observed, three qualities were indispensable – common sense, courage and honesty: the first, to grasp things at all; the second, to not become frightened at what one sees; the third, to avoid the temptations of self-deception. Most of all, however, the historian needed to recognise that “Every epoch is equally close to God”, equally infused by grandeur and equally scarred by tragedy. It is not “the office of judging the past, or of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages” that has been assigned to historians; it is that of carefully reconstructing, rationally analysing and dispassionately presenting the past in all of its remoteness and complexity.
Reading Ergas’s tribute, I was reminded of what George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the infamously funny Flashman diaries, wrote in his wartime memoir Quartered Safe Out Here:
“You cannot, you must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own terms and values, if you are to have any inkling of it. You may not like what you see, but do not on that account fall into the error of trying to adjust it to suit your own vision of what it ought to have been.”
Below are pieces published in In That Howling Infinite in regard to Australian history as it these relate to Indigenous Australians:
Keith Windschuttle and the continuing battle for history
Henry Ergas, The Australian, 18 April 2025
Historian Keith Windschuttle in Perth, 2004.Ross Swanborough
With the death last week of Keith Windschuttle Australia lost a scholar driven by the duty Leopold von Ranke famously defined as the historian’s highest calling: to write about the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen” – “as it had really been”.
To achieve that task, Ranke observed, three qualities were indispensable – common sense, courage and honesty: the first, to grasp things at all; the second, to not become frightened at what one sees; the third, to avoid the temptations of self-deception.
Most of all, however, the historian needed to recognise that “Every epoch is equally close to God”, equally infused by grandeur and equally scarred by tragedy. It is not “the office of judging the past, or of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages” that has been assigned to historians; it is that of carefully reconstructing, rationally analysing and dispassionately presenting the past in all of its remoteness and complexity.
Never was that task harder than in this country’s “history wars”. Triggered, in the self-congratulatory words of the ANU’s Tom Griffiths, by a “concerted scholarly quest to dismantle the Great Australian Silence” – a silence that had “hardened into denialism … denial of bloody warfare on Australian soil” – the revisionist historians’ portrayal of Australia’s history as a never-ending tale of murderous dispossession, cultural decimation and environmental destruction inevitably took its toll on accuracy and objectivity.
There was, in the revisionists’ onslaught, little room for the Rankean virtues, first and foremost that of meticulous attention to the documentary records. It was therefore unsurprising that The Fabrication of Aboriginal History’s relentless focus on those records thrust Windschuttle into the firing line.
Historians Keith Windschuttle and Henry Reynolds.
Nor was it surprising that he paid a high price for his audacity. As Tim Rowse, one of Australia’s most distinguished scholars of Aboriginal history, noted, “at least one speaker” at a 2001 National Museum of Australia conference on Windschuttle’s work “was patronising towards Windschuttle to a degree that exceeded anything I’ve experienced in academic life”; instead of addressing his arguments, the focus was on comparing Windschuttle to David Irving, thereby placing him “outside the conversations of humanists”.
Yet it would be wrong to suggest Windschuttle’s colossal efforts were ignored. As Rowse, who could hardly be accused of being a reactionary, admitted, Windschuttle’s review of the NSW archival evidence on the Stolen Generations was “compelling”, raising real questions about an episode that has become emblematic of “the heavy-handed and insensitive management of Indigenous Australians”.
Moreover, even the attempts to debunk the Fabrication’s contentions yielded tangible benefits. Windschuttle’s Quadrant articles were “widely derided as politically mischievous”, writes Mark Finnane, a legal historian whose work on the interactions between Indigenous Australians and the law has reshaped the field; but their longer-term impact “has been to accelerate research in local and regional studies”, providing a sounder factual base for broader analyses.
At least partly as a result, there are some outstanding works, including by historians broadly on the left, that are far removed both from the revisionists’ overwhelming Manicheanism and from the flights of fancy of the post-modernists Windschuttle had so effectively denounced in The Killing of History (1994).
For example, Rowse’s White Flour, White Power (1998) – with its conclusion that “‘assimilation’ was in some respects a constructive policy era, not only a destructive onslaught on Indigenous ways of life” – remains an exceptionally fine book, and several of his more recent essays, such as the one on the “protection” policy’s role in reversing the decline in the Indigenous population, directly challenge the revisionists’ core assumptions.
Equally, Finnane’s Indigenous Crime and Settler Law (2012), co-authored with Heather Douglas, provides a balanced account of the repeated efforts the colonial authorities made – albeit with only mixed success – to deal sensitively and humanely with the gap between tribal custom and English law.
Noting that putting “the colonial encounter in polarised terms” as a clash between black and white “is an abstraction from a complex and constantly shifting reality”, Finnane and Douglas highlight the need to recognise that “settlers were divided – convicts, free immigrants, military, governors”, as were “Indigenous peoples – jealous of their own country, accustomed in many places to constant warring, seeking advantage of alliances with settlers to advance or protect their own interests”.
And Andrew Fitzmaurice’s Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–2000 (2014) is a deeply researched corrective to simple-minded claims (including, unfortunately, by the High Court) about the relevance of “terra nullius” to Britain’s assertion of sovereignty.
But despite those efforts, the sloppiness continues, as even a cursory glance at the ever-expanding literature on the Native Mounted Police shows.
For example, the military historian Peter Stanley – who has been influential in the Australian War Memorial’s portrayal of the “frontier wars” – has recently claimed that “the Native Police were Australia’s own Einsatzgruppen”, the Nazi murderers who machine-gunned hundreds of thousands of Jews that they had herded on to the edge of pits, stripped naked and beaten to within an inch of their lives. That Stanley’s claim is abhorrent for minimising the horrors of the Holocaust should not need to be said; that it is grotesque for its obvious historical inaccuracy ought to be apparent to even the least informed reader.
Striking too are the contentions of Queensland historian Raymond Evans. The mounted police, Evans claimed in 2010, were responsible for 24,000 deaths. But since then, Evans, in work with Robert Orsted-Jensen, has nearly doubled that estimate to 41,040, allegedly on the basis of a methodology that is “conservative” and “cautious”.
Peter Stanley
Keith Windschuttle
In an attempt to justify relying on highly selective samples and superficial extrapolations, Orsted-Jensen has claimed that there was a “a very systematic, deliberate and comprehensive destruction of virtually all sensitive flies stored in Queensland’s Police Department” – an accusation that has become one of the revisionist historians most widely repeated tropes.
However, a devastating review of Evans and Orsted-Jensen’s work by Finnane and Jonathan Richards not only points to the wealth of documentary material on which Evans and Orsted-Jensen could have drawn; it also concludes that any gaps in the records are more likely “an accumulated outcome of administrative culling, bureaucratic indifference, and misadventure” than of systematic destruction.
In fact, “rather than a history of cover-up, the entire administration of the Native Police from as early as 1861 on illustrates the concern of governing elites with the risk of unwarranted killing”.
As for Evans and Orsted-Jensen’s estimates of casualties, Finnane and Richards show that they are “highly subjective … and correspondingly unreliable”, while “the picture (Evans and Orsted-Jensen) paint of massive governmental indifference to or complicity in the deaths of tens of thousands of Aboriginal deaths does not stand up to scrutiny”.
But if questionable assertions remain common in the professional literature, they absolutely pervade the public commentary. Predictably, the ABC publicised Evans and Orsted-Jensen’s estimates; no less predictably, it has done nothing to correct the record. And if the academic historians are willing to rebut inaccuracies in scholarly publications, they are far more reluctant to do so when that involves intervening in the public debate.
That was apparent in the wake of Keryn Walshe and Peter Sutton’s Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? (2021), which vividly exposed the flaws of fact and analysis in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu. The reviews in scholarly journals, such as that by Peter Veth in Australian Archaeology (2021), did not mince their words about Pascoe’s egregious errors; but more often than not, the media commentary by academic historians was cautiously circumspect.
There were, for sure, attacks on Walshe and Sutton that merely reproduced the left’s deeply engrained orthodoxy. To take but one example, Heidi Norman from UTS accused Walshe and Sutton of “wanting to strip the debate of contemporary meaning” by deploying a neo-colonial framework in which “Western definitions and labels are supreme”.
However, the academics’ dominant tone was mealy-mouthed, conceding that Pascoe had made mistakes but arguing that those mistakes counted less than Dark Emu’s merits in advancing reconciliation.
Peter Sutton
James Boyce
Thus, reviewing Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? in The Guardian, Sydney University’s Mark McKenna carefully put the word ‘fact’ in scare quotes, as if there was some doubt as to its meaning; while “at face value, this is a dispute about ‘facts’”, he wrote, the dry-as-dust issues of evidence and verisimilitude are far less important than “Pascoe’s ability to capture and move audiences desperate to hear his stories of Aboriginal ‘achievement’”.
In exactly the same way, the Tasmanian historian James Boyce recognised shortcomings in Pascoe’s work but nonetheless hailed it as a “significant cultural achievement”, whose “lifegiving” story “speaks to people for whom Aboriginal Australia remains a foreign country but want this to change”.
And Henry Reynolds, writing in Meanjin, essentially pooh-poohed the criticisms, arguing that Pascoe’s faux pas was primarily one of terminology: had Pascoe “declared that the First Nations peoples were not ‘just’ hunters and gatherers but graziers rather than farmers”, the problems with his account would have been largely overcome.
The undertone, in those comments, was clear: that it would be unfair to disabuse Pascoe’s adoring white fans, whose intentions were as pure as their thoughts were confused. Keeping faith with those intentions might involve distorting the truth; but the lie, like those Plato advocates in The Republic, would be a noble one, which ruling elites tell “in order to benefit the polis” by convincing citizens that “it is not pious to quarrel”.
Bruce Pascoe
Ironically, in their effort not to discomfort the masses, the revisionists had enveloped themselves in a Great Australian Silence of their own.
Yet the harm those deliberate distortions of the historical record cause is not just to truthfulness; it is to our ability to live with the past, rather than to live in the past. For so long as we cannot accurately and dispassionately view this country’s history, we will lack the foundations needed to better shape its future.
And it is not much comfort to know that when intellectual constructs stray too far from careful readings of the world, as they so tragically have in everything to do with Indigenous history and policy, reality has a nasty habit of biting back.
In the end, Nietzsche was right: the basic question societies, no less than individuals, must face, is “How much truth can we endure? Error is not blindness; it is cowardice.” Exposing cowardice takes courage. Now, with Keith Windschuttle gone, that duty must fall to others.
If I ruled the world
Every day would be the first day of Spring
Every heart would have a new song to sing
And we’d sing of the joy every morning would bring
If I ruled the world
Every man would be as free as a bird
Every voice would be a voice to be heard
Take my word, we would treasure each day that occurred
My world would be a beautiful place
Where we would weave such wonderful dreams
My world would wear a smile on its face
Like the man in the moon has when the moon beams
Leslie Bricusse and Cyril Ornadel
On his inauguration on January 20 2025, US President Donald Trump declared to the American people, “My fellow citizens, the golden age of America begins right now.”
Pundits and partisans right across the political spectrum, both at home and overseas, agree that Donald John Trump’s second presidential term is probably the most consequential since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That is perhaps the only thing that they can agree on.
After 100 days in office, he is in command, testing the limits of executive power, resetting political and cultural perceptions and expectations, and reframing America’s role in the worked. But it would seem to many that having arguably declared war on America and the world, he is veering out of control.
There is almost no part of American society which has not felt the blizzard of change from the day he was sworn in. In a stand-over style that is more mob boss than head of state, he has forged a new American imperialism to project what he perceives as US interests, secure strategic assets and rebuild American economic self-sufficiency. The global trading system that has been in place for 75 years has been crippled, if not destroyed, and economists and stock markets surmise that the US economy is on the verge of crashing. America is no longer the leader of the free world because the world is no longer following America, but rather, is taking evasive action. Trump has united the people of most countries around the world around their political leadership, and yet he has not united America and Americans.
In a recent opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, Bruce Wolpe, a senior fellow at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre and former Congressional staffer, wrote a concise overview of Trump’s tumultuous first 100 Days. I have borrowed from it to write the following précis.
Trump is not governing by legislating but by an unprecedented exercise of executive power. He has signed fewer bills into law than any recent modern president while his 100 executive orders have triggered a tidal wave of new policies to change what the government can and cannot do. His political style of is marked by decrees coupled with complete domination of the airwaves for several hours each day, from greeting world leaders in the Oval Office to his televised cabinet meetings. For Trump, it is all streaming, all the time.as he remarked in the prime-time public takedown of the Ukrainian president in the Ovak Office, this it makes for “good television”.
On foreign policy, Trump promised groundbreaking early success on the world stage. But he has to date failed to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, come close to a nuclear deal with Iran , or settling the dozens of trade wars he launched against his allies. Instead, there are constant reversals in tactics and rhetoric. He has decoupled America from the wider world with ramifications which will be felt for many years, if not decades. He has treated allies like adversaries, withdrawn America from numerous global institutions and treaties, erected daunting tariff barriers on all US trading partners and slashed US foreign aid and the State Department, terminating foreign aid, vaccines and food programme. The cumulative effect has been to gravely weaken America’s ability to wield soft power at a time when China and Russia are rushing to fill the vacuum.
Aided and abetted by billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, Trump unleashed Project 2025’s sledgehammer to the bureaucracy with overriding acts of Congress to dismantle agencies and programmes, mass firings, loyalty oaths, and the seizure of databases. And, as he promised on the campaign trail, Trump is exacting vengeance on his enemies. He has called on judges who have ruled against him to be impeached. He has blacklisted law firms that worked with Democrats, or else shook them down for millions of dollars of free work. In a speech at the Department of Justice, Trump said his enemies were “scum”, that the cases brought against him were “bullshit”, that the judges who ruled against him were corrupt, his prosecutors were deranged, and that those who came after him should be imprisoned. In a war against the nation’s most prestigious universities, he is demanding their leftist woke elitism be expunged, or else research dollars and tax-free status will be eliminated. Meanwhile, he continues to target the media as the enemy of the people. The Associated Press has been excluded from presidential events; the Voice of America has been shut down; and Trump has asked the regulator to cancel the broadcast license of CBS whilst moving to defund public media’s NPR and PBS.
The Democrats in Washington meanwhile are adrift and effectively leaderless. With control of the House and the Senate, Trump dominates everything in the capital. The force, speed and scope of his administration’s actions are so intense that the Democrats cannot respond effectively. Its not as if everyone has been taken by surprise. If they had been paying attention, this is exactly what Trump and his team said they would do. It is the scale of this revolution that has put everyone into a spin. It is a time of everything happening everywhere all at once – in accordance with the MAGA mantra of “move fast and break things”.
But, say optimists, the pushback is coming. Every weekend, people are flooding the streets in cities across the country. That movement is growing. If all that Trump and his administration have let loose comes into full force but does not deliver the American miracle he promised – with recession, inflation, and chaos taking hold across the land – the midterm elections next year could be a turning point. The Democrats are in striking distance of retaking control of Congress. If so, Trump’s power may be checked and his golden age may be stillborn. And yet, nothing about Trump is certain. His approval ratings might now be at a historical low, but he has been wrongly written off many times before.
So, how did it come to this?
As the authors of the long but excellent opinion piece in The Atlantic published below explains, Donald Trump’s Second Coming began four years ago and took meticulous planning.
That’s right, it’s come to this Yes, it’s come to this And wasn’t it a long way down? Wasn’t it a strange way down?
L Cohen, Dress Rehearsal Rag
Postscript: a bad case of imperial purple …
The story goes that Roman Emperor and stoic “philosopher king” Marcus Aurelius engaged a slave to follow him as he walked around Rome; his only job, whenever his master was praised, was to whisper in his ear, “Remember, you are just a man, you are just a man”. Washington, meanwhile, is starting to resemble some of the more excruciating scenes from the BBC’s iconic sword and sandals series I Claudius.
‘Brazen transaction mixed with humbling obeisance is hardly unknown in Washington … In Trump’s Washington, the imperative has never been plainer: if you want to get ahead or stay out of trouble, praise the President as much as he praises himself … The gestures of servility come from all over. At a Cabinet meeting not long ago, Trump’s secretaries took turns: “Your vision is a turning point and inflection point in American history” (Brooke Rollins, Agriculture); “You were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority—Americans want you to be President” (Pam Bondi, Attorney General); “What you’re doing now is a great service to our country, but ultimately to the world” (Marco Rubio, State) … At a hearing of the House Committee on Natural Resources, where a dozen or so members were discussing the Gulf of America Act of 2025, sponsored by Marjorie Taylor Greene. Democrat congressman Jared Huffman said: “This is remarkable new stuff in this committee, just bootlicking sycophancy of the highest order,” he said. (Not long after the hearing, Huffman suggested an amendment to rename Earth “Planet Trump”.’
Illustration by Dale Stephanos. Source: Ethan Miller / Getty.
Before we begin, a primer on the science of arranging an interview with a sitting American president:
In ordinary times, reporters seeking an on-the-record encounter with the commander in chief first write an elaborate proposal. The proposal details the goals of the interview, the broad areas of concern, and the many reasons the president must, for his own good, talk to these particular reporters and not other, perfectly adequate but still lesser reporters. This pitch is then sent to White House officials. If the universe bends favorably, negotiations ensue. If the staff feel reasonably confident that the interview will somehow help their cause, they will ask the president—with trepidation, at times—to sit for the interview. Sometimes, the president will agree.
Such is what happened recently to us. We went through this process in the course of reporting the story you are reading. We made our pitch, which went like this: President Donald Trump, by virtue of winning a second term and so dramatically reshaping the country and the world, can now be considered the most consequential American leader of the 21st century, and we want to describe, in detail, how this came to be. Just four years ago, after the violent insurrection he fomented, Trump appeared to be finished. Social-media companies had banned or suspended him, and he had been repudiated by corporate donors. Republicans had denounced him, and the country was moving on to the fresh start of Joe Biden’s presidency. Then came further blows—the indictments, the civil judgments, and the endless disavowals by people who once worked for him.
And yet, here we are, months into a second Trump term. We wanted to hear, in his own words, how he’d pulled off one of the most remarkable comebacks in political history, and what lessons, if any, he’d internalized along the way.
Trump agreed to see us. We were tentatively promised a meeting and a photo shoot—likely in the Oval Office, though possibly the Lincoln Bedroom. But then, as is so often the case with this White House, everything went sideways.
The week our interview was supposed to occur, Trump posted a vituperative message on Truth Social, attacking us by name. “Ashley Parker is not capable of doing a fair and unbiased interview. She is a Radical Left Lunatic, and has been as terrible as is possible for as long as I have known her,” he wrote. “To this date, she doesn’t even know that I won the Presidency THREE times.” (That last sentence is true—Ashley Parker does not know that Trump won the presidency three times.) “Likewise, Michael Scherer has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES.”
Apparently, as word of our meeting spread through Trump’s inner circle, someone had reminded him of some of the things we (specifically Ashley) had said and written that he didn’t like. We still don’t know who it was—but we immediately understood the consequences: no photo shoot, no tour of the newly redecorated Oval Office or the Lincoln Bedroom, and definitely no interview.
But we’ve both covered Trump long enough to know that his first word is rarely his final one. So at 10:45 on a Saturday morning in late March, we called him on his cellphone. (Don’t ask how we got his number. All we can say is that the White House staff have imperfect control over Trump’s personal communication devices.) The president was at the country club he owns in Bedminster, New Jersey. The number that flashed on his screen was an unfamiliar one, but he answered anyway. “Who’s calling?” he asked.
Despite his attacks on us a few days earlier, the president, evidently feeling buoyed by a week of successes, was eager to talk about his accomplishments. As we spoke, the sounds of another conversation, perhaps from a television, hummed in the background.
The president seemed exhilarated by everything he had managed to do in the first two months of his second term: He had begun a purge of diversity efforts from the federal government; granted clemency to nearly 1,600 supporterswho had participated in the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those caught beating police officers on camera; and signed 98 executive orders and counting (26 of them on his first day in office). He had fired independent regulators; gutted entire agencies; laid off great swaths of the federal workforce; and invoked 18th-century wartime powers to use against a criminal gang from Venezuela. He had adjusted tariffs like a DJ spinning knobs in the booth, upsetting the rhythms of global trade and inducing vertigo in the financial markets. He had raged at the leader of Ukraine, a democratic ally repelling an imperialist invasion, for not being “thankful”—and praised the leader of the invading country, Russia, as “very smart,” reversing in an instant 80 years of U.S. foreign-policy doctrine, and prompting the countries of NATO to prepare for their own defense, without the protective umbrella of American power, for the first time since 1945.
Donald Trump after being sworn in as president for his second term in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol (Shawn Thew / Reuters)
He had empowered one of his top political donors, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, to slice away at the federal government and take control of its operating systems. He had disemboweled ethics and anti-corruption architecture installed after Watergate, and had declared that he, not the attorney general, was the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. He had revoked Secret Service protection and security clearances from political opponents, including some facing Iranian death threats for carrying out actions Trump himself had ordered in his first term. He had announced plans to pave over part of the Rose Garden, and he had redecorated the Oval Office—gold trim and gold trophies and gold frames to go with an array of past presidential portraits, making the room look like a Palm Beach approximation of an 18th-century royal court.
Old foes were pleading for his grace. Meta—whose founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had become an enthusiastic supplicant—had paid $25 million to settle a civil lawsuit with Trump that many experts believed was meritless. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, announced that he was banning his opinion writers from holding certain opinions—and then joined Trump for dinner the same night at the White House.
“He’s 100 percent. He’s been great,” the president told us, referring to Bezos. “Zuckerberg’s been great.”
We asked Trump why he thought the billionaire class was prostrating itself before him.
“It’s just a higher level of respect. I don’t know,” Trump said. “Maybe they didn’t know me at the beginning, and they know me now.”
“I mean, you saw yesterday with the law firm,” he said. He was referring to Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the nation’s most prestigious firms, whose leader had come to the Oval Office days earlier to beg for relief from an executive order that could have crippled its business. Trump had issued the order at least partially because a former partner at the firm had in 2021 gone to work for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, where he was part of an investigation of the Trump Organization’s business practices. Also that week, an Ivy League institution, threatened with the cancellation of $400 million in federal funding, had agreed to overhaul its Middle Eastern–studies programs at the Trump administration’s request, while also acceding to other significant demands. “You saw yesterday with Columbia University. What do you think of the law firm? Were you shocked at that?” Trump asked us.
Yes—all of it was shocking, much of it without precedent. Legal scholars were drawing comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the early stages of the New Deal, when Congress had allowed FDR to demolish norms and greatly expand the powers of the presidency.
As ever, Trump was on the hunt for a deal. If he liked the story we wrote, he said, he might even speak with us again.
“Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” he said. Perhaps the magazine can risk forgoing hotness, he suggested, because it is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, which buffers it, he implied, from commercial imperatives. But that doesn’t guarantee anything, he warned. “You know at some point, they give up,” he said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.
Media owners weren’t the only ones on his mind. He also seemed to be referring to law firms, universities, broadcast networks, tech titans, artists, research scientists, military commanders, civil servants, moderate Republicans—all the people and institutions he expected to eventually, inevitably, submit to his will.
We asked the president if his second term felt different from his first. He said it did. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
For weeks, we’d been hearing from both inside and outside the White House that the president was having more fun than he’d had in his first term. “The first time, the first weeks, it was just ‘Let’s blow this place up,’ ” Brian Ballard, a lobbyist and an ally of the president’s, had told us. “This time, he’s blowing it up with a twinkle in his eye.”
When we put this observation to Trump over the phone, he agreed. “I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do,” he said. “You know, what I do is such serious stuff.”
EXILE
that trump now finds himself once again in a position to blow things up is astonishing, considering the depth of his fall. So much has happened so fast that the improbability of his comeback gets obscured. Perhaps no one in American history has had a political resurrection as remarkable as Donald Trump’s.
In the waning days of his first term, his approval rating stood at a pallid 34 percent. A few weeks earlier, he had watched on television while an insurrection he incited overran the Capitol; polls showed that a clear majority of Americans believed he bore responsibility for the attack. The House of Representatives had just impeached him for the second time—making him the only president to ever achieve that ignominy. And although the Senate failed to reach the two-thirds majority required for conviction, seven Republican senators voted to convict—the most members of a president’s own party to vote for an impeachment conviction in history.
Twitter and Facebook, his favorite social-media platforms, had banned or effectively silenced him, along with Instagram and YouTube. To try to reestablish direct connection with his followers, he would launch a blog, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump.” But it gained little traction and was abandoned within weeks.
Major corporations announced that they were cutting off political contributions to officials who had supported Trump’s election lies. Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank decided to stop doing business with Trump and his companies. Perhaps most painful to the president, the PGA of America yanked its scheduled 2022 championship tournament from Trump’s Bedminster golf course. Former members of his own Cabinet and staff—people he had hired—would declare him, or had already declared him, “a moron” (Rex Tillerson, secretary of state), “more dangerous than anyone could ever imagine” (James Mattis, secretary of defense), “the most flawed person I have ever met” (John Kelly, chief of staff), and “a laughing fool” (John Bolton, national security adviser). And now longtime allies were abandoning him. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House minority leader, had discussed pushing Trump to resign from office. On the evening of the insurrection, Senator Lindsey Graham, a compass reliably magnetized toward wherever power in the Republican Party lies, pointed away from Trump for the first time in four years. “Count me out,” Graham had declared on the Senate floor. “Enough is enough.” Rupert Murdoch, then the chairman of Fox Corporation, sent an email to a former Fox Broadcasting executive in which he declared, “We want to make Trump a non person.” Coming from Murdoch himself, the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told us recently, “that’s a papal bull.”
On the morning of Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump was a dozen miles southeast of the festivities, at Joint Base Andrews, preparing to depart for Florida. (Trump was the first president since Andrew Johnson, in 1869, to boycott the swearing-in of his successor.) Standing before a modest crowd, his dark overcoat a meager bulwark against the cold, the soon-to-be-former president cut a diminished figure.
Just before boarding Air Force One for the final time, to head to Mar-a-Lago, Trump spoke to those gathered to bid him farewell. “We will be back in some form,” he said, a notably modest framing from such a formerly oversize figure.
Few believed him. It didn’t even sound like he believed it himself. The Trump era was over.
Almost as soon as Trump arrived at his gilded Elba, he began plotting his return. He missed the press pool—the gaggle of reporters that tails every president—and once tried to summon it, only to be told that no such pool still existed. But it would turn out that the lack of attention in those first months—and the lack of access to social-media platforms—was a blessing. Enforced obscurity gave him the time and clarity he needed to plan his comeback.
To understand how Trump rose from the political dead, and how he set himself up to wield power in his second term, we spoke with dozens of top advisers, senior aides, allies, adversaries, and confidants. Many who talked with us did so only on the condition of anonymity, in order to be more candid or to avoid angering the president. The story they told us revealed that Trump’s time in the political wilderness is crucial to understanding the way he’s exercising power now.
He had been in Palm Beach a week when an opportunity presented itself. Trump heard that Kevin McCarthy would be in South Florida for fundraisers. Though the two men had clashed after the Capitol riot, Trump invited McCarthy to Mar-a-Lago. Even before the meeting happened, news of it leaked to The New York Times, shaking the political universe: Were Republican leaders, who had seemed so intent on purging Trump, embracing him again? When Trump and McCarthy met in person, the former president asked the minority leader who had tipped off the Times.
Donald Trump departed Washington in 2021 a pariah, twice impeached, abandoned by former allies, and banned or suspended from his favorite social-media platforms. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Noam Galai / Getty; Alex Edelman / AFP / Getty; Sepia Times / Universal Images Group / Getty.)
“I know who leaked it—you did,” McCarthy replied, multiple people briefed on the exchange told us.
“It’s good for both of us,” Trump shot back.
Both men were right. McCarthy had already concluded that the path back to Republican control of the House in the 2022 midterms—and his own path to the speakership—required a unified party, one that included Trump and his MAGA base. After the meeting, each man separately released the same photo: the two of them grinning amid the ostentatious splendor of Mar-a-Lago. Trump had taken his first step toward political redemption.
It is a truism that Trump has never felt governed by the traditional rules of politics. And he has always been convinced of his own genius, his pure gut instincts. But never more so than today. The past four years have turned him into a Nietzschean cliché. Banishment, multiple indictments, a 34-count felony conviction, repeated brushes with assassins—all have combined to convince him that he is impervious to challenges that would destroy others. Those years also strengthened in him the salesman’s instinct that he can bend reality to his will—turn facts into “fake news,” make the inconceivable not just conceivable but actual, transform the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, make people believe what he’s selling in defiance of what they see with their own eyes. This is the core lesson that Trump and his acolytes internalized from the 2020 election and January 6. The real-estate mogul who branded buildings with his name everywhere from Turkey to Uruguay, who sold the “world’s greatest steaks” and the “finest” wine and “fantastic” mattresses, had mastered the alchemy of perception. Reality, to Trump, is fungible. While reporting on Trump over the past four years, we were repeatedly struck that, in failing to drive a stake directly through his heart, all of the would-be vampire slayers—Democrats, Never Trumpers, Republican-primary opponents, prosecutors, judges, media critics—only strengthened him. Which brings us to a second lesson: Trump and his team realized that they could behave with near impunity by embracing controversies and scandals that would have taken down just about any other president—as long as they showed no weakness.
Even now, Trump—who described himself to us as “a very positive thinker”—struggles to admit that his return to power was a comeback. To concede that he’d had to come back would be to admit that he had fallen in the first place.
Early in our reporting for this article, we asked the Trump loyalist and former Breitbart News editor Raheem Kassam to explain how the president had been able to bend the country, and the world, to his will. Over a meal of oysters brûlées, duck confit, and fries cooked in beef tallow at Butterworth’s, the new MAGA haunt on Capitol Hill, he responded crudely, if vividly. “He didn’t bend them to his will,” Kassam said. “He bent them over.”
When we spoke with Trump in late March, his approval ratings seemed steady, his political base apparently unshakable. Institution after institution was submitting to him—“obeying in advance,” as the historian of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder has put it. Trump was carrying out his agenda with surprisingly little resistance, even from Democrats. But in the days and weeks that followed, the patina of infallibility began to crack. At the instigation of Elon Musk’s DOGE team, critical workers had been getting fired—and then hired back. An embarrassing (and possibly illegal) operations-security snafu, in which the editor of this magazine was included on a Signal group chat that discussed imminent attack plans on Houthi targets in Yemen, made the administration look incompetent, in a fashion reminiscent of the clown-car chaos of Trump 1.0. The president’s tariff rollout was shambolic, tanking the stock market and causing even some loyalists to question him publicly. His approval rating on the economy, long a buttress of his polling support, went negative. Was this what happens when a feeling of indomitability curdles into hubris? Or was this just the next setback for Trump—some combination of Houdini and Lazarus—to recover from?
he had almost been destroyed before. After a real-estate downturn in the early 1990s, Trump found himself on the brink of financial ruin. His near bankruptcy and recovery led to his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback. For his political advisers in exile, this book became essential reading.
The first pages list Trump’s “Top Ten Comeback Tips.” When we met one of his advisers recently, this person recounted from memory some of the rules on the list. “Rule 1 is: Play golf,” this adviser told us. “Rule 9 is: Get even.” (Rule 10, “Always have a prenuptial agreement,” seemed less applicable to politics.)
To stage a comeback, Trump would need the right staff. He had realized, in his exile, that at nearly every turn in his first term, someone on his own team—Reince Priebus, John Kelly, James Mattis, Bill Barr, Gary Cohn—had blocked him. He needed smart people who would figure out how to let him do everything that he wanted to do, in whatever way he wanted to do it. His first key hire was a political operative who had impressed the former president with her retrospective analysis of the 2020 election. Biden had won the election that year by flipping back into the Democratic column five key states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (along with a lone congressional district in Nebraska). One of the few bright spots for Trump in 2020 had been Florida, where he had increased his winning margin from 2016. What, Trump began asking his allies after the election, had he done right in Florida that he hadn’t done in the rest of the country?
The answer, in large part, boiled down to Susie Wiles, who had run Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns in the state. Wiles, the daughter of the legendary NFL announcer Pat Summerall, is an experienced campaign operative (she was a scheduler for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign), who over the past three decades had developed deep Florida ties. After every campaign she runs, Wiles writes an “after action” report, documenting what worked and what didn’t. Over dinner with Trump on the patio at Mar-a-Lago in early 2021, she delivered “the Florida memo.” Soon after, he hired her to run his political operation, which eventually became his 2024 campaign.
Wiles saw that one thing that had held Trump back in 2020 was that he had not finished taking over the Republican Party during his first term. Part of Trump’s leverage had been his ability to endorse in Republican primaries—influence he was eager to reprise. “When I endorse somebody, they win,” Trump told us on the phone. “But even when I endorse them in the general election, mostly they win. It’s important.” (Now when Trump calls to pressure a fellow Republican about an issue or a vote, they are almost always grateful for his past support, or feel that they owe their seat to him.)
The Wiles process for evaluating potential endorsees—which she undertook with James Blair, now a deputy chief of staff in the White House, and Brian Jack, now a congressman representing Georgia—involved researching how they had spoken about Trump in the past. “The basic thing was their loyalty and their political viability,” one adviser told us. “So we were looking for things like: So, what did they say on J6? What did they say during the Access Hollywood tapes? What is their voting record with us?” Trump was building a coalition of loyalists, something he hadn’t sufficiently done during the first term.
Wiles had plenty of experience managing men with big personalities. But colleagues say a key reason she’s been successful working with Trump (she is now his White House chief of staff) is that she never tries to manage him. She does not imagine that she can control him, as some former top advisers attempted, and she tends not to offer advice unless specifically asked. Her primary role, as she sees it, is to set up processes to help ensure Trump’s success, and then to execute his directives, whatever they may be.
At first, Trump’s banishment from the big social-media platforms, along with mainstream media outlets’ reluctance—including Fox News’s—to give him much coverage, seemed potentially devastating. But Trump turned to the far-right platforms and activists still welcoming him. Taylor Budowich—now a White House deputy chief of staff—worked with MAGA influencers to evade the Twitter and Facebook bans: They would print out pro-Trump social-media posts; Budowich would have Trump sign the paper with his Sharpie, and then mail the signed post back to the influencer; almost invariably, the influencer would then post the signed missive, flexing their access and building their audience—while simultaneously amplifying Trump’s voice. At the same time, a video ecosystem grew up around Trump, with streaming platforms such as Right Side Broadcasting Network stepping in to cover his events when cable networks would not.
“Him being banned gave rise to people like me, because the president’s supporters followed me to find out what he was saying,” one MAGA influencer told us. “It backfired on the tech people who deplatformed him, because it platformed all of us.”
Trump, meanwhile, continued to promote the lie that he’d won the 2020 election, and that January 6 was just an ordinary Wednesday. Normal political logic suggested that this was a bad strategy. But his shamelessness, as ever, remained a strength. By repeating something frequently enough, he could slowly make it feel true, at least for his supporters.
Not long ago, we sat in Steve Bannon’s Capitol Hill rowhouse, where he records his War Room podcast, pressing him on Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, and his denial of what transpired on January 6. “Our reality is that we won” and that January 6 was a “fedsurrection,” Bannon said, referring to the conspiracy theory that FBI agents had incited the crowd on the Ellipse that day.
But this reality, we pointed out to Bannon, is simply not true.
“Now, here’s the interesting thing,” Bannon said. “Who’s won that argument? I think we have.”
“BE READY!”
the first televised hearing of the House select committee on January 6 was scheduled for the beginning of June 2022, and it was sure to be a spectacle that reminded viewers of the horror of the insurrection and emphasized the former president’s culpability. Trump’s team at Mar-a-Lago was desperate to distract attention from the hearing. At one point, someone proposed a brazen gambit: Trump could announce his 2024 bid for the presidency just minutes before the hearing gaveled in.
Trump’s response was telling. “I’m not ready for this,” he said. “We’re not ready for this right now.”
“That was the first moment of, like, ‘Okay, he’s not just thinking about it; he’s seriously thinking about how he wants to do it,’ ” one of his advisers told us. “He’s not going to just use it as a stunt to make a moment. He wants to win.”
Before long, Trump began emphasizing behind the scenes that he was serious. “Be ready,” he would repeat to people who had served with him the first time around. “Be ready! Be ready! We’re coming back! Be ready!”
Still, when Trump did launch his campaign, in November 2022, it did not get off to an auspicious start. Even his most fiercely supportive advisers concede that the announcement, in the form of an hour-long speech at Mar-a-Lago, was a dud.
Surprisingly few political reporters from major outlets were in attendance; it was as though the mainstream media still didn’t believe that Trump could be a viable candidate again. Worse, some members of Trump’s own family hadn’t bothered to show up. As the speech dragged on, even Fox News cut away, switching to what Bannon called “a C-level panel,” before returning for the final few minutes.
The campaign struggled to gain traction. Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio told us that even months later, into early 2023, getting donors to attend the first big super-PAC event “was like pulling teeth.” And although Trump was now a declared presidential candidate, his team said it was still having trouble getting him booked even on shows such as Fox & Friends.
The first turning point, several advisers told us, came in February 2023. A Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, spewing toxic material. Sitting in the West Palm Beach campaign headquarters one day, Trump’s team watched Joe Biden’s press secretary struggle to answer a question about the president’s plans for outreach to East Palestine. Soon after, Susie Wiles received a call from Trump’s oldest son, Don Jr., saying that his father ought to just show up there himself. When Wiles brought the suggestion to Trump, in the living room of Mar-a-Lago, his response was unequivocal: “That’s a great idea,” he enthused. “When can we go?”
Trump’s visit to East Palestine—and the footage of him buying McDonald’s for the first responders—had a potent effect. “It just reminded everyone that people still like this guy,” one adviser told us. “He’s still a draw.” Nearly two years later, Trump’s visit continued to resonate. “People are living their lives and they don’t delve that easily into policy,” a woman across the border in the swing state of Pennsylvania told our colleague George Packer before the election last fall. “All they know is that Trump was here buying everyone McDonald’s” and that Biden hadn’t visited for more than a year.
The halting start to the campaign kept Trump off the radar, giving his team time to plan. Former Trump advisers had used their years out of power to set up their own groups—America First Legal, America First Policy Institute, Center for Renewing America—to prepare for a second Trump administration.
“The people who were the true believers knew Trump was going to run again and win,” Caroline Wren, a former top Trump fundraiser, told us, adding that Trump’s policy loyalists “sat there and prepared executive orders for four years.”
The time out of the spotlight also allowed the team to build a new election strategy. By now, Trump had alienated a significant share of the voting public, and he was polling lower among some demographic groups than in previous elections. The conventional wisdom was that the criminal investigations and legal proceedings then under way would only increase that alienation. His campaign directors decided that the best tactic was to turn this problem into a strength. Chris LaCivita, who was a co–campaign manager alongside Susie Wiles and a military veteran wounded in the Gulf War in 1991, took to exhorting younger staffers with a Marine slogan: “Embrace the suck.”
The impulse to let Trump be Trump, so contrary to the instincts of much of the first-term staff, was laid out in a memo that James Blair and Tim Saler, the campaign’s lead data expert, sent to Wiles in early 2024. This became known around the campaign as the “gender memo.” “Instead of saying, ‘Look, we did two points worse with white suburban women between 2016 and 2020’ and ‘How do we get those points back?,’ what if we did it the other way?” an adviser familiar with the memo told us. “What if we said, ‘We gained eight points with non-college-educated men. What if we won them by 12?’ ”
During his brief political exile, Trump hired the campaign operative Susie Wiles. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: ablokhin / Getty; Tom Brenner / The Washington Post / Getty; ZUMA Press / Alamy.)
The strategy had the benefit of letting Trump be the version of himself that appealed to those men. In a moment when the Democratic Party often felt like an amalgamation of East Coast elitists, niggling scolds, and far-left activists, Trump appeared to offer judgment-free populism to a populace sick of being judged.
Trump’s own view, we were told, was more self-referential: “Why would I distance myself from my people? They love me.”
“IT MADE ME STRONGER”
on friday, may 31, 2024, the day after Trump was convicted of 34 felony charges in a New York City courtroom, the treasurer at Make America Great Again Inc., the main super PAC supporting the former president, called his boss, Taylor Budowich, with good news. A large wire transfer was incoming—a record $15 million. The call set off an internal scramble, because the bank needed the donor’s name to approve the transfer, and nobody knew who it was.
Shortly thereafter, the treasurer called back. “I’m so sorry,” he told Budowich. “I misheard him. It’s not $15 million—it’s $50 million.”
“Don’t be sorry!” Budowich said. (The donation was eventually traced to Timothy Mellon, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune.)
The Democrats assumed that Trump’s legal issues would politically neuter him. “A convicted felon is now seeking the office of the presidency,” Biden would say. But all the scandals and controversies that would have sunk a different candidate became background static. “The thing about the court cases is there were too many of them, and this is one of Trump’s superpowers—he never just breaks the law a little bit; he does it all over the place,” Sarah Longwell, a formerly Republican, anti-MAGA political strategist who regularly conducts focus groups, told us. “And as a result, there were so many court cases that it was just white noise to voters. They couldn’t tell them apart.”
The Democratic base remained outraged. Trump’s base continued to believe his claims that all the criminal investigations and January 6 hearings constituted a “witch hunt.” But for the sliver of voters who would actually decide the election, the Democratic argument that Trump was a threat to democracy was too far removed from their more urgent concerns about grocery prices. As time passed and Trump continued to rewrite history to turn insurrectionists into “patriots,” the events of January 6 receded into abstraction for many of these voters.
“If you said, ‘What’s J6?,’ it’s like, ‘What is that? Bingo? Are you playing Battleship?’ ” the adviser familiar with the gender memo told us, describing what the campaign’s voter research had found.
Trump’s felony conviction actually proved to be a boon. This did not surprise his advisers. A year earlier, in the spring of 2023, when Trump had been indicted over hush-money payments to a porn star, his support in Republican-primary polls jumped 10 points within a month, to more than 50 percent—a level it would never drop below again. In the first three months of 2023, MAGA Inc. had reported raising only about $600,000; in the three months following the indictment, the group took in nearly $13 million. “Democrats just played right into our hands,” Fabrizio, the Trump pollster, told us.
For Trump’s base, the cases were energizing, and they put his Republican-primary opponents in the difficult position of having to defend Trump against “lawfare” or risk being seen as supporting the Democrats’ position. So even while campaigning against him for the nomination, they were in effect campaigning for him.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump had ignored the traditional fundraising circuit, which increased donor skepticism of him. But during his time in the wilderness, he began to enjoy raising money. He asked advisers to schedule more call time for him with top donors. He wrote personal notes, and he regularly invited wealthy supporters and potential donors to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago. He judged generosity not by the size of the check, his allies told us, but by the size of the check relative to the donor’s net worth. He liked pressuring donors to bet on him—and watching them squirm if they hedged. Sometimes he was blunt, invoking the specter of a President Kamala Harris taking their wealth.
(“If I’m not president, you’re fucked,” he would tell a roomful of oil executives at Mar-a-Lago after the election. “Look at your profit-and-loss statements. You realize what would have happened to you if she was president? What’s wrong with you?”)
The Supreme Court decision in July 2024 regarding a legal challenge to the federal prosecution of Trump for interfering in the 2020 election gave Trump and his allies further momentum. Trump v. United States addressed the question of legal liability for a president, but Trump’s allies focused on how the Court described the presidency itself, suggesting that all the powers of the executive branch were imbued in the personage. “Unlike anyone else,” the Court wrote, “the President is a branch of government.” That the prosecution of Trump both revivified his candidacy and then gave him more executive power in his second term remains a stinging irony for Democrats.
When we talked with Trump, we asked him if he thought the criminal prosecutions had made him stronger. “Shockingly, yes,” he said. “Normally, it would knock you out. You wouldn’t even live for the next day. You know, you’d announce your resignation, and you’d go back and ‘fight for your name,’ like everybody says—you know, ‘fight for your name, go back to your family.’ ”
He paused. “Yeah, it made me stronger, made me a lot stronger.”
In the final months of the campaign, Democratic strategists working for Vice President Harris focused on seven swing states. Trump, by contrast, told aides that he wanted to put resources into picking up voters even in states he was already certain to win.
“We don’t want anyone to know—it’s a surprise—but I think we might win the popular vote,” Trump would say to his advisers. “We have got to run up the score.”
During breaks between events, his team would place calls to groups of voters in red states and put him on the line. “This is your favorite president, Donald Trump,” he’d say, before launching into brief remarks. They would make calls from the motorcade, from the campaign plane, as many as 10 a day. In this way, working around the old mass media, Trump reached thousands of voters directly.
“If there was someone in America in some state, still awake, Donald Trump would find a way to get to them,” Chris LaCivita told us.
In 2016, Trump had been so frustrated about losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton that he’d falsely asserted, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Eight years later, he didn’t have to pretend. As Election Night gave way to dawn in Palm Beach, Trump basked in the comprehensiveness of his victory—all seven swing states, and a strong showing in the popular-vote tally, which he ultimately won. Several aides got calls from him around 4 a.m. “You won’t believe it,” Trump crowed, according to one. “I’ve already had 20 world leaders call me. They all want to kiss my ass.”
Some time later, Trump addressed a gathering of supporters in the living room at Mar-a-Lago. During his first term people would say, “Yeah, he won, but he doesn’t have a mandate, ” Trump told the crowd. “Now they can’t say it anymore.”
THE TRANSITION
people who worked with Trump in his first term used to play a parlor game of sorts. What would happen, they wondered, if they, the human guardrails, weren’t there to correct the president’s errors, to explain to him all the things he did not know or understand, to talk him out of or slow-walk his most destructive impulses?
During his first term, he faced resistance and obstruction from all over the government: from the courts and from the Democrats, but also from Republicans in the House and Senate, who at times treated him like a floundering student. The contempt was mutual. “Paul Ryan was a stupid person,” Trump told us in March, referring to the former Republican speaker of the House. “And Mitch, Mitch wasn’t much better,” Trump said of Mitch McConnell, the former Senate Republican leader and, lately, the epicenter of GOP resistance to Trump, such as it is. But some of the most crucial pushback came from within the executive branch. At times, his chief of staff and his White House counsel declined to carry out his orders. Trump had been apoplectic when “his” Justice Department, under Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein, opened an independent-counsel investigation into whether the Russians had influenced the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign had colluded with them.
This time would be different, because he’d learned from experience. “When I did it before, I never did it, you know?” he told us. “I didn’t know people in Washington.”
On January 15, at 8 p.m., five days before the inauguration, Trump sent out an incendiary post on Truth Social. In it, he described the sorts of people his incoming administration would not be hiring—a list that included anyone who had ever worked for, in his words, “Americans for No Prosperity (headed by Charles Koch), ‘Dumb as a Rock’ John Bolton, ‘Birdbrain’ Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, disloyal Warmongerers Dick Cheney, and his Psycho daughter, Liz,” and anyone “suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.” For those staffing Trump’s second term, the missive was doctrine: This time, loyalty would be absolute.
In 2016, few experienced Republicans had been involved in Trump’s campaign, so the pool of presumptive loyalists to draw from was small. His incoming team also used key transition picks—Cabinet secretaries, West Wing advisers—to reassure a still-skeptical Republican Party that Trump was one of them. This produced a dysfunctional dichotomy in which Reince Priebus, a mild-mannered traditional Republican from Wisconsin, and Steve Bannon, a revolutionary hell-bent on dismantling the administrative state, shared top billing in the West Wing. The competing camps—the MAGA fire-breathers, the establishment swamp creatures, “Javanka” and the globalists—leaked relentlessly to the media and tried to knife one another. A miasma of chaos surrounded Trump, and impaired the administration’s ability to carry out its policy agenda.
But by 2024, Trump had effectively consumed the party, and he had no need to recruit traditional Republicans, if any even remained. Cliff Sims, who during Trump’s first term had served as a communications aide in the White House before going to work for the director of national intelligence, helped the transition team manage hiring for the second term. The formula for staffing the administration wasn’t hard this time, Sims told us: “Don’t hire anyone who wasn’t committed to the agenda last time.”
“I knew that Stephen Miller would ultimately run the policy operation, with immigration as a top priority,” Sims told us, referring to Trump’s senior domestic-policy adviser, who is, famously, an immigration hard-liner. “So I just asked him, ‘Who do you want? Who should prepare DHS? Who should prepare ICE? Who are the rock stars from your team? Let’s get them all rolling.’ ” Same, too, with trade. Sims called Jamieson Greer, who had served as the chief of staff to the U.S. trade representative in Trump’s first term before taking over the role himself this time around. He asked Greer who Trump’s pro-tariff “killers on trade” were. “And he’s like, ‘I’ve been sitting here hoping someone would call about this; I’ve already got a list ready,’ ” Sims told us.
Because the transition hiring for the second term harvested a uniformly loyalist crop of staffers, getting things done the way Trump wants became easier. In the first term, executive orders designed by the MAGA faction were sometimes rushed through without proper legal vetting, in an attempt to prevent a warring faction from killing the directive, someone familiar with this process told us—which made them vulnerable to court challenges. This time around, the process for generating the orders is more disciplined.
Trump’s aides and advisers also now understood the hydraulics of the government better. They’d learned, for instance, that immigration policy was not contained solely within the Department of Homeland Security, and that to curb the flow of immigrants across the southern border, they also needed to install loyalists in crucial roles at the Department of Health and Human Services. When it came to the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department, they now knew they needed MAGA diehards in key roles. This kind of knowledge would now be applied to thousands of hires across dozens of agencies.
When his cabinet nominees hit trouble in the Senate, Trump and his team were determined to test their new power. “It was ‘You’ll eat your breakfast and you’ll like it,’ ” a veteran Republican operative told us. The first major test came during the former Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s quest for confirmation as defense secretary.
Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, a Republican, was skeptical about Hegseth’s qualifications. Ernst is the first female combat veteran to serve in the Senate; Hegseth had previously said that women should not serve in combat roles. Ernst is also a sexual-assault survivor; Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault and other misconduct, including alcohol abuse. (Hegseth has denied the accusations.) But when Ernst publicly signaled that she might not be able to support the nomination, Trump’s allies leaped into action. On private text chains, they talked about how failing to win confirmation for Hegseth was untenable. The consensus was clear: Because Matt Gaetz had already had to withdraw as Trump’s pick for attorney general, if they lost another major nominee, there would be blood in the water. Even the most controversial—Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel—needed to be muscled through.
Trump and his team saw the confirmation of their most controversial Cabinet nominees—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard—as a chance to flex their power over the Republican Party. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Rebecca Noble / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Philip Yabut / Getty; Print Collector / Getty.)
They decided to make an example of Ernst, as a warning to other senators about what to expect if they stepped out of line. An op‑ed implicitly excoriating her appeared on Breitbart News ; Bannon and the gang on his War Room podcast hammered her relentlessly; and the powerful young conservative activist Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA team threatened to send resources to Iowa to oppose her reelection in 2026. Ernst’s effort to “end Pete Hegseth,” Kirk posted on X in early December, “is a direct attempt to undermine the President and his voters. Pete Hegseth is the redline. If you vote against him, primaries will ensue.”
Trump’s team knew that once the most prominent MAGA figures began their onslaught, second-tier influencers would follow. Ernst called around to Trump allies, begging them to stop the attacks. But they wouldn’t relent; she voted to confirm Hegseth.
Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator and physician from Louisiana, also briefly found himself in the hot seat as he struggled with his confirmation vote on Kennedy, a vaccine critic who has misstated scientific findings, to lead the nation’s top health agency. (Cassidy was also viewed as a problem by Trump supporters because he’d voted to convict the president for his role in the January 6 insurrection.)
Cassidy ultimately supported Kennedy’s nomination, though he maintained that the vote had nothing to do with his own reelection prospects in 2026. Afterward, in the course of general conversations about the midterms, Cassidy’s team sought Trump’s support in his upcoming GOP primary. Trump told an aide to relay to Cassidy: “I’ll think about it.” (A Trump adviser told us that, for the moment, the president and Cassidy have reached “an uneasy détente.”)
Business leaders fell more quickly in line. After the election, they descended on Mar-a-Lago.
At dinner with Silicon Valley moguls, Trump would sometimes play “Justice for All”—a song by the J6 Prison Choir that features men imprisoned for their actions on January 6 singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” interspersed with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. One Trump adviser gleefully recounted how confused the tech billionaires appeared when “Justice for All” started, looking around for cues before inevitably rising and putting their hands over their hearts.
“The troll is strong,” the adviser told us.
The Thursday before the inauguration, a friend of Trump’s was sitting with him at Mar-a-Lago when the once and future president held up his phone to show off his recent-call log.
“Look who called in the past hour,” Trump boasted, then scrolled through a list that included Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tiger Woods. Apart from Woods, all were former Trump critics who, eight years earlier, had tried to keep their distance.
SHOCK AND AWE
the start of a new presidency is a famously harried and jury-rigged affair. But Trump and his team had spent his time out of office preparing for his return. Longwell, the anti-MAGA strategist, told us—echoing something our colleague David Frum had warned about four years ago—that watching Trump’s second-term team attack the federal bureaucracy was like watching “the velociraptors who have figured out how to work the doorknobs.” Day one of the second term, the product of weeks of meticulous planning, was all about—in the Trump team’s words—“shock and awe.” “We did all the immigration and border executive orders,” an adviser told us. “If we just left it at that, all the stories would have been about what bad people we are—we’re kicking people out of this country. But then right after he signed those border executive orders, bam: the J6 pardons.” The adviser explained that, along with Trump’s multiple speeches that day and inaugural balls that evening, this meant “the media had to choose what to cover. It’s either the J6 pardons or the immigration executive orders.” This convulsion of activity, the adviser told us, was all “planned”—designed to overwhelm.
“We have everyone kind of in the barrel, like everyone’s on the spin cycle, just getting whipped around, and that’s advantageous for us,” another adviser told us.
In his first term, Trump had floated the idea of buying Greenland—speaking of it almost offhandedly as a potentially intriguing if unusual real-estate acquisition. But now, even before taking office again, he had suggested that Canada should be America’s 51st state, threatened to reclaim the Panama Canal, and vowed to gain control of Greenland—“one way or the other,” as he would later put it. He followed this during his inaugural address by invoking “manifest destiny,” the 19th-century idea that the United States has a divinely ordained right to control North America.
He added that many of the things that, in his first term, Trump had floated as provocations or trollings or idle musings are now things the president realizes he can actually do. “These are all doable,” Bannon told us. “When you’ve come back from such long odds, you clearly feel, ‘I can do anything.’ ”
In his first term, Trump and his team had not done certain things—fired key bureaucrats, upended certain alliances, overhauled various initiatives—because, as one former adviser told us, “we thought they were red-hot.
“And then you touch it,” the former adviser continued, “and you realize it’s actually not that hot.” This may be the key insight of Trump’s second term. The first time around, aides were constantly warning him that the stove was too hot. This time, no one is even telling him not to touch the stove.
Tradition holds that artists honored with lifetime-achievement awards at the Kennedy Center meet with the sitting president. During Trump’s first term, some of the most prominent artists refused to do so. He, in turn, didn’t attend a single performance there.
“I didn’t really get to go the first time, because I was always getting impeached or some bullshit, and I could never enjoy a show,” Trump said, according to an adviser familiar with the comments. But as planning for the second inauguration got under way, someone mentioned the possibility of holding an event there, impelling Trump to muse aloud about naming himself chairman of the Kennedy Center, a position that had long been held by the philanthropist and Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein. Trump ordered, “Call David Rubenstein and tell him he’s fired.”
Overnight, Trump’s cultural remit went from queuing oldies on his iPad on the patio of Mar-a-Lago to being chairman of the Kennedy Center, one of the nation’s premier arts institutions. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty)
Some of Trump’s advisers have learned to operate by an unofficial rule: They make sure to do things after he says them twice. This is a necessary and important rule because, as one adviser explained, “he says a lot of shit.” So the second time Trump mentioned wanting to take over the Kennedy Center, his aides got to work, and in early February, Trump fired most of the board and named himself chairman. His cultural remit had gone overnight from entertaining his aides by playing oldies on his iPad on the patio of Mar-a-Lago to being chairman of the board of one of the nation’s premier arts institutions.
One of the most chaotic departures from convention has been Elon Musk’s prominent role in the administration. The disruption Musk has unleashed through DOGE, putting swaths of government “into the wood chipper,” as he described it, has tended to obscure the fact that the richest man in the world, who is one of Trump’s biggest financial donors, is attending Cabinet meetings while continuing to run his private businesses, which benefit from billions of dollars in federal contracts. The conflicts of interest here run fathoms deep. But Trump has confidently normalized all of it, even going so far as to conduct an infomercial for Tesla on the White House grounds.
In previous presidencies, Musk’s role in the administration would have been a scandal that dominated the media and congressional hearings for months. In Trump’s second term, this—by design—gets drowned out by everything else.
So, too, does Trump’s complete departure from convention regarding the Justice Department, which has historically had some independence from the president. In April, Trump ordered the DOJ to investigate Chris Krebs, who in Trump’s first term ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which declared the 2020 election secure and Biden the legitimate winner. Trump, in short, wanted to prosecute Krebs for accepting reality. He has also made clear that he wants the attorney general to protect his supporters, including Musk, whose Tesla dealerships and charging stations have been targeted by vandals. “When I see things going on like what they’re doing to Elon, that’s terrible,” Trump told us. “That’s a terrible thing. That’s terrorism.”
Trump boasted to us of Musk’s private business successes as if they were his own. One of Musk’s companies, SpaceX, had just helped to retrieve astronauts who had been marooned for months on the International Space Station. “They don’t come out of there at some point, you know, the bones start to break down,” Trump said.
Trump marveled at the media’s coverage of the splashdown. “They said, ‘And the rocket’s coming down in the Gulf of America.’ They didn’t make a big deal. They didn’t say Trump named it,” he told us. “It was like it was old hat. And it’s been the Gulf of Mexico for hundreds of years, literally hundreds of years. The Gulf of Mexico, before our country was formed. It’s been a long time. And that’s good.”
“THAT IS NOT WHAT THEY SIGNED UP FOR”
for all of trump’s success in dominating the political sphere, Democrats have grown more optimistic that his political fortunes may be changing. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who gave the Democratic rebuttal to Trump’s address to Congress in early March, told us that some of her constituents say their votes for Trump were born of despair. “They’ll say to me, ‘Look, it’s like I’m a Stage 4 cancer patient. My life has been getting worse, from my grandfather to my father, from my father to me, and my kids are going to do worse than me, so I need experimental chemo. Trump is my experimental chemo. It may hurt like hell. It may not work at all. But I’m at the end of my rope, and I’ll try anything.’ ”
We asked her whether now, several months into the second Trump administration, her constituents think the chemo is working. “I can’t tell you how many Trump voters have said to me, like, ‘Look, I voted for him to make the economy work. I did not vote for all of this craziness, and I certainly didn’t vote, for instance, for cuts to the VA,’ ” Slotkin said. “That is not what they signed up for.”
But in nearly every conversation we had with various Trump advisers, they told us that delivering on what people had voted for was in fact essential to holding the House and the Senate in the 2026 midterms. Trump himself has his eyes on a larger, long-term political realignment. “It’s a much different party,” he told us. “I got 38 percent of the male Black vote. Nobody knew that was possible. That’s a lot. I got 56 percent of Hispanics. How about that one? Every county along the Texas border is Hispanic. I won every one of them.” Though every single number he cited was wrong, the general thrust of his observation was correct.
Delivering on Trump’s campaign promises, his advisers told us, was the key not only to securing his legacy but to transforming the MAGA base into Republican voters for decades to come. (This project—persuading MAGA supporters to vote for Republicans even when Trump is not on the ballot—is a “central theme” of this presidency, one adviser repeatedly told us.) During the campaign and then the transition, Trump’s aides kept a shared document that meticulously cataloged and updated his promises for what he would do on day one, as well as what he’d promised to do more generally. The advisers we spoke with said that voters had absolutely known what they were asking for when they pulled the lever for Trump—and Trump’s team was determined to deliver.
But this is where the now nationally ingrained tendency to take Trump seriously but not literally may have created a disconnect between what Trump’s supporters thought they were voting for and what they are now getting, even among his most committed base. Over the years, Trump said many things that never came to fruition. Or he spoke with such hyperbole that everyone substantially discounted the reality of what he was ostensibly committing to. Or the policy implications of what he said would get obscured in the cloud of his ruminations about shark attacks and electrocutions and Hannibal Lecter—allowing voters to focus on what they liked and to ignore the riskier, more worrisome aspects of his promises. So although it’s true that Trump is delivering on commitments to impose tariffs, cut government waste, and aggressively deport immigrants, many of his voters are only now beginning to realize the effect these policies will have on their daily lives.
Several months into his second chance, the blitzkrieg of the early days continues—but it seems to be meeting more substantial resistance. Federal courts are once again blocking—or at least trying to block—Trump plans that flout the Constitution or stretch legal reasoning. The repeated rollouts and rollbacks and re-rollouts of his tariff measures have pushed the world toward an economic breaking point. (Even in the best-case scenario, any renaissance of the U.S. industrial base remains a long way off.) The Federal Reserve recently adjusted short-term-inflation projections higher, and GDP projections are getting lower. Financial analysts say the odds of a recession have risen significantly. The stock market just had its worst quarter in three years. When we talked with him in March, Trump had told us that Vladimir Putin “is going to be fine” in the Ukraine peace negotiations—but Putin has thwarted Trump’s promise of a quick deal. (“I’m trying to save a lot of lives in the world,” Trump told us. “You know, Ukraine and Russia—it’s not our lives, but it could end up in a Third World War.”)
The Signalgate fiasco appalled even a majority of Republicans. (Here Trump has so far stuck to his second-term policy of conceding essentially nothing, of never admitting weakness or a lie. To date, no one has been fired over Signalgate—though advisers we spoke with privately predicted that National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who inadvertently added The Atlantic’s editor in chief to the attack-planning chain, would exit the administration by the end of the year, if not much sooner.) Mass anti-Trump protests, notably absent during the first two months of this term, have become more frequent, including in red states.
Even as Trump continually seeks to expand his presidential powers, he at times seems to acknowledge that they have limits. In our March conversation, he seemed frustrated at the notion that a court might try to curb his ability to deport anyone he wanted, however he wanted. Yet when we asked if he would go so far as to actively disregard a judicial order, his answer suggested that he understood the Constitution would not allow that. “I think the judge is horrible,” he said, referring to James Boasberg, the federal-district-court judge who had tried to stop deportations of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. But Trump then referenced the Supreme Court’s more congenial opinion in Trump v. United States, which had given him immunity from criminal prosecution for anything he does as part of his core “official” duties as president. “But I’ve had a lot of horrible judges, and I won on appeal, right? I got immunity on appeal,” he said. He told us that the Court is “going to do what’s right” when reviewing his expansive use of executive power, and he spoke with uncharacteristic charity about the Court’s Democratic appointees. “I see them at the State of the Union, things that I do, and I think they’re very good people,” he said.
When questioned, Trump has sought to evade direct responsibility for individual deportations by his administration, legal challenges to which are wending their way through the courts.
“You know, I’m not involved in that. I have many people, many layers of people that do that,” Trump told us when we asked if he was worried that he may have mistakenly deported innocent people. “I would say they are all extremely tough, dangerous people. I would say that. And, don’t forget, they came in the country illegally.”
Trump’s advisers argue that, overall, the shock-and-awe approach is working. “Think about everything that’s happened immediately on immigration,” Cliff Sims told us. “Oh, we’re just going to ship gang members to a prison in El Salvador? ‘Sure.’ We’re going to send Tom Homan”—Trump’s border czar—“to kick down the door of every criminal illegally in the country? ‘Have at it.’ It is the ultimate example of the ruthless efficiency of Trump 2.0.”
We asked Trump about the portraits on the walls of the Oval Office. Who, we wondered, had a legacy that he himself might like to have? “Ronald Reagan, I like in terms of style. But he was not good on trade—terrible on trade,” Trump replied. We pointed out that Reagan was also far more welcoming of immigrants. “Well, the toughest one in immigration was Eisenhower, believe it or not,” Trump said. “He was tough, and he just didn’t want people to come in illegally, like, you know, me. Well, I’m great on trade.”
Trump has also started talking publicly about running for a third term, which the Twenty-Second Amendment clearly prohibits. This started as joking comments with advisers—before making them, he would sometimes teasingly instruct the sober-minded Wiles, “Susie, close your ears”—but now seems to have become more serious. MAGA acolytes outside the administration have said they’ve been investigating ways of getting around the Twenty-Second Amendment, and an adviser acknowledged that if Trump thought a third term could somehow be made feasible, he would likely consider it.
We asked Trump about a rumor we’d heard that he had tasked his Justice Department with looking into the legality of his running again in 2028. He said he hadn’t, but then seemed to leave open the possibility. Was this the rare democratic norm he was unwilling to shatter? “That would be a big shattering, wouldn’t it?” he mused, laughing. “Well, maybe I’m just trying to shatter.” He noted, twice, that his supporters regularly shout for him to seek a third term, but concluded, “It’s not something that I’m looking to do. And I think it would be a very hard thing to do.” But not, it appears, a hard thing to profit from: The Trump Organization is now selling “Trump 2028” hats.
As a final question during our conversation in March, we asked the president whether he had concerns that his successor will follow his precedent and directly steer the powers of the presidency against his opponents, something he had accused Biden of doing against him. Wasn’t he laying the groundwork for an endless cycle of tit-for-tat retribution?
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve already gone through it,” the president told us. “I got indicted five different times by five different scumbags, and they’re all looking for jobs now, so it’s one of those things. Who would have thought, right? It’s been pretty amazing.”
Three weeks after our initial phone call, the political complexion of the moment seemed to have shifted rather dramatically, and we wondered if that had changed Trump’s thinking. So we called the president’s cellphone, hoping to ask some follow-up questions. He didn’t answer. We left a voicemail.
That night, Saturday, April 12, Trump traveled from Mar-a-Lago to Miami to watch the mixed-martial-arts spectacle of UFC 314. He entered the arena like a conquering general, surrounded by a coterie of Cabinet secretaries and other high-level advisers and officials. The cheers from the adoring fans were uproarious. After some of the fights, the winner would rush to the side of the ring where Trump was sitting, to demonstrate fealty.
When the fights were over, well after midnight, Trump’s motorcade headed back to Air Force One, at the Miami airport. The next morning, one of us awoke to find that, at 1:28 a.m., the president had called, just as the pool report showed he was getting back in his motorcade. He hadn’t left a message. Had he been calling to ask if we’d seen what had transpired—the display of obeisance from these gladiators, and from his base? Or was this merely a late-night pocket dial? His team declined to clarify.
We made another appeal for an in-person interview. Later that day, an aide told us Trump was denying our request. But the rejection came with a message from the president—a message, Trump specified, only for Michael, not Ashley, with whom he was still annoyed. If the article we were working on really told the remarkable story of how he had come back from the political dead, “maybe The Atlantic will survive after all.” As is often the case with Trump, his business advice could also be interpreted as a kind of a threat.
The president had one last message for us. “What can be said?” Trump had instructed his aide to tell us. “I won the election in a landslide, and there isn’t anyone who can say anything about that. What can they write about?”
We thought we’d finished our story. But for Trump, negotiation is a perpetual state, and nine days later, he reversed himself again. We were asked to report to the Oval Office on the afternoon of April 24 for the interview we had first requested two months earlier. Trump also invited the editor in chief of this magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, whom he had recently attacked as a “total sleazebag,” to join the meeting. Then, hours before we arrived, the president announced the interview to the world.
“I am doing this interview out of curiosity,” he wrote on Truth Social, “and as a competition with myself, just to see if it’s possible for The Atlantic to be ‘truthful.’ ” Goldberg, he added falsely, was a writer of “many fictional stories about me.” (Several White House aides, upon reading the message, joked about playing a prank on National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, the official who had accidentally added Goldberg to the Signal chat. “Tell Waltz to go into the Oval,” they dared one another, “but don’t tell him who’s in there.”)
“This will be very, very interesting,” Trump said, by way of greeting us as we approached the Resolute Desk. “You think Biden would do this? I don’t think so.”
In private, Trump often plays against the bombastic persona he projects in larger settings—at rallies, on television, on social media. He was launching a charm offensive, directed mainly at Goldberg. There was none of the name-calling or hostility he regularly levels at our magazine. He boasted about the 24-karat gold leaf he’d had imported from Palm Beach to decorate the Oval Office. “The question is: Do I do a chandelier?” he asked. “Beautiful crystal chandelier, top of the line.”
“I am in the first group, believe it or not,” he said. (This was indeed difficult to believe, we interjected.) “But a lot of people that are in the administration aren’t. They feel that I was really badly treated.” In our presence, he seemed inclined to outsource his retributive id to others. But soon after we left the Oval Office, Trump sought to exact further political revenge on his foes by directing the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the main Democratic fundraising platform.
When we mentioned the turmoil at the Pentagon, including recent reporting that Pete Hegseth had installed a makeup room in the building, the president smiled. “I think he’s gonna get it together,” Trump said of Hegseth. “I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.” Trump also said that Waltz was “fine” despite being “beat up” by accidentally adding Goldberg to the Signal chat. What had Trump told his staff after the controversy? “Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?”
He spoke of his opposition with earnest befuddlement, if not actual pity. “I think that the Democrats have lost their confidence in the truest sense,” he said. “I don’t think they know what they’re doing. I think they have no leader. You know, if you ask me now, I know a lot about the Democrat Party, right? I can’t tell you who their leader is. I can’t tell you that I see anybody on the horizon.”
Trump pushed back on the notion, popular among some Wall Street analysts, that financial turmoil—plummeting markets, the threat of a recession, a weakened dollar—would cause him to roll back his tariff policies. “It always affects you a little bit,” he said, but there’s no red line, no “certain number” at which he would feel compelled to change course.
We asked about the concern that his administration was pushing the country toward authoritarianism, where politicians use the power of their office to punish their enemies for speaking their minds, as Trump was attempting to do to Chris Krebs, Harvard, law firms, universities, and news outlets. He did not answer the question directly, but instead talked about how he’d been wronged.
We pressed further, again bringing up his efforts to deport undocumented immigrants without due process. What would happen, we asked, if his administration accidentally got the wrong person—a legal resident, or even an American citizen? “Let me tell you that nothing will ever be perfect in this world,” he said.
Near the end of the interview, we asked Trump why, given that he’s now definitively won a second term, he can’t just let go of the claim that he won the 2020 election.
The president told us it would “be easier” for him to just accept our assertion. But he couldn’t. “I’m a very honest person, and I believe it with all my heart,” he said. “And I believe it with fact—you know, more important than heart. I believe it with fact.”
“I’d like to say that that is reality,” Trump said. “Probably I do create some things, but I didn’t create that.”
Never mind that the votes had been counted, the court cases concluded. He was still trying to shift perceptions, make a sale, bend the world to his will.
This article appears in the June 2025 print edition with the headline “Donald Trump Is Enjoying This.”
The featured image of this post is a profile in crystal of Kemal Atatürk that sits on my bookshelf as a reminder of my late friend and academic colleague Mehmet Naim Turfan. Naim, like millions of his compatriots, harboured a deep affection and respect for the legacy of Atatürk, the founder of modern Türkiye and its first president. It was gifted to me by His wife soon after his passing by his wife Barbara. His doctoral thesis was published posthumously in 2000 as Rise of the Young Turks: Politics, the Miliary and Ottoman Collapse. He is cited several times in the book that is the subject of this article. I thought of Naim often while reading the book and writing what follows.
Enver Pasha, soldier, politician and member of the troika that ruled the Ottoman Empire before and during WW1
Ottoman Endgame
Many believe that prior to the outbreak of World War 1 in August 1914, Europe had been at peace. In matter of fact, brutal and bloody little wars had raged in Eastern Europe three years prior, whilst Italy fought the Ottoman Empire for Tripoli and Cyrenaica, both now modern Libya and yet also presently two warring parts of a fractured whole and now being triggered by the aftermath of equally nasty little wars in the same lands in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. The Ottoman Empire’s entry into alliance with the Central Powers in 1915 against the Entente of Britain, France and Russia was the direct outcome of what we know refer to generically as The Balkan Wars – which aided and abetted by Russia, saw the emergence of Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. In retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight, they were the beginning of what we might now refer to as The Wars of the Ottoman Succession. They are not over.
The empire’s entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers against the Entente of Britain France and Russia was a devious, drawn-out business as it sought to take advantage of its potential allies in recovering why it lost in the preceding Balkan Wars that had deprived it of its European provinces,
Few have told the story of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of modern Türkiye as well as English historian Sean McMeekin in his geographically sprawling and historically enthralling book The Ottoman Endgame. He juxtaposes military operations in the empire with those on Europe’s eastern and western fronts, demonstrating how, in the shifting fortunes of war in Europe, each impacted the other from the first offensives in France and on the eastern front to the Russian Revolutions of 1917.
Author and journalist Christopher de Bellaigue sets the scene well in a brief but compelling review (published in full below with some excellent pictures, along with a article by the author himself):
”For the historian of the first world war, the Ottoman theatre is a blur of movement compared to the attrition of the western front. Its leading commanders might race off to contest Baku and entirely miss the significance of events in the Balkans, while the diffuse nature of operations tended to encourage initiative, not groupthink. The war of the Ottoman succession, as Sean McMeekin calls it, was furthermore of real consequence, breaking up an empire that had stifled community hatreds, and whose absence the millions who have fled sectarian conflict in our age may rue …
For the Ottomans, the “great war” of western historiography was part of a much longer period of conflict and revolution, and arguably not even its climax. The process started with the collapse of the Ottomans’ Balkan empire – encouraged by Russia, moderated by Britain – and it brought to power the militaristic regime of the Committee of Union and Progress, or CUP. When Turkey entered the European war on 10 November 1914, Ottoman innocence was long gone, the army fully mobilised, the people benumbed by loss and refugees and the empire hanging in the balance. And yet, for the CUP and its triumvirate of leading pashas, the Young Turk troika of Enver, Talat and Djemal, the moment was as fraught with opportunity as it was with danger. On the opportunity side of the ledger was the prospect of riding Germany’s coat tails to victory, overturning the Balkan reverses and winning back provinces in the east from the old enemy, Russia. Enver, the CUP’s diminutive generalissimo, even spoke of appealing to Muslim sentiment and marching all the way to India.
For the Russians, the game was about winning Constantinople (or Tsargrad, as they presumptuously called it) and with it unimpeded access to the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus; it was with “complete serenity”, Tsar Nicholas II informed his subjects, that Russia took on “this ancient oppressor of the Christian faith and of all Slavic nations”
The European war on the eastern and western fronts was characterized by attrition and stalemate, but that waged by the Ottomans and the Russians, and soon, the British and French, was in contrast, highly mobile and constantly shifting, with the exception perhaps of the allied assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula which very soon resembled the trench warfare and brutal but futile offensives that characterized the Western Front. It is difficult to comprehend to scale of the war fought in the Middle East in terms of its territorial extent. From Baghdad to Baku, Gallipoli to Gaza, the Black Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Caspian Sea. It was waged across European and Asian Ottoman lands including present day Greece, Bulgaria and Romania in the west, in the Caucasus in the east, in present day Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan and Iran, and in the south in present day Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and Palestine.
Though the Sultan departed, and with him, the Islamic Caliphate, and most of the empire’s non-Turkish lands – were lost, under the leadership of former Ottoman commander and war hero Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the Anatolian heartland resisted and ultimately repelled invading foreign armies, and the Turkish state he created endures today as an influential participant in world affairs.
Casting new light on old narratives
McMeekin, writes de Bellaigue, is an old-fashioned researcher who draws his conclusions on the basis of the documentary record. In the case of a conflict between Ottoman Turkey and Germany on one side, and Russia, Britain and France on the other, and involving Arabs, Armenians and Greeks, this necessitates linguistic talent and historical nous of a high order. McMeekin is at home in the archives of all major parties to the conflict and his accounts of some of the more contested episodes carry a ring of finality. Access to previously closed Russian and Turkish archives has provided new and potentially controversial insights into accepted narratives regarding the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Challenging long accepted narratives, he addresses three of the most enduring shibboleths of the First World War.
He jumps right in even before he begins his wide-ranging story, leaves hanging in the air like a predator drone until he returns to it in chronologically due course. The Sykes Picot Agreement of 1916 – the bête noir of most progressive narratives of the modern Middle East, and to many ill-informed partisans, the causus bello of the intractable Arab Israeli conflict – was not the brainchild of perfidious Albion and duplicitous France, but rather a plan for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire concocted by the foreign minister of Imperial Russia. France’s Monsieur François-George Picot and Britain’s Sir Mark Sykes played second and third violin to the “third man” Sergei Sazonov. Both Russia and France had for decades sought to establish their political, strategic and economic interests at the expense of the so-called “sick man of Europe”, an ostensibly terminal invalid who throughout the nineteenth century, had experienced many deathbed recoveries. Czar Nicholas II, in common with his Russian Orthodox predecessors, dreamt of bringing Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, the heart of the orthodox patriarchate, or Tsargrad into the empire. It was no coincidence that the infamous Sykes Picot pact was outed by Russia’s Bolshevik regime after the collapse of the Czarist regime to discombobulate the revolution’s foremost European enemies.
The second icon of “received history” in McMeekin’s sights, is one Australia’s foundation stories – the ill-starred Dardanelles Campaign of 1915 and particularly, the the ANZAC’s Gallipoli legend. It was, from McMeekin’s perspective, a misconceived, poorly planned endeavour to capture the Ottoman capital, to relieve pressure on Russian forces engaged in bitter fighting in Eastern Anatolia, and potentially, to knock the Ottomans out of the war. Contrary to popular conceptions, the British were not exactly enthused by the idea. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill’s preference was for an assault on the “soft underbelly” of the empire – the port of Alexandretta in Ottoman Syria (now Turkish Antakya), with its strategic and logistic proximity to the Hijaz railway and the hinterland of the Levant. One indisputable fact about Gallipoli is that it assured the ascent Mustafa Kemal, a key commander who had already distinguished himself in the Balkan Wars, who would go on to conduct a fighting retreat of Ottoman Armies through what is now present-day Palestine and Syria, lead Turkish forces to victory in the war of liberation that followed, and, as Kemal Atatürk, would become the founder of modern Türkiye.
The third widely held narrative concerns the Armenian Genocide. Unlike the rulers of modern Türkiye, McMeekin does not deny its occurrence. Nor does he downplay or even ignore it, as does Israel for the idiosyncratic reason that it potentially minimises the horrors of the Shoah. Rather, he places it in the context of events in the empire’s Anatolian heartland. Two predominantly Armenian provinces in Eastern Anatolia were home to active nationalist independence movements, and these gave tacit and actual support to the Russian forces encroaching on the empire from the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea (in present day Azerbaijan and Georgia). Armenian militias fought alongside Russian forces on the Caucasian front whilst partisans operated behind ottoman lines, and cities, town and villages were actually “liberated”, fostering fears in the Istanbul government of an treasonous” fifth column”. McMeekin acknowledges the death toll of what we now recognise the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity which was spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and implemented primarily through the mass deportation and murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children. Whilst most probably died of inhumane treatment, exposure, privation and starvation, unknown numbers were murdered.
Kemal Pasha and Ottoman offices at Gallipoli
Parallels
Reading The Ottoman Endgame, I was reminded often of his compatriot Anthony Beevor’s harrowing tale of the Russian Revolution (reviewed in In That Howling Infinite’s Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war. That Revolution and the end of the Ottoman Empire converged. McMeekin notes that with regard to the war in Anatolia and the Caucasus, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended the war between Czarist Russia and the Central Powers, was poisoned chalice for both Russia and Turkey and as significant as any of the treaties that followed the end of the war.
I found it fascinating that many individuals who were to play a significant part in the Russian Civil war also feature in Ottoman Endgame. Admiral Alexander Kolchak, commander of the imperial Black Sea fleet and General Anton Deniken, commander of Russian forces on the Caucasian front, became leaders of the Tsarist cause and were to command the counter-revolutionary White forces against the Red Army with the Siberian People’s Army and the Volunteer Army in Ukraine.
None were more prominent or as controversial in western narratives, however, as Winston Churchill. As noted above, McMeekin lays to rest the notion that the Dardanelles campaign and Gallipoli were Churchill’s sole doing and his folly – though he did blame himself later on and has been pilloried for it ever since. Ironically, once disgraced, and having volunteered to serve on the Western Front, at the end of the war, he was brought back into Lloyd George’s cabinet as Secretary of State for War. There, he advised against military intervention against Kemal’s nationalist forces and indeed mused about the option of dumping the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot dispensation imposed on the moribund empire’s Arab provinces after the armistice and of restoring the prewar territorial status quo, a kind of circumscribed Ottoman Redux. And yet, as civil war broke out and spread in the nascent Soviet Union, he was alone of his cabinet colleagues in advocating for a full-on allied intervention. Critics claimed that he dreamt, – though some believed that he fantasized – about of creating an effective White army and a borderlands alliance to defeat the Bolsheviks. But his aspirations were foiled by the imperialism of the White leadership and of White officers, and the various national movements’ fear that that if the Whites prevailed, they would restore Russian rule. Britain’s rulers were reticent about shoring up and providing financial, material support and also, soldiers sailors and airmen to brutal to demonstrably homicidal Cossack brigades and revanchist and reactionary royalist autocrats. It is not without reason that admirers and critics alike would agree that Winston had more positions than the Karma Sutra.
The Russian Revolutions – there were two, in February and October 1917 – and the Civil War that followed it, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire followed by foreign intervention, the war of liberation, and the creation and endurance of Türkiye can be said to have defined the contours of modern Middle Eastern geopolitics, setting the stage for many if not most of the conflicts that have inflicted the region since, including three Gulf wars, the rise and fall of the Islamic State, the Lebanese, Iraqi and Syrian civil wars, and the Arab-Israel conflict, arguably the most intractable conflict of modern times. Cold War and also, the current Ukraine war.
In the wake of the fall of the Russian Empire, the Twentieth Century was not kind to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder called them “the blood lands”. Nor was it kind to the heirs and successors of the Ottoman Empire. Though the tyranny and oppression and the death and destruction wrought by rulers and outsiders upon the lands and peoples of the Middle East has been significantly less than that endured by the people of Eastern Europe and Russia, the region would fit Snyder’s sombre soubriquet.
TE Lawrence, General Allenby, Kemal Ataturk, and Ben Gurion
Clone of Russia returns to a Middle East it never really left
Sykes and Picot have taken the blame but actually it was a Russian who drew the map of the Middle East, writes Sean McMeekin
The World Today, 7 December 2018
To judge from press coverage, the emergence of Islamic State has brought about a cartographic revolution in the Middle East. With the borders of Syria and Iraq in flux, journalists have resurrected the legend of Sykes-Picot, wherein Britain and France are said to have divided up the Ottoman empire between them in an agreement signed 100 years ago, in May 1916. Russia’s intervention in Syria, by upstaging the United States and her allies, seems in this view to be completing the rout of western influence in the Middle East, putting the final nail in the coffin of ‘Sykes-Picot’.
Rarely has history been more thoroughly abused. In reality, none of the contentious post-Ottoman borders of the Middle East was settled by Sykes and Picot in 1916: not the Iraq-Kuwait frontier notoriously crossed by Saddam’s armies in 1990, not those separating the Palestinian mandate from (Trans) Jordan and Syria, not the highly contested and still-in-flux Israeli/Palestinian partition of 1948, nor, in the most relevant example from today, those separating Syria from Iraq.
To take an obvious example from recent headlines, Mosul, the Iraqi city whose capture in June 2014 led Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of Islamic State to proclaim himself Caliph Ibrahim, was actually assigned to French Syria in the 1916 agreement.
Journalists are even more spectacularly wrong in describing the Ottoman partition agreement as exclusively (or even primarily) a British-French affair, omitting the driving role played by Tsarist Russia and her Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazonov.
The final terms of what should more accurately be called the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot agreement were actually hashed out in the Russian capital of Petrograd in the spring of 1916, against the backdrop of crushing Russian victories over the Turks at Erzurum, Erzincan, Batum, and Trabzon (the British were reeling, having been humiliated at Gallipoli and in Iraq, where an expeditionary force would shortly surrender).
The conquest of northeastern Turkey in 1916 left Russia, unlike her grasping allies, in possession of most of the Ottoman territory she was claiming – barring only Constantinople (called ‘Tsargrad’ by the Russians), which still needed to be taken.
At the dawn of 1917, Tsarist Russia was poised to inherit the crown jewels of the Ottoman empire, including Constantinople, the Straits, Armenia, and Kurdistan, all promised to her in the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot Agreement. Along the Black Sea coast, Russian engineers were building a rail line from Batum to Trabzon, with the latter city a supply base for the Caucasian Army, poised for a spring assault on Sivas and Ankara. With Russia enjoying virtually uncontested naval control of the Black Sea, preparations were underway for an amphibious strike at the Bosphorus, spearheaded by a specially created ‘Tsargradskii Regiment’.
After watching her allies try, and fail, to seize the Ottoman capital during the Dardanelles/Gallipoli campaign of 1915 (when Sazonov had first put forward Russia’s sovereign claim on Constantinople and the Straits), Russia was now poised to seize the prize for herself – weather permitting, in June or July 1917.
Of course, it did not turn out that way. After the February Revolution of 1917, mutinies spread through the Russian army and navy, including the Black Sea fleet, just as it was poised to strike.
In a remarkable and little-known coincidence, on the very day the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Government, Pavel Milyukov, first aroused the anger of the Petrograd Soviet and the Bolsheviks by refusing to renounce Russia’s territorial claims on the Ottoman empire – April 4, 1917 – a Russian naval squadron approached the Bosphorus in ‘grand style’, including destroyers, battle cruisers, and three converted ocean liner-carriers which launched seaplanes to inspect Constantinople’s defences from the air. The amphibious plans were not abandoned until fleet commander Admiral AV Kolchak threw his sword overboard on June 21 during a mutiny. Even after ‘revolutionary sailors’ had taken control of the Black Sea fleet, a Russian amphibious strike force landed on the Turkish coastline as late as August 23, 1917, in one last sting by the old Tsargrad beast.
After the Bolsheviks took power, Russia collapsed into civil war, which left her prostrate, at Germany’s mercy. By signing a ‘separate peace’ with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, Russia forfeited her treaty claims to Armenia, Kurdistan, Constantinople, and the Straits, throwing the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 into chaos, even as new claimants were appearing on the scene, such as Italy and Greece – not to mention local actors: Jewish, Arab, and Armenian troops were attached as national ‘Legions’ to General Allenby’s mostly British army as it rolled up Palestine and Syria. These forces, along with French, Italian, and Greek expeditionary forces sent after the war, and the Turkish nationalists who regrouped under Mustafa Kemal in Ankara to oppose them, would determine the final post-Ottoman borders in a series of small wars between 1918 and 1922, with scarcely a nod to the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot Agreement.
While Russia’s forfeiture of her claims in 1918 was welcome, in a selfish sense, to the other players vying for Ottoman territory, it was not necessarily a positive one for the region. In the absence of Russian occupying troops to police the settlement, the
Allies, in 1919, offered Russia’s territorial share, now defined (in deference to Woodrow Wilson) as mandates, to the United States – only for the Senate to vote down the Versailles Treaty, rendering the arrangement moot. Lacking Russian or American troops as ‘muscle’, the Allies leaned on weaker proxies such as the Italians and, more explosively, local Greeks and Armenians, which aroused the anger of the Muslim masses and spurred the Turkish resistance led by Kemal (the future Atatürk). Armenians, Greeks and Kurds, too, could only lament the vacuum left behind by the departing Russians, which left them to face Turkish wrath alone.
Soviet Russia re-emerged as a player in the Middle East fairly quickly, not least as Mustafa Kemal’s key diplomatic partner during his wars against the West and its proxies from 1920-22. In a reminder of the enduring prerogatives of Russian foreign policy, the Cold War kicked into high gear when Stalin made a play for Kars, Ardahan, and the Ottoman Straits in 1946: these moves, along with the British withdrawal from Greece, Turkey, and Palestine, inspired the Truman doctrine.
In an eerily similar replay of the history of 1917-18, the collapse of Soviet power in 1991 led Moscow to turn inward, withdrawing from the Middle East and inaugurating a period of US and western hegemony in the region, which turned out no less well than the Middle Eastern free-for-all of 1918-22. A prostrate and impoverished Russia put up no objection during the First Gulf War of 1991, and did little more than sputter during the Iraq War of 2003. Russia’s recovery of strength and morale in the Putin years led, almost inevitably, to her return in force to the Middle East – from which, in reality, she never truly left.
The Russian return to the region, along with Turkey’s increasingly overt hostility over her Syrian intervention, resurrects historical patterns far, far older than Sykes-Picot. For centuries, the Ottoman empire was the primary arena of imperial ambition for the Tsars, even as Russians were the most feared enemies of the Turks. In many ways, the Crimean War of 1853-56, which saw western powers (Britain, France, and an opportunistic Piedmont-Sardinia) unleash an Ottoman holy war against the Tsar to frustrate Russian ambitions in the Middle East, is a far more relevant analogy to the present crisis in Syria than the pseudo-historical myths of 1916. It is time we put the Sykes-Picot legend in the dustbin where it belongs.
Diplomatic carve-up: the third man
In David Lean’s 1962 film, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, a cynical British official explains how the carcass of the Ottoman Empire was to be divided at the end of the First World War under the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
‘Mr Sykes is an English civil servant. Monsieur Picot is a French civil servant. Mr Sykes and Monsieur Picot met and they agreed that after the war, France and England would share the Turkish Empire, including Arabia. They signed an agreement, not a treaty, sir. An agreement to that effect.’
This summary of wartime diplomacy has proved long-lived. It encapsulates the less than honest dealings of the British government with the Arabs – who wanted independence after being liberated from Turkish domination, rather than rule by the European colonial powers – but it leaves out the key figure in the deliberations, Sergei Sazonov, Russian foreign minister, 1910-1916.
Sazonov was one of the most significant diplomats both before and during the Great War. It was thanks to his adroit manipulation that Britain and its allies came to accept that Russia would gain the Ottoman capital Constantinople, in the event of an Allied victory, an outcome that Britain had tried for decades to prevent.
At the talks in the Russian capital Petrograd in 1916, the British and French emissaries were far lesser agents of empire than their host.
Sir Mark Sykes was a gifted linguist, travel writer and Conservative politician, but no top-flight diplomat. As for François Georges-Picot, he was an experienced diplomat and lawyer and noted advocate for a greater Syria under French rule.
But with France having no troops in the eastern theatre of war, he had to accept Russia’s demand to swallow up large parts of what is now eastern Turkey, but which Paris had set out to claim.
Sykes died of influenza in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference, where Sazanov represented the White Russians. He died in Nice in 1927
Legal Legacy, WordPress August 6, 2016 by rhapsodyinbooks
Czar Nicolas I of Russia is sometimes credited with coining the phrase “Sick Man of Europe” to describe the decrepit Ottoman Empire of the mid-nineteenth century. By the early 20th century, there could be little doubt that the disparaging sobriquet applied in spades. The Ottoman Empire was soundly defeated in two Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913 by the comparatively pipsqueak countries of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia. One result of the wars was that the Empire lost all of its European territories to the west of the River Maritsa, which now forms the western boundary of modern Turkey. Then, when World War I broke out, the Ottomans made the disastrous decision to side with the Central Powers against the Triple Entente, ending up on the losing side of that cataclysm.
A popular theory is that the carving up of the Ottoman lands after the war, pursuant to the Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and Britain, is the source of many of the problems of the current Middle East. In The Ottoman Endgame, Sean McMeekin concedes that it is not wrong to look to the aftermath of the war for the roots of many of today’s Middle Eastern problems, but the “real historical record is richer and far more dramatic than the myth.” For example, the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement was sponsored primarily by Russia, whose foreign secretary, Alexander Samsonov, was the principal architect of the agreement. McMeekin’s retelling of the demise of the Ottoman Empire and its recrudescence as modern Turkey is a fascinating and complicated narrative.
Among the interesting facts McMeekin points out is that according to an 1893 census only 72% of the Ottoman citizens were Muslim, and that in the middle of the 19th century the majority of the population of Constantinople may have been Christian. The Balkan Wars started a trend, exacerbated by World War I, toward ethnic cleansing, with hundreds of thousands of Christians leaving the Empire and similar numbers of Muslims moving from territory lost by the Empire to areas it still controlled.
We in the West tend to think of World War I as a static slugfest conducted in the trenches of northern France. But the war in the East, particularly as it applied to the Ottoman Empire, was a much more mobile affair. In fact, the Ottomans ended up fighting the war on six different fronts, as the Entente Powers invaded them from many different angles.
Winston Churchill in 1914
At the outbreak of WWI, the Ottomans allied themselves with Germany out of fear of Russia, which had coveted control over the straits connecting the Black and Mediterranean seas for centuries. In 1914 the Russians invaded Eastern Anatolia and met with initial success. However, Russia feared its early success was quite precarious, and so it inveigled its ally, Britain, to launch a diversionary assault on the Gallipoli peninsula. The “diversion” became one of the most deadly killing grounds of the war, as the British poured hundreds of thousands of men into the battle in hopes of breaking the stalemate on the Western Front. The author credits Russian prodding more than Winston Churchill’s stubbornness for the extent of the British commitment. The Ottomans, led by Mustapha Kemal (later to be known as Ataturk, the “father of modern Turkey”), prevailed in this hecatomb, showing that there was still plenty of fight left in the “Sick Man.”
Turkish General Mustafa Kemal, Gallipoli, 1915
The Ottomans also soundly defeated the British in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in late 1915, but they were less successful against the Russians, who invaded across the Caucasus and held much of eastern Anatolia until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 caused them to withdraw voluntarily. The British ultimately prevailed against the Ottomans in 1918 by invading from Egypt through Palestine, with a little help from the Arabs of Arabia.
The Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war in Europe in 1919, did not end the war for the Ottomans. The victorious Allies were ready to carve up much of the Empire for themselves. The Ottoman armies were to disband; England was to keep Egypt and to get Palestine and Mesopotamia; France was to get Syria, Lebanon, and parts of modern Turkey; and Greece was to get a large swath of western Turkey. All might have gone according to that plan, but Mustapha Kemal (Attaturk) was still in charge of a small but effective fighting force in central Anatolia. Attaturk husbanded his forces and fought only when he had an advantage. In a war that lasted until 1923, he was able to expel the Greeks from Anatolia and to establish the boundaries of modern Turkey.
McMeekin deftly handles this complexity with a lucid pen. His descriptions of the various military campaigns are riveting. This is not to say that he shortchanges the political machinations taking place. He gives more than adequate coverage to the “Young Turks,” a triumvirate that ruled the Empire from 1909 until they eventually brought it to its ruin in 1919. He also covers the Armenian massacres as objectively as possible, given the enormity of the events described.
Evaluation: This is a very satisfying book and an excellent addition to the enormous corpus of World War I literature. The book includes good maps and photos.
Published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2015
Ah, you loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
L Cohen
The second coming is certainly interesting. President Donald Trump doing everything he said he’d do – in spades.
His proposal for the reconstruction of the destroyed enclave of Gaza is, as Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu says, out of the box. It looks like a case of “you guys have had years to sort this out for yourselves! Now let a very stable genius and the greatest nation in the universe to have a go”.
But is it an imperial tantrum or an actual initiative? As Israeli commentator Alon Pinkas states in the article republished below, it is incomprehensible, impractical, illogical, unviable – and illegal. He writes:
“So what does Trump want? Distraction. He thrives in the chaos and constant distractions he creates … Trump is a preeminent agent of chaos. That’s a trademark he has always paraded, boastfully and defiantly. As he said he would, he is actively generating and promoting chaos in America, discord within alliances, and is out to undermine the world order. Agents of chaos sow chaos. It’s that simple. They instill discordance, confusion, controversy and uncertainty. That’s a modus operandi, not a tailored policy or crisis management technique. Agents of chaos and anarchy are by definition out to disrupt the status quo by floating outrageous ideas, based on a simple principle: Everyone viscerally understands the status quo has exhausted its usefulness, more-of-the-same doesn’t work anymore”.
Juxtaposed to this article, we also republish an opinion piece by British broadcaster and journalist Jonathan Sacerdoti. He reckons that Trump’s proposal is at once breathtaking and groundbreaking. I’d like to have some of what he is smoking! But then again, maybe not …
Trump said in the Oval Office that he wants Palestinians to leave Gaza, and that ideally they would not return to the war-torn region. But the ambitious plan is not about to be implemented. Gazans, who survived 15 months of punishing attacks by Israel, largely don’t want to live in exile, and Trump isn’t going to send US troops to push almost 2 million people out of the Strip. Nor will Egypt and Jordan go along with it, despite Trump’s confidence that their reliance on US aid and military support gives him enough leverage to push them to take in massive numbers of Gazan refugees. For both countries, Trump’s proposal crosses red lines.
It is all probably a ploy to “change the game”, and perhaps, to strong arm the wealthy Gulf Arabs into financing Gaza’s reconstruction – though not a dollar will be offered by anyone until Hamas is out of the picture. As for Jordan and Egypt taking the ejected population, they both depend on US economic and military aid, so there’d be heavy Trumpian pressure on them too, though neither are keen to offer the Gazans a home: from past experience, they have no desire to import potential security threats from thousands of exiled jihadis and their families and hundreds of thousands of traumatized and angry refugees.
Meanwhile, the world justifiably hyperventilates in reaction to Donald Trump’s statement that the United States will “own” a Gaza Strip that has been ethnically cleansed of Palestinians”. Indeed. The left is hysterically outraged and the right hysterically jubilant. There is ignorance on all sides of the land and its people, their history and culture, needs and aspirations, their resilience and determination to have and to hold.
How people, especially in Gaza, can be so glibly reduced to chattels with no history, no identity, no connection to their land. At least no connection as deep as Trump’s connection to real estate. The two property tycoons are advancing the American Dream for Palestinians – nice big houses, well-paying jobs, upward financial mobility – not the Palestinian dream, which is to return home. They are also selling the renovator’s dream for Gaza: a knock-down-rebuild.
For all his talk about his and others’ “humanitarian hearts”, he probably gives little thought to them as human beings – he asks the world to reframe the rubble of Gaza as a real estate opportunity. He has neither empathy for a people nor an understanding of history and probably sees no personal need nor desire for either. He does not get the power and importance of blood and soil, of religious faith, and a people’s attachment to their homeland, be they Arabs or Israelis. Nor does he understand nor care that to many Arabs and Israelis, this, the modern world’s most intractable conflict, is both existential and sacred. For them, it is much, much more than a real estate deal, but part of their lives and their identity. It does not have a monetary value. See the Qatari carton below, hi ‘ashya’ la tushtaraa.
But never mind that. As republican congresswoman and MAGA acolyte Nancy Mace said in support of Trump’s proposal, “let’s turn Gaza into Mar-a-Largo!”
هي أشياء لا تشترى hi ‘ashya’ la tushtaraa Some things are not for sale. Qatari cartoon
Impractical, Incomprehensible, Illegal: Trump Traps Netanyahu and Sows Chaos With U.S. Takeover Plan for Gaza
Trump’s plan for the Gaza Strip that includes the relocation of 2 million Palestinians is not logical or viable. Whether it’s an imperialist tantrum or an actual ‘out of the box’ initiative, there is really no way to endorse, refute or examine it
Ah, you loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
Leonard Cohen
You have to admire the noble attempts to instantly try and make sense of something U.S. President Donald Trump says one day, only to furiously rebuke and deride him the next. Oh wow, the sheer creativity and sublime “out of the box” innovation of proposing to relocate over 2 million Gazans and then “take over Gaza.” Genius.
Makes sense, right? Of course it does, because Gaza truly is uninhabitable. Oh no, but it’s not practical or viable. In fact, it’s incomprehensible.
So what does Trump want? Distraction. He thrives in the chaos and constant distractions he creates. Did he not impose 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and then grant them a 30-day extension since they promised they would do the things they are already doing?
Trump is a preeminent agent of chaos. That’s a trademark he has always paraded, boastfully and defiantly. As he said he would, he is actively generating and promoting chaos in America, discord within alliances, and is out to undermine the world order.
Agents of chaos sow chaos. It’s that simple. They instill discordance, confusion, controversy and uncertainty. That’s a modus operandi, not a tailored policy or crisis management technique. Agents of chaos and anarchy are by definition out to disrupt the status quo by floating outrageous ideas, based on a simple principle: Everyone viscerally understands the status quo has exhausted its usefulness, more-of-the-same doesn’t work anymore.
As for the Israeli-Palestinian issue, the endless, irrelevant and incoherent mumbling about “the two-state solution” is just an exercise in futility. Trump only said what many are thinking, right?
Yet still, you might have missed three critical points in Tuesday’s reality TV sitcomin the East Room of the White House. First, until the United States “takes over Gaza,” the cease-fire and stage two of the hostage release agreement need to continue – otherwise how will the Americans take over Gaza?
Second, the United States is applying “maximum pressure” on Iran to compel it to engage in a new nuclear deal. So, no U.S. war in Iran for the time being.
That’s not a bad harvest for two weeks by the “America First” president of a superpower that has always prided itself on being “a reluctant empire.” Are these imperialist tantrums, common-sense truisms aimed at provoking and stirring emotions, a coherent plan? Or are they just outlandish and left-field comments with a life expectancy of several days at best? It could very well be all of the above.
The realtor-in-chief came up with an amazingly simple idea: empty the Gaza Strip so that reconstruction can begin. This real-estate development process evolved throughout Tuesday. First Trump called it a “demolition site,” repeating things he said a few days earlier about how the devastated-to-rubble Strip was uninhabitable. Then his aides said Gaza effectively required 15 years and billions of dollars for reconstruction, so the Palestinians would have no alternative but to move out. That makes sense when you come from real estate.
By noon, Gaza was a “hellhole,” which means that 2 million Palestinians must quickly move to Egypt and Jordan – who, according to Trump, will agree to accept them.
By late afternoon in the White House, Trump was proclaiming that America will take over and turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” But if the Palestinians are relocated, who will this Mar-a-Gaza be built for? Ah, that’s easy according to Trump: “Palestinians, mostly,” though it would also be “an international, unbelievable place.” So maybe Greenlanders fed up with the cold, or Canadians who want an NHL expansion team in Rafah.
Even if you’re not instinctively dismissive of or resistant to Trump’s idea, the total lack of details and specificity make it impossible to endorse or repudiate.
There is no reference to legal matters: By what power and authority can the United States take over Gaza? Logistics: How do you relocate 2 million people, most of whom may not want to leave? Political: Who will manage this process? Financial: Who will fund this monumental undertaking? Regional: Most Arab countries have already vehemently rejected the idea.
Beyond the intuitive inclination to deride the concept, there is really no way to endorse, refute or examine its feasibility. So here’s the bottom line: Do not try to find logic, coherence or patterns. Just wait a few weeks. It may all change.
What Netanyahu did not get
Throughout his career, Benjamin Netanyahu always followed the sage advice of Yogi Berra: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Years of solipsism, manipulation, deceit, duplicity, confabulation, interpolation and retraction, all woven into a modus operandi that provided him with success.
The indecision-maker would always come up with a speech, delivered with a tormented face and melodramatic baritone, describing the excruciating dilemmas he faced before making no decision. But not making a decision is a decision in and of itself, and he was good at it. Now Trump, for better or worse, is making decisions for him.
Netanyahu’s jig is up. He was nothing more than a prop in the Trump White House show. Trump upended the playing field on Gaza, Iran and everything else. It may not be sustainable, but as of today Netanyahu has to play by Trump’s rules.
Before going to Washington and after his meeting with Trump, he was presented with a fork in the road, a binary choice: desert the hostages, resume a goalless war and save his government in the immediate time frame. Or adhere to the cease-fire agreement he signed, move on to stage two and risk losing his ruling coalition.
Sometimes, making contradictory promises and giving inconsistent assurances is impossible to square. Now Netanyahu will try to market a mirage, according to which he was in on Trump’s plans. Maybe he was.
How does that change the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations? It doesn’t. Can he now annex the West Bank? He cannot. Does it add stability and predictability to relations with the United States? It doesn’t.
So what did Netanyahu get out of his Washington trip? A few days reprieve for his coalition, during which he can persuade them that Trump proved he’ll allow Israel to resume the war. And did Trump do that? No
Some moments in history demand recognition, not just for their weight in the present but for the seismic shifts they herald. The Trump-Netanyahu press conference was one such moment – not a perfunctory diplomatic exercise, nor a routine reaffirmation of alliance, but an unambiguous declaration of intent. It was a disruption of long-entrenched, failed orthodoxies and the unveiling of a vision that dares to reimagine the Middle East in starkly different terms.
For decades, world leaders have clung to exhausted formulas – peace processes built on illusion, agreements predicated on fantasy, and a wilful refusal to acknowledge the fundamental realities of Palestinian rejectionism and terror. That era is now over. Standing together, the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Israel made it unmistakably clear: they are not here to mollify, to equivocate, or to perpetuate the cycles of appeasement that have long defined western diplomacy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict. They are here to reset the board entirely.
Amid the declarations that emerged from this historic moment, one stood above all: Trump’s unequivocal statement that the goal is not to reform Gaza, not to manage it, but to remove its population entirely. No more illusions of Palestinian self-rule, no more diplomatic contortions to accommodate an irredeemable status quo. Trump’s is not another failed experiment in Palestinian self-rule – but a move to dismantle the population that carried out the most brutal attack on Jews since the Holocaust and to relocate them elsewhere.
The gravity of this pronouncement cannot be overstated. As Israeli commentator Amit Segal astutely observed, had the hard-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir proposed such a policy as part of coalition negotiations merely two years ago, it would have ignited an international firestorm. Yet here it was, calmly, deliberately articulated as the official position of the most powerful nation on Earth.
Nor was this an offhand remark – no Trumpian improvisation to be explained away later. The president read from prepared notes, delivering the statement with the deliberation and gravity of a policy long in the making. This was not casual hyperbole, nor an idle provocation; it was a calculated, official pronouncement. It was an act of political theatre designed to break the bubble of denial and intransigence.
But that was only the beginning. Alongside this, Donald Trump laid out an unambiguous multi-part framework: no to a Palestinian state. The old paradigm, a fixture of failed diplomatic orthodoxy, is now irrelevant – a fantasy proven ever more unworkable each time it has been forced into action. Yes to an enduring peace with Saudi Arabia – without Palestinian preconditions. The old linkage between Arab-Israeli normalisation and Palestinian statehood is gone, though the Saudis swiftly denied this. Yes to permanently ending Hamas and ensuring Gaza can never again pose a threat. The destruction will be total. There will be no ‘rebuilding’ for Hamas to rule over, only American led efforts. Yes to stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions – by any means necessary. Iran will be weakened, its regional reach crushed.
This is not a strategy of containment, nor an effort to sustain the perpetual diplomatic holding pattern that has defined western policy for decades. It is a vision of finality – an approach that seeks not to manage conflict but to bring it to a decisive and irreversible conclusion. If Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize less than eight months into his presidency, Trump must surely be worthy just three weeks into his.
Trump’s ability to impose his will upon seemingly intractable situations is no accident. He understands that power is not merely about policy but about the mastery of organised chaos – the capacity to disrupt, to destabilise, and in doing so, to force a new reality into being. He has demonstrated time and again that resistance to his demands – whether from allies or adversaries – eventually bends to his will. Just ask Mexico, Canada, or the growing list of others. The question, therefore, is not whether this plan is feasible. The question is how long it will take before the world accepts that it is already in motion. Trump’s pronouncement is the emperor’s new clothes of Middle Eastern geopolitics: a reality that exists the moment he dares to name it.
Trump is set now to meet with Egypt’s President and Jordan’s King – two leaders whose cooperation will be critical in reshaping Gaza’s fate. These are not symbolic meetings. They show the seriousness of his intent, and are part of a rapidly unfolding strategy. If past is prologue, their initial resistance will give way to accommodation.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu stood beside Trump not as a mere ally but as a statesman fully aligned with the vision before them. He was not a leader reacting to a surprise American policy shift, but the co-architect of a new regional order. Together, these two men have already upended decades of Middle Eastern diplomacy with the Abraham Accords. What they now propose is even more ambitious.
Furthermore, by means of yet another executive order, Trump gave a forceful rejection of longstanding UN biases against Israel, removing financial and diplomatic support from institutions that have systematically worked against Israel’s legitimacy on the world stage. He cut all US funding to UNRWA, citing its infiltration by designated terrorist groups and the involvement of its employees in the 7 October attack. This move effectively ends American financial support for an agency long accused of fostering anti-Israel narratives and aiding Palestinian terrorism. The order also withdraws the United States from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), halting American participation in a body that has consistently shielded human rights abusers while disproportionately targeting Israel. In addition, the US will conduct a review of its membership of UNESCO, withholding its share of funding and assessing the body’s history of anti-Israel bias, including its efforts to erase Jewish historical ties to significant sites like the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.
Trump’s vision will terrify those who have grown comfortable with the status quo. It will unsettle those who prefer diplomatic inertia to hard truths. And it will enrage those who have built careers, reputations, and fortunes upon the perpetuation of the unsolvable. But what he and Netanyahu propose is not reckless; it is reality-based. It acknowledges the unspeakable truth that policymakers have long whispered but never dared articulate: that Gaza, under its current governance and population, is a failed experiment that cannot be salvaged.
Ever the salesman, Trump frames this all as an opportunity for Gazans to build peaceful, prosperous lives – just somewhere else. Many will recoil at the audacity of this proposition. But is it not more audacious to continue pretending that Palestinian self-rule in Gaza can exist without terror, that this small strip of land under continued Palestinian rule can be anything other than a launchpad for perpetual war?
History will remember this moment not merely for what was said, but for what it signified: the point at which two leaders, long derided by their critics, once again proved that their vision is neither naïve nor impractical, but bold, comprehensive and daring.
Jonathan Sacerdoti (born 1980) is a British broadcaster, journalist, and TV producer. Born in London, his father was a Holocaust survivor, and his grandfather had been an Italian Rabbi.
“America is in a mess. We need someone to clean it up. And his name is …”
So run the opening titles of Tim Robbin’s’ 1992 satire Bob Roberts. In a dark case of life imitating art, the story of a Wall Street millionaire who begins his political career as a reactionary folk singer foreshadows the rise of a uniquely American autocrat who channels the pain and anger of millions who feel that they’ve been left behind. The eponymous Bob Roberts is portrayed as a rightwing Bob Dylan, right down to a parody of the famous Subterranean Homesick Blues story boards to the iconoclastic song Times are a’changin’ … Back. Read a 2020 retrospective of this prescient film HERE. [From In That Howling Infinite‘s Deconstructing Donald – translating Trumpspeak]
Fast track to the present day as second coming began with a barnstorming inaugural address:
“ … the United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons [and] will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars”.
In a pugnacious declaration of American exceptionalism and, dare we say it, Magafest Destiny, he said: “Nothing will stand in our way because we are Americans, the future is ours, and our Golden Age has just begun.”
His first press conference followed shortly afterwards as he signed off on a plethora of executive orders and bantered with the assembled Fourth Estate. Apart from his customary vindictiveness, grievance-driven musings and hyperbole, he was clearly in good humour, folksy even. We were, against our better instincts, bemused, amused, entertained even.
Whatever comes next – and the hectic events of the last fortnight have provided many clues. Along with the name “Gulf of Mexico”, it’s out with the old and in with the new. Tech billionaire Elon Musk has moved into the White House as the new power behind the throne; the purge of public servants and the deportation of illegal migrants have begun; foreign aid is suspended; and “woke” programmes and pronouns are cactus. Panama and Greenland are on the president’s shopping list, and the trade wars are now on: “This will be the golden age of America,” Trump posted on his Truth Social account. “Will there be some pain? Yes, maybe (and maybe not!) But we will make America great again, and it will all be worth the price that must be paid.”
America made its choice – most, for quite understandable reasons that have little to do with populism, racism, fascism or in fact any of the other “isms’ that are tossed about like confetti at a wedding – and must live with it.
Meanwhile there’s predictable faux panic on the left, in Australia and elsewhere, as armchair and keyboard warriors whinge from the sidelines with the same old discussions, the same old articles, serviced by the same bias-confirming algorithms, denigrate and demean America and Americans, and endeavour to tar our own ostensibly “trumpian” conservatives with the same tired brush. Countless social media memes and comments about American stupidity illustrate how out of touch, self-righteous, arrogant and morally “superior” many of the so-called “left” have become. But while they may derive some vicarious satisfaction from their predictable put-downs, they are just pissing in the wind.
America made its choice – most, for quite understandable reasons that have little to do with populism, racism, fascism or in fact any of the other “isms’ that are tossed about like confetti at a wedding – and must live with it. The march to the “right side of history” has turned out just to be to the right. And there’s nothing we can about it. As a Facebook friend commented recently, ” … it’s like watching the Titanic sail away knowing it’s going to sink, but the details of where and when are unknown. But it keeps our old brains active”.
It’s not that people are unaware of Trump’s faults. They harbour no illusions that he will behave any better this time around. They know he will never change; he is erratic, unhinged and foments chaos; he is arrogant, has no sense of history, and is completely transactional. He never apologises, recants or retreats. He never expresses regret for his actions. When under attack for scandalous behaviour or abuse of power, Trump has one playbook: deny, denounce, discredit, defame.
Even dyed-in-the-wool conservatives acknowledge this. Former Australian attorney general George Brandis wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on 18 November:
“… the sheer weirdness of Donald Trump himself: narcissistic, vulgar, bombastic, mendacious, idiosyncratic, outrageous; while at the same time flamboyant, mesmerising and on occasions very funny. He broke every rule, told every lie, did the unthinkable, said the unsayable and still came up … (you complete the pun). The epic unconventionality of Trump’s campaign dramatised a result that would probably have been the same had the Republican candidate been less unorthodox. For that reason, the outcome is fertile ground for over-interpretation and exaggeration”.
Commentators and author Troy Branston wrote in The Australian, on 9th November 2024: “It’ll be a wild four years with Trump back in power. He remains a despicable and disgusting man devoid of integrity and ethical values, is boorish, moronic, and unstable, and I fear, by a narrow margin, Americans have made the wrong decision. But it a decision that they must live with we must accept”.
We are on the threshold of a consequential four years. Like it or not, we are in interesting times.
From time to time, I republish articles by News Ltd commentators that I believe are worth sharing with those who cannot scale the News paywall – and those who, out of misguided principle, refuse to read articles by its more erudite and eloquent contributors. This, by The Australian’s Greg Sheridan, is one of those.
We published a similar piece exactly six years ago at the commencement of Trump’s first term:The Ricochet of Trump’s Counter-revolution. Back then, we were unsure what the next three years would bring. This time around, we probably have a good idea, and it’s likely to be a wild ride for America and also the world.
I find it hard to tell you, ’cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles, it’s a very very mad world
Trump remakes America with a revolution in common sense
Greg Sheridan, The Australian 25 January 2025
Boom. Boom. Boom. The second presidency of Donald Trump burst like a clap of thunder across the whole American nation, across the whole world.
Here is the Donald in unimagined glory, the victor of all he surveys, not just embarking on the latest unbelievable chapter in a completely unbelievable American life, from reality TV to the White House, via porn star dalliances, assassin’s bullets and politicised felony convictions that voters rightly ignored, but promising the very reinvention, the historic renewal, of America itself.
It’s a scene with biblical resonance.
But is Trump a modern Moses leading his people into the promised land? Or is he the Apocalypse? It’s too early to tell, but the blizzard of activity in Trump’s first few days demonstrates he is changing America, probably fundamentally. As with all things Trump, there will be good and bad, courageous and cringeworthy, inspiring and implausible.
The dangers are manifold: that Trump goes too far; that his administration is ill-disciplined if not incoherent; that the opposition in the courts and Democrat-controlled states frustrates his program; that he ignores the law; that he confuses personal profit with public policy; that America’s adversaries, wise to Trump this time, less intimidated by his bluster, refuse him the deals he wants, the deals he needs; that the meanness inherent in parts of Trump’s program becomes exaggerated or dominant; that he encompasses some monumental blunder.
But the promise is also manifold: that Trump unleashes the entrepreneurial spirits of the American economy; that the US military streaks ahead of the rest, providing unassailable deterrence; that the US sets up a huge lead in artificial intelligence and other areas of hi-tech; that America leads the West out of the debilitating ideologies of self-hatred and identity politics that grip the Western academy; that race is delegitimised as a central feature of Western politics and culture; that inflation is slayed; that bureaucracy is tamed, government spending reduced; that deregulation liberates business and slashes costs.
The frisson of danger that always accompanies Trump is palpable. It’s tied up not only with Trump’s personality but with his essential modus operandi. Everything is psycho-drama. Everything is a deal. So everything is unpredictable. Positions that seem solid, change in a minute, sacrificed as leverage in a deal. Strategic unpredictability can be an asset in negotiation, but as former diplomat Peter Varghese has argued, strategic unpredictability can easily become strategic unreliability.
To take one relatively minor example, Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance, a few days before the inauguration, said any of the January 6, 2021, rioters who had attacked police wouldn’t be pardoned. Then Trump pardoned them anyway, saying they’d been in jail long enough. Vance surely had spoken to Trump before he made his public comments. Trump presumably was undecided until the last minute, characteristically. He certainly wasn’t fussed about embarrassing Vance.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his wife Jeanette AFP
Still, stepping back from the sheer volume and speed of action in the first days, you can see that Trump’s election, notwithstanding the new/old President’s many foibles, represents a characteristic American response to perceived decline and stagnation. The old left liberal orthodoxy that was strangling America, its economy and its society, just as it’s strangling Europe and even Australia, just wasn’t working. Everyone could see that except left-liberal ideologues. Crime. Homelessness. Skyrocketing energy prices. Uncontrolled illegal immigration. These things were a mess.
No nation suffers paradigm paralysis less willingly than the US. If things really aren’t working, its voters have a visceral reaction: throw the bums out! And if the next lot don’t work, throw them out too.
Often the US has looked permanently crippled by its internal difficulties – after the civil war in the 19th century, or the savage internal polarisation over Vietnam in the 1960s, or the stagflation of the ’70s. But every time, America comes roaring back.
Is it roaring back now? America certainly has profound social problems – drug abuse, especially fentanyl, gun violence, homelessness, inner-city crime, obesity. Ruinous inflation. But never forget the incredible American achievement.
Psychologist Jordan Peterson claimed recently that by the end of 2024, the poorest US state, Mississippi, was richer than the richest province of social democratic Canada, after a decade of enlightened left-liberal incompetence and ideological posturing from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The poorest American state enjoys a higher per capita income than Britain or France. The US is about $US30,000 ($47,700) richer per head than Canada, about twice as rich per capita as the EU. Even when America is doing poorly, it’s doing better than almost everybody else. Nonetheless, America has dangerously lost much of its manufacturing industry. In today’s militarily fraught environment, that’s dangerous.
A homeless encampment in San Francisco. Getty Images
But the modern world was still made in America – from Silicon Valley to Hollywood, from Pulitzer prizes to nation-shifting podcasts, from the internet to space travel. So while left-liberal formulas are failing, Trump inherits an America still possessed of profound strengths. Nonetheless, he’s going to change its direction and, if he can, its character. He’s attacking every issue with frightening energy.
His first week was political shock and awe: dozens of presidential executive orders; two states of emergency, energy and the southern border; two big international withdrawals, from the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organisation; a string of important appointments; a half-trillion-dollar AI investment announcement; the establishment of a new agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, to slash government spending; and the greatest repudiation of racial preferences by abolishing every program of the federal US government implementing or promoting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Trump gave us real actions in a dizzy range of policy areas. These include: the economy, including tariffs, energy policy, climate change, tax cuts, deregulation; foreign policy, including China, Russia, Israel and the Middle East; immigration, especially the southern border; and every aspect of identity politics, to promote “a colourblind society based on merit”.
It’s a cultural revolution, perhaps as Tesla boss and Trump bestie Elon Musk, head of DOGE, claimed, “a fork in the road of human civilisation”.
There will be plenty of resistance, even if Democrats rightly feel like idiots at the moment, demoralised at their loss, stunned at the people’s rejection, humiliated that the majority did not regard Trump in anything like the lurid light that Democrats had painted for eight years.
Nonetheless, although Trump’s victory was clear, it was relatively narrow. Trump got 77.3 million votes to Kamala Harris’s 75 million. That’s good but not landslide territory. He won 49.8 per cent of a relatively low turnout to Harris’s 48.3 per cent. Trump didn’t win a majority of the popular vote as George W. Bush did in 2004.
The result was, in the prescient phrase of former Trump campaign manager and adviser Kellyanne Conway, a “narrow landslide”.
Trump won all the battleground states, but narrowly. If Harris had won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, she would be president. She lost those states respectively by 120,000, 80,000 and 29,000. So if just 115,000 votes in three key states, out of a total of more than 155 million votes cast, had gone the other way, the Trump revolution would be just one of the ghostly ifs of history.
None of this diminishes Trump’s victory. Given everything thrown against him, it was a magnificent triumph. But America is still a 50-50 nation. Trump will need to score successes that affect people’s lives to cement his political revolution. Just as conservatives were energised by Joe Biden’s appalling presidency, radical activists will be motivated to oppose Trump. Though not just yet, perhaps.
What do Trump’s early actions tell us about how he’ll govern? Stylistically, they’re revealing. This will be a personalised presidency where all big policy issues are deals, supervised by the President.
Some specific policies are clear. Trump will secure US borders. The American people want that. He says he will deport people who are in the US illegally. That’s more than 12 million people. He can’t physically deport that many. But he can deport a lot if he wants to.
Barack Obama, liberal hero, deported hundreds of thousands of people every year. That’s what it means to enter the US illegally. You don’t have the right to be there. If Trump concentrates on illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes, and the more than a million who have been ordered to be deported but have not actually been removed, that’s likely to maintain strong support.
US Customs and Border Protection officers. AFP
For the moment, Trump has stopped all refugee arrivals. That surely must be temporary. Attempting to end automatic citizenship for babies born in the US appears unconstitutional. The constitutional amendment was first introduced to allow slaves and ex-slaves to become citizens. That will be fought legally.
Energy policy is clear. Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, ended federal mandates for electric vehicles and reversed every one of Biden’s multitudinous executive orders restricting fossil fuel exploration and exploitation. During the election, Harris did not campaign on climate change at all. This issue could be gone for the left.
Most politicians try to sniff the breeze. Some politicians make the weather. Trump is doing this, perhaps literally and figuratively, on climate change and energy. His administration will promote the use of every source of energy – oil, gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar – everything altogether all at once. There will be a lot of legal battles but the direction is clear. And the US taxpayer won’t contribute a dime to green energy funds.
There are only a couple of nations formally outside the Paris Agreement. But Trump’s action demolishes global climate plans as they exist and demonstrates the extreme folly of the Albanese government bankrupting our economy to pursue the fantasy chimera of net zero.
Most developed nations have substantially deindustrialised because of crazy net-zero targets and the consequent spiralling costs of energy. This week’s Spectator magazine contains a mournful essay outlining the process in Britain. A recently returned European diplomat observes to me that climate action and green energy policies have damaged German industry more than the Royal Air Force did in World War II.
Trump won’t let this happen in America. Further, the big greenhouse gas emitters, whose emissions are growing most strongly, are not developed economies but nations such as China, India, Indonesia and so on. These nations are part of the Paris accords but don’t face any serious burdens under them. They use every source of energy they can.
The US Mexico border at El Paso, Texas. AFP
With the US effectively joining them, it’s the failing economies of Europe, and not much better performing Australia, that look out of touch with reality and committed to self-destruction. Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are both right to say Australia can’t exit Paris like the US has done. This would be to become a target. It should instead do what so many do: stay notionally in Paris but maintain the economy anyway with traditional energy sources. And it should embrace nuclear.
Trump wants to cut taxes and attract foreign investment into the US. None of this foreign investment will hesitate for a nano-second because of ethical concerns about climate. Trump will face his greatest opposition in the courts, from some Democrat states such as California; and, if Republicans lose congress in two years, from congress as well.
On tariffs, Trump is still a mystery. He says punitive tariffs may begin against Canada and Mexico in a week or two. He’s unhappy that they let too many people, and too much fentanyl, cross into the US. Such tariffs would devastate Mexico and Canada. The slight delay seems to be an invitation to their governments to make him an offer he can’t refuse.
He has delayed the giant tariffs he was planning on China even further. Though Trump said he would impose such tariffs, it’s clear they were always essentially a bargaining ploy. He’s open to deals.
Trump offered actions and indications of direction on the Middle East, Russia and China. The actions are unified by Trump’s deal-making and by his America first predilections, but they can’t be connected by coherent policy otherwise.
On the Middle East, he forced a welcome ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. If Hamas comes back to dominate Gaza, Trump will likely back Israel if it decides it must resume military action.
Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in 2018. AFP
On Russia, Trump wants a deal. However bad it is in principle, in that Ukraine should not have had to give up any territory, in reality the shape of the deal is obvious. Russia gets to keep the Ukrainian territory it has already conquered and Ukraine gets genuine security guarantees – if not NATO membership, perhaps the presence of British and French troops on its soil.
Trump began by hectoring Russia’s Vladimir Putin, saying he was destroying Russia and waging a ridiculous war. He threatened more sanctions if Putin didn’t make a deal. That seems a hollow threat but Trump’s deals typically begin with a lot of bluster. Trump wants this deal very badly.
On China, Trump has sent mixed and confusing signals. His decision to save TikTok is extremely perplexing. Congress passed legislation to force TikTok to sever its connection with its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or cease operations in the US. Trump has delayed enforcement of this law, and that in itself seems highly dubious legally. Trump also says he would accept a deal in which the US, whether government or private companies, owned 50 per cent of TikTok. But that would still be in breach of the law, which Trump himself called for way back in 2020, and would not stop China from harvesting all the user data from TikTok.
As a result of Trump’s stay of execution, TikTok has been lavishing praise on him. That’s pretty dubious from every point of view.
Trump has appointed genuine and profound China hawks such as new Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elbridge Colby, the new Under Secretary of Defence for Policy at the Pentagon. But he also has appointed business-as-usual types to Treasury. Similarly, he has talked of wanting to visit China soon, which would seem unlikely if he’s levying punishing tariffs. The best you can say is that China policy is a movable feast, likely to harden over the course of Trump’s presidency, as it did during his first term.
Trump wants to renovate, modernise and expand American power. He’s greatly drawn to tariffs and economic sanctions as his “hard” power tools of choice. He’s pro-business, pro-hi tech, pro-patriotic and in alliance with many good forces in US society. And of course, he has his dark side and his share of very bad hangers-on.
History has often used much worse men than this to conduct necessary national renovations. Trump is planning to reinvent himself and reinvent America. The world awaits the reinvention.
In December, In That Howling Infinite published Syria. Illusion, delusion and the fall of tyrants, an analysis of the downfall of the Assad dynasty. It observed: “…the immediate future is far from clear. It is axiomatic to say that most commentators who say they understand what is going to happen in the Levant often don’t. To quote B Dylan, something’s happening, and we don’t yet know what it is … Syria now pauses at a crossroads, where both hope for a better future, and skepticism that it will be achieved, are equally warranted. Whether or not the new Syrian regime can succeed is an open question”.
Syria’s political transition is literally a regime change: not simply the switching out of personalities on the throne, but a total philosophical and conceptual reordering of governance. Maybe it’s not the wind of freedom that is blowing through the streets of Damascus.
Russian-oriented media platforms like RT and Mint have been saying for two months now that despite their friendly noises, including pragmatic contacts with western countries like the USA, Britain and France that once treated the Assad regime as a pariah and also regarded Hayat al Tahrir al Shams as a terrorist outfit, and wealthy Gulf states that had only just made up with the old regime, whilst hedging on the thorny issue of relations with Turkey and Israel on the one hand, and former enables of the regime, Russia, Iran and even Hezbollah, on the other, Syria’s new rulers are Islamists at heart and will soon show their true colours.
Maybe they have a point …
In late December, Obaida Arnout, a spokesperson for the Syrian transitional government, said that women’s “biological and physiological nature” rendered them unfit for certain governmental jobs, sparking demonstrations in Damascus and other cities. At a press conference, the new Syrian leader asked a female reporter to cover her hair. There are reportsthat the new authorities are purging the school curriculum of pre-Islamic history and content deemed contrary to Islamic strictures. Before Christmas, foreign jihadis allied to Hayat al Tahrir al Sham torched a Christmas tree in Hama, leading to protests by Syrian Christians.
Syria’s de facto ruler Ahmed al Shara’a declared that free elections could be four years away, and in late January, seven weeks after he led the rebel offensive that overthrew Bashar al-Assad. he was named president for the “transitional period“. Rebel military commander Hassan Abdul Ghani also announced the cancellation of Syria’s 2012 constitution and the dissolution of the former regime’s parliament, army and security agencies, according to the Sana news agency. As president, Sharaa would form an interim legislative council to help govern until a new constitution was approved, he said. Meanwhile, he added, all rebel groups which opposed Assad in the 13-year civil war would be dissolved and integrated into state institutions.
This may provie difficult if not impossible. in the north, Turkish proxy forces battle with Kurdish forces in semi-autonomous Rojava. in the south, rebel militias oppose the imposition of HTS authority. In the west, Alawite militias who supported the Assads engage in firefights with HTS. In the east, meanwhile, the Americans bombing surviving pockets of Islamic State fighters who may be encouraged by the chaos to stage a jailbreak of tens of thousands of jihadis held in camps guarded by the embattled Kurds.
Maybe it’ll be business as usual in the middle eastern axis of awful. It may be the wind of freedom that is blowing, but then again, maybe not. So far so bad …?
Women in Damascus celebrate the fall of the Assad regime
Fears Syria is the next Mid-East humanitarian nightmare
Henry Ergas, The Australian, December 13, 2024.
To describe the current Syria situation as combustible is consequently an understatement.
No one mourns the wicked, says the song. But, while the end of Bashar al-Assad’s blood-soaked rule is undoubtedly welcome, his overthrow is not likely to solve Syria’s crippling problems.
That Syria’s descent into a murderous civil war was partly triggered by economic factors is clear. Far-reaching land reforms in 1958 and 1962-63 created a vast number of small to very small farms, which accounted for 60 per cent of all agricultural holdings but only 23 per cent of cultivated land. That structure was always precarious; what destroyed it was a trebling in Syria’s population.
With inheritance laws subdividing those holdings as more and more sons survived into adulthood, the marginal farms, which accounted for the bulk of agricultural employment, became completely unviable. Steadily worsening water shortages, culminating in a disastrous drought from 2005 to 2010, then delivered the final blow, precipitating a flight to the cities, particularly from the Sunni areas, that left many rural villages without young men.
But Syria’s heavily regulated, corruption-ridden economy could scarcely absorb the inflow, so more than half of those young men became unemployed, eking out tenuous livelihoods in illegally built complexes on the urban fringes.
People gather to celebrate in Umayyad Square on December 11, 2024
None of that would have provoked the civil war had the rural collapse, and the subsequent rise in poverty, not aggravated deep-seated ethnic and religious conflicts. Exactly like Lebanon and Iraq, the country that gained independence in 1946 was a state without a nation. Nor were there any broadly shared goals or ideas that could shape a unifying national identity.
The extent of the differences became obvious in 1954, when a Sunni-dominated government enacted centralising laws that sparked a Druze revolt. The revolt was quickly suppressed but the inability to define a workable balance between the conflicting groups fuelled six military coups in rapid succession.
It was only in 1966, when the Baath (Resurrection) party seized power, and then in 1970, with the so-called Corrective Revolution, which vested undivided power in Hafez al-Assad, that a degree of stability prevailed. The Baath had secured just 15 per cent of the vote in 1963, the last more or less free election; but, at least initially, it managed to coalesce a viable, if never broad, base of support.
At the heart of that support was the army, whose officer corps, like the Baath, was dominated by Alawites, who replaced the Sunnis decimated in the military purges that followed the coups and countercoups of the previous decade. Complementing that core was a tidal wave of Baathist patronage as sweeping nationalisations in 1964-65 and a 20-fold increase in the size of the public service – enacted in the name of “the scientific Arab way to socialism” – politicised employment decisions.
There is, however, no doubt that the Sunnis, who derived few benefits from that patronage, were left behind, at a time when Islamic fundamentalism was gaining lavish funding from the newly wealthy petro-monarchies. Although a shadowy battle between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood had raged for some years, the Hama revolt in 1982 proved the key turning point.
Suppressed in a sea of blood, the revolt of Hama’s Sunnis induced Assad to rely even more heavily on a pervasive security apparatus manned by Alawites and controlled by members of his family: of the 12 key officers who ran the military-security complex between 1970 and 1997, seven were linked to Assad by blood or marriage.
That pattern persisted when Bashar al-Assad acceded to the presidency in 2000. By then, however, the transition from “Arab socialism” to an especially degenerate form of crony capitalism had made the cracks in the regime’s foundations ever more glaring.
To begin with, because the Sunni birthrate was much higher than that of the ethnic and religious minorities, the minorities’ share of the Syrian population was a third lower than in 1980, narrowing the regime’s power base, heightening its paranoia and increasing its dependence on outside support (which eventually came from Iran and Russia).
At the same time, the growing concentration of young, unemployed Sunni men in the major towns created an immensely receptive audience for radical imams, who – repeating the Al-Jazeera sermons of Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheik Youssef al-Qaradawi – denounced the Alawites as “even more defiled than the Jews”.
It is therefore no accident that it was a broadcast by al-Qaradawi, calling, on March 25, 2011, for an uprising to root out the unbelievers, that transformed highly localised demonstrations into a national civil war.
Retracing that civil war’s history would take too long. What matters is that each of its many protagonists sought to create a safe base for its constituency by ruthless ethnic cleansing.
The regime readily accepted – when it did not force – the displacement of some eight million people, mainly Sunnis, out of its area of control. That not only removed potential adversaries; it also allowed the regime, through a special law passed in mid-2018, to expropriate the displaced, reselling their assets (at bargain basement prices) to its Alawite, Christian and Druze supporters. That those minorities, which effected much of the regime’s dirty work, feel threatened by the victims’ return is readily understandable.
Nor was the ethnic cleansing any less brutal in the areas controlled by the regime’s Islamist opponents. In Turkish-controlled Afrin, for example, where Kurds previously comprised 90 per cent of the population, there are virtually no Kurds left, as Turkey’s military has replicated the “demolish and expel” strategy it implemented in Turkish-occupied Cyprus. To make things worse, it has, in what were relatively secular regions, enforced conformity to Islamic precepts to an extent unthinkable in Turkey itself.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham chief Ahmed al-Sharaa
Equally, in Idlib, which is governed by HTS (the Movement for the Liberation of the Levant), Christians, who were treated as dhimmis, have fled, as have any surviving Alawite, Ismaili and Yazidi “heretics”. Ahmed al-Sharaa, who heads HTS, presents himself as a technocratic nation-builder; the reality is that he never abandoned his jihadi outlook, reined in the Islamist fanaticism of HTS’s followers or relaxed the sharia-inspired prohibitions that dominate Idlib’s daily life.
Far from being a model of modernity, Idlib under Sharaa (who has reverted from Abou Mohammed al-Jolani to his original name) closely resembles Gaza under Hamas – an authoritarian, Islamist enclave that survives by diverting humanitarian assistance to fund HTS’s operations. There is every reason to fear Sharaa will try to take Syria down that road, provoking (in a repeat of the Iraqi scenario) a renewed conflict with the former regime’s supporters, as well as with the US-backed Kurds.
To describe the current situation as combustible is consequently an understatement. And it is an understatement too to say that Israel’s precautionary measures, which include strengthening its grip on the Golan Heights, are eminently rational.
Of course, that won’t stop the UN, and Australia with it, condemning the Israeli moves, while staying mum about Turkey’s expansion of its so-called “self-protection zone” in Syria and its indiscriminate bombing of Kurdish villages. But if the Syrian tragedy has a lesson, it is this: in the Arab Middle East, with its deep hatreds, long memories and searing fractures, only sheer power counts. To believe anything else is just a childish fantasy
The Gaza quagmire is a forever war without winners but with the ceasefire yet to go into effect, if indeed it actually happens, Hamas and its supporters are already declaring victory. As the ceasefire was announced, senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya responded by praising the October 7 massacre as a major achievement that would be taught with pride to future generations of Palestinians. He went on to say that the next step is to rid Jerusalem of all Jews. In Gaza, fighters are openly displaying weapons and firing off “Happy shots” into the air accompanied by the takbirs of cheering onlookers. There are celebrations in the West Bank and in Teheran and Kabul whilst social media resounds with triumphalism by Muslims and western progressives alike. Critics argue that as the deal doesn’t require Hamas to be dismantled. this “victory” sets Gaza and Hamas up for the next war.
Commentator Armin Rosen wrote in Unherd on 18 January:
“Hamas’s reaction to the ceasefire agreement, with its leaders celebrating amid devastation, raises fundamental questions about the meaning of victory. Are wars still won by the usual measures of blood and territory, or is victory now more notional and slippery, a condition existing in the mind above all? Given the sheer scale of destruction over the past year, it seems crass for either side to claim victory. And as one Israeli official told me in early 2024: “You have won when no one has to ask whether you have won or not.”
An end to the war is a long way off and a long-term peace agreement of any kind between Israel and the Palestinians remains a hope and a dream, and in this long and bitter conflict hopes and dreams have so often ended in nightmares. The prospective ceasefire will bring relief and also, grief, to both Israelis and Palestinians, but a large majority of each, in their post-October 7 world, see the conflict as a zero-sum game with no end to it except victory for their side.
If this is a victory, we’d hate to see what defeat looked like.
We republish below an appraisal of the circumstances that have produced the prospective ceasefire at this particular stage in the present conflict and including the realities of multiple battlefields and the wider regional and global events that have compelled it.
For its part, Israel is victorious on the battlefield – and recognition of that probably accounts for the willingness on both sides to negotiate a ceasefire.
Politicians in Washington are indulging in a certain amount of unseemly grandstanding about who deserves credit for the Gaza ceasefire, provisionally agreed in Qatar this week and announced on Thursday. Outgoing US President Joe Biden boasts of his patient diplomacy through 15 months of war. President-elect Donald Trump touts his threat of “all hell to pay” if Hamas does not free its hostages before his inauguration on Monday (Tuesday AEDT), and the role his newly appointed envoy, Steve Witkoff, played in clinching the agreement.
Netanyahu meets US President-elect Donald Trump’s Mideast envoy Steve Witkof
These claims are, of course, exaggerated and wildly premature. This is a complex three-stage ceasefire agreement, only the first stage of which has been approved, and whose implementation will be extraordinarily contentious and difficult. The political pointscoring also obscures the military facts on the ground that drove the deal, which resulted less from deft diplomacy than from brutal battlefield reality.
That reality is obvious if we consider that only two of the principals who were in office when the war began will be alive still and in power when any ceasefire takes effect: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yemen’s Ansarallah (Houthi) leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi.
Hamas military commander Yayha Sinwar has been killed, wounded by an airstrike then finished off, live on social media, by an Israeli first-person-view drone in October. His counterpart, Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh, also is dead, assassinated by Israel in Tehran in July.
Slain Hamas military commander Yayha Sinwar. AFP
Many other senior Hamas commanders are dead, as is Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, killed in an airstrike that collapsed his headquarters last September.
Nasrallah’s successor, Hashem Safieddine, died days later in another Israeli strike, along with Hezbollah’s intelligence chief, Hussein Hazimah. Dozens of other Hezbollah leaders were killed, thousands wounded and Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amini, blinded in an earlier Israeli covert operation that concealed explosives in pagers and radio transceivers.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a Hezbollah partner and Iranian ally, was overthrown last month and is exiled in Moscow. Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, a crucial Hamas and Hezbollah sponsor and Assad’s principal backer, died in a helicopter crash last May. Several Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps generals – advisers to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and the Syrian regime – also have been killed. These include the IRGC’s commander in Syria, Razi Mousavi, killed in an airstrike in Damascus shortly after the war began. Iran’s senior adviser to Hezbollah, Abbas Nilforoushan, died in the same strike that killed Nasrallah.
This decapitation of Iranian, Syrian, Hezbollah and Hamas leadership reflects the broader beating that Israel – with extensive non-combat assistance from the US – has dealt its regional adversaries.
Syria’s army evaporated when Assad fled; its navy was sunk at its moorings by Israeli jets and its air force destroyed on its runways in the days after the regime fell. Hezbollah lost thousands, killed and wounded in its two-month war with Israel in 2024, while expending a significant portion of its missile arsenal, to lesser effect than many analysts (including me) expected before the war.
Hamas started the war with its own extensive rocket arsenal and perhaps 40,000 fighters at its disposal between its own military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, and allies such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad. At least half these fighters have been killed and others scattered or forced underground.
The Gaza Strip is de-urbanised, depopulated and extensively damaged, whole settlements bombed and bulldozed, and millions of civilians displaced to makeshift camps in horrific conditions. It is claimed up to 50,000 Gazans have been killed in the conflict and many times more wounded.
Large areas of Lebanon – especially in the southern region, in Beirut and in Hezbollah strongholds of the Bekaa Valley – have been extensively damaged in Israeli airstrikes. Syria’s cities were battered by more than a decade of war but the final campaign inflicted even further damage.
The exception to this picture is Yemen’s Houthi movement. The Houthis entered the war in late 2023 with a campaign against commercial shipping in the Bab el-Mandab Strait, a chokepoint that carried, before the conflict, 13 per cent of total ship traffic. Their stated intent was to pressure Israel and Israel-friendly nations by holding ships and trade routes at risk until a ceasefire was agreed and Israeli troops withdrew from Gaza. Using aerial drones, missiles, uncrewed surface vessels, armed speedboats and helicopters, the Houthis succeeded in reducing shipping through the strait, costing billions of dollars, disrupting supply chains and damaging more than 87 ships while sinking two and capturing one.
Houthi supporters rally in Sanaa, Yemen, in November. AP
Despite two naval taskforces – one US-led and one assembled by the EU – deploying to protect commercial shipping in the strait, along with extensive airstrikes and a blockade against Yemen’s port of Hudaydah, the Houthis continue their campaign. Their reaction to the news of this week’s tentative ceasefire, so far, has been to threaten that they will resume their efforts if the deal collapses while in fact persisting in their attacks. Iran’s proxies in Yemen remain defiant even as Iran and the others in its self-styled Axis of Resistance are on the back foot.
For its part, Israel is victorious on the battlefield – and recognition of that, rather than fancy footwork by Western diplomats, probably accounts for the willingness on both sides to negotiate a ceasefire. Indeed, it’s possible Israel’s main motivation for a ceasefire arose from the combination of clear battlefield victory close to home along with equally clear inability to suppress the Houthis, who continue launching long-range missiles against Tel Aviv. Benjamin Netanyahu is personally triumphant, albeit facing political and legal challenges.
None of this assuages the pain of Israeli families whose loved ones were massacred in the initial attacks or have been held by Hamas since October 2023. As few as 20 of the roughly 250 hostages taken at the outset of the war may remain alive, though it is almost impossible to say. In Israel, about 980 civilians and an equal number of military personnel have been killed, more than 13,000 wounded and up to a 500,000 displaced from their homes because of ground attacks at the start of the conflict and rocket and missile attacks since then.
Israel also faces difficult decisions, even if the ceasefire is confirmed and broadly holds. Hamas can survive with largely uncontested control over Gazans; there were no significant incidents of anti-Hamas unrest in Gaza at any time during the war. In the displaced persons camps and ruined cities of the Gaza Strip, Hamas maintains political authority. It also has sufficient military potential – at least 10,000 fighters still at large – to maintain the fight in the form of a guerrilla campaign or terrorist activity. Permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza would face an insurgency, while full Israeli withdrawal risks resurgence of conventional capability on the part of Hamas. And Israeli forces are still heavily committed in Lebanon, the Golan and the West Bank, with no immediate end to these deployments in sight.
All of which is to say that, even if this week’s ceasefire does indeed stick, what comes next will be the hardest thing. We can only hope the region’s innocent civilian populations – in Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian and Yemeni territory – receive some measure of relief, however temporary. Who, if anyone, gets the credit for a ceasefire matters far less than the possibility that one may finally be at hand.
David Kilcullen served in the Australian Army from 1985 to 2007. He was a senior counter-insurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq in 2007-08, followed by special adviser for counter-insurgency to secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. He is the author of six books including most recently The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West and The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan.
When I first arrived in Australia in April 1978, I was keen to know more about the country I had unexpectedly migrated to – as a matter of fact, apart from what I’d learned from my then-wife, who was a Sydneysider, I knew very little. Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country was highly recommended. And yet, the Australia Horne described therein did not seem like the country I was about to call home. It was a critique of “the way we were” – the somnolent fifties and sixties that preceded its publication – a society and a culture that ceased to be relevant in the decades that followed. As author and columnist Nick Bryant writes in a reevaluation republished below: “Just as the title has been misappropriated – it was meant sardonically. its subtitle has been mislaid: Australia in the Sixties. Though many insights proved prescient and perennial, Horne was describing a different land”.
Indeed, the book had appeared as the Australia Horne described and condemned had already begun to change. An imperceptible social revolution had already been pushing against the rigid morality of the war-time generation. The comforting but constraining ties of the traditional family, religious observance and community obligation which were regarded as unreasonably oppressive by his generation and many in the one before it, were breaking down, to be replaced in the seventies by a more open, more travelled and and inquisitive society and a paternal and benevolent social welfare state which provided free healthcare and for a generation of Australians, free tertiary education – from which I, once naturalised, benefitted. Much if this change was not all that recognisable at the time – transformations of this kind are mostly visible only with the benefit of hindsight.
The Lucky Country nevertheless continues to dominate the intellectual landscape; but 60 years after its publication, and as Bryant notes, it’s one that Australia mistakenly takes too seriously.
“Many who use the terms “lucky country” or “tyranny of distance” have probably not even read the books or understand their original context or meaning. If they read the books today, they might see that almost every form of our personal, community, national and global interests still involve “distance” as much as ever, and that notions of “the lucky country” remain ironic. ” The result, he laments, is a re-run of issues revisited but not resolved, opportunities not seized, and challenges not confronted … it is no surprise that the distance between word and deed on so many fronts, and so often, has created its own climate change, one of a collective vacuum or vacuousness. An environment where it is too easy to become disinterested, or be distracted by, or attracted to, those offering an “answer”, even if it is often more volume, ideology, self-interest, simplicity, hype and nonsense than validity, ideas, public interest, substance, hope and common sense. A 24/7 connected world where we drown in words and information but thirst for bona fide truth, knowledge and understanding, and more disconnectedness and disengagement”.
We republish below two retrospectives we’ll worth reading, one written from a conservative perspective, the other, by Bryant, from a relatively progressive viewpoint (there are some great pictures too). Both agree however that it is a book that can be read in a slightly or very different way by each generation, always having something new to say. As columnist Henry Ergas notes therein: “For all of its shortcuts and grievous errors, its insights still dazzle, no matter how often they are read or reread. So does its freshness, its sense of humour and perhaps most of all, its eager hopefulness and sense of aspiration”.
“Join the Lucky Ones” ran the front-page headline of The Australian on Tuesday, December 1, 1964. Starting the next day, readers could enjoy “the first big instalment of Donald Horne’s controversial new book The Lucky Country”, which was being published that week.
Horne had a long association with Frank Packer and Australian Consolidated Press, but in a publishing coup Rupert Murdoch’s new national newspaper had secured exclusive rights for “the most candid, controversial book of the year”.
The Australian had begun life less than six months previously as a daring experiment, the first nationally circulated newspaper in a country beginning to fizz with a sense of expanding possibilities yet faced with new, sometimes daunting prospects in a dramatically changing world.
Horne’s much-anticipated “witty and irreverent study of Australians and their way of life” couldn’t have found a stage better suited to its bold approach or for the questions it was firing, at point-blank range, into the national conversation.
Australians were reintroduced to themselves in the weeks that followed as a people who “hate discussion and ‘theory’ but can step quickly out of the way if events are about to smack them in the face”.
The Australian newspaper on December 2, 1964 featured an extract of ‘The Lucky Country’
They found out that “to understand Australian concepts of enjoyment one must understand that in Australia there is a battle between puritanism and a kind of paganism and that the latter is beginning to win”. Competitive sport, they were now given to understand, had all the qualities of “a ruthless, quasi-military operation”, making it “one of the disciplinary sides of Australian life”.
As for mateship, it reflected “a socially homosexual side to Australian male life” that involved “prolonged displays of toughness” in pubs, where men “stand around bars asserting their masculinity with such intensity that you half expect them to unzip their flies”.
Perhaps most arresting was the argument that went with the title’s assertion. Australian life, combining scepticism and “delight in improvisation”, had resulted in dependence on a type of gambler’s luck.
As circumstances shifted, Australians’ “saving characteristic, ‘the gambler’s coolness’ ”, had helped them to “change course quickly, even at the last moment”.
But the aim of those swerves had always been to “seek a quick easy way out”. Now that strategy needed to be reconsidered.
Abrupt changes
The Lucky Country packed many punches – and they landed at the perfect moment.
The tremendous post-war growth of an educated and engaged public had been evident since the mid-1950s as new magazines proliferated and the market for Australian books expanded more prodigiously than at any other time in the century.
Coupled with that were global shifts even more dramatic and described in The Australian’s first editorial, which spelled out both the paper’s vision and the challenges the nation faced.
Since the end of World War II all the major European empires had ceded or lost control of the lands and people to Australia’s immediate north. As British, Dutch and French imperial power in Southeast Asia collapsed, new nations – including Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam – were born and ancient ones, such as Burma and Thailand, reshaped. Behind them lay “the brooding power and intelligence of the new China, a land with whose people’s desires and plans our own future is deeply entwined”.
The first Australian visit by a US President. United States President Lyndon B Johnson greets the crowd in Swanston Street, Melbourne. Ken Wheeler
These abrupt changes coincided with Britain trying to join the European Common Market, making it clear that wherever the United Kingdom saw its future, it was not primarily with the Commonwealth.
Losing the blanket of certainty that Australia’s close relationship with Britain had long provided was a blow. But, The Australian insisted, it could prove “a salutary shock”, as it helped us realise “that now, as never before in our history, we stand alone”.
Collection of snapshots
The Lucky Country’s impact was immediate and all-pervasive. Despite some scathing reviews (one confidently predicted the book would have been forgotten by the next football season), it flew off the shelves. Its initial print run of 18,000 sold out in nine days and the pace showed no sign of flagging.
In 1965 it sold another 40,000 copies before repeating the feat in 1966, a staying power beyond its publisher’s wildest dreams.
One of the books that truly defined the decade, it entrenched itself in the national consciousness in a way similar to Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance, published two years later, another title that instantly entered the national lexicon.
Blainey’s deeply researched work, which reflected his training as a historian, was tightly argued. In contrast, even Horne admitted that his book was “a collection of snapshots of Australia”. An assemblage of ideas and insights that had been amassing for a decade, Horne thought it was part of the book’s success, handing readers a host of opinionated pages of observation and commentary.
Donald Horne at home
More than the loose structure, though, the book’s style was crucial to its impact. That style came from Horne’s long spell as a journalist, editor and advertising man.
Horne had a keen understanding of what readers wanted to know and talk about. He had spent years honing his approach, addressing Australia’s burgeoning magazine and newspaper readers, and recognised their hunger for a new type of journalism that The Australian sought to embody: urbane, expository, intelligent, sparky, informed.
And if it worked for magazines and papers, why not for a serious – if chronically irreverent – book about who we were and how we now lived?
The Lucky Country introduced this sharp change in tone to Australia in the 1960s, marking it as ineradicably as David Williamson’s plays would do. The content matched the tone, too, aggressively insisting that the way we lived had changed so abruptly that the nation could no longer be served by the standard-issue ideas.
The national mythology, populated by bush legend figures (shearers, bushrangers, drovers) and grizzled Anzacs, had no relevance to daily reality.
Australians were urbanites and suburbanites, and increasingly so: from 1947 to 1966 the percentage of Australian living in cities leapt from 68 per cent to 83 per cent.
Misappropriated and misunderstood
Horne’s coup was to bridge this gap between myth and reality. Certainly to his mind The Lucky Country’s success came from the fact it captured Australia as Australians experienced it, not through the fake lenses of a glorified past.
It was, Horne claimed, the first book to reflect “the suburban nature of the lives of most Australians without jeering at them”. What really cut through, however, was the book’s underlying thesis.
Despite its gadfly-like style, the book worked off a set of powerful assumptions that constituted a strong, even startling, argument.
Horne would complain ever after that its title had been misappropriated and misunderstood. But it is hard to deny that the title itself made the argument palpably clear.
Earlier exercises in self-reflection generally portrayed Australia’s journey to nationhood as a process of maturation. Nurtured under the shelter of Britain’s wing, foresight, hard work and inspired guidance had allowed the infant nation to grow into a strapping adult, capable of standing on its own feet.
Horne knocked that narrative for six. Australia’s prosperity and stability were not, he argued, the result of increasing national maturity, much less diligence and determination. They were due to sheer good fortune. To make things worse, it was a good fortune the country didn’t deserve – or know how to use.
The problem wasn’t the bulk of ordinary Australians, who weren’t a bad lot. It was “the people on top”. Our leaders and elites were second-rate provincial mediocrities who had got stuck in a groove some 50 or 60 years earlier and never budged out of it, even as one generation passed to another and still another.
Premature senility
Thanks to them, the nation was in a time warp, living out a fantasy that bore no relation to its realities – or its challenges.
The proper national metaphor, in Horne’s eyes, was not a maturational shift from boisterous youth to fully fledged adulthood; it was a leap from childhood to premature senility. Without “a radical overthrow and destruction of the prevailing attitudes of most of the nation’s masters” the decades to come would likely witness “a general demoralisation; the nation may become run down, old-fashioned, puzzled, and resentful”.
The radical overthrow and destruction of Australia’s outmoded approach, and the subsequent renewal, could, Horne speculated, possibly come through the rising generation. He was drawn to generational explanations of change, citing Walter Bagehot’s comment that “generally one generation succeeds another almost silently.
But sometimes there is an abrupt change. In that case the affairs of the country are apt to alter much, for good or for evil; sometimes it is ruined, sometimes it becomes more successful, but it hardly ever stays as it was.”
The Lucky Country, featuring the painting of the same title by Albert Tucker
Generational change had salvaged the national project before. The great Australian initiative, when Britain and other outside models of development had been energetically rejected, had emerged in the decades at the turn of the 20th century. This was when a nationalism of mateship represented “the general egalitarian position” that, flecked with Irish anti-English hostility, had formed an explicit contrast to an England of wealth and privilege. To those who had experienced that earlier time, “this present pause would be unbelievable”.
Robert Menzies epitomised everything that had gone wrong. He had absorbed too much of the pro-British obsequiousness of the post-World War I world, notably “the ceremonial clinging to Britain” that was “part of the delusional structure of the people who were running Australia”.
Unable to escape that delusional structure’s grip, subsequent generations had fallen into Menzies’ stride rather than broken it. And while Menzies’ leading rival, Arthur Calwell, could not be accused of being unduly pro-British, he was no better able “to recognise and dramatise the new strategic environment of Australia”.
Fresh start
As a result, “the nation that saw itself in terms of unique hope for a better way of life is becoming reactionary – or its masters are – addicted to the old, conformist” ways of doing things. The inability to cope with change meant the “momentum towards concepts of independent nationhood has slowed down, or stopped”.
There were, however, inklings of a fresh start. Although “still full of mystery”, the generation born during and immediately after the war “seems fresher”. Who knew, “it may be the generation that changes Australia”.
Expressing the egalitarian pragmatism that Horne identified as the quintessential philosophy of the national consciousness, the baby boomers would be socially progressive, tertiary-educated, technocratic pagans and managerially gifted hedonists. As they gained control, the better qualities of the Australian people, sprawling and sunburnt on the nation’s beaches, would finally be able to express themselves unencumbered by the tired leftovers of a bygone era.
Exactly how this revolution would occur was left unclear.
Bathers at Bronte Beach, Sydney, 1964, John William’s Line Zero: Photo-reportage 1958-2003
Horne’s career had to this point been on the political right. He was still editor of Quadrant whenThe Lucky Country came out, a vigorous anti-communist who had run as a Conservative in an English election while living there in the 1950s.
In some ways, he might still have been a conservative – for example, in his identification of the ideals of egalitarianism and fraternity as the essence of a national culture that needed to be preserved.
What is certain, however, is that by the time of The Lucky Country, Horne was no conservator. His conservativism was what he now described as being of the “radical”, even “anarchist”, variety. Enormous social and political renovation was the order of the day and the book’s task, Horne said, was “to produce ideas that may prompt action at some later time” – but that would need a change agent only the future would disclose.
Whitlam the messiah
Given that sense of anticipation, it is unsurprising that Horne drank the Gough Whitlam Kool-Aid deeply and early. When Whitlam replaced Calwell as ALP leader, Horne declared that he “seemed to understand that not only the Labor Party but Australia as a whole needed a psychological reorientation, a new tone and style to make it adaptable in the modern world”.
In April 1973, less than six months after the federal election that brought “the ludicrous Menzies era” to a close, Horne predicted that Whitlam could easily become Australia’s greatest prime minister. Until then, it had begun to seem “as if our sense of nationality was going to remain rather grisly: a fairly second-rate European-type society cutting itself off from its environment and from the mainstreams of the age, trying to keep up its spirits by boasting about its material success, its mines and its quarries”.
Now he predicted a new national anthem within 12 months and a republic within 10 years. The eternal “tomorrow” of utopian political vision had suddenly become, as it were, Monday morning – and Whitlam was its messiah.
Inevitably, having soared to such heights, the deflation when the curtains fell on the new dawn was all the more traumatic. It exploded into visceral anger in the book Horne wrote immediately after the 1975 dismissal.
Whitlam, Horne said in Death of the Lucky Country, had been doubly “assassinated” – once by the governor-general, then again “by his defeat in an illegitimately called election, done in by strong and powerful enemies”.
Gough and singer Little Pattie. Sunday Telegraph
Donald Horne, centre, with union leader John Halfpenny, left, and authors Patrick White (right) and Frank Hardy in the background, leading the singing of Advance Australia Fair at Sydney Town Hall in 1976. They were “maintaining the rage” over the dismissal of prime minister Gough Whitlam one year earlier.. Kevin Berry
The elites had had their revenge. Public violence, Horne suggested, would be an entirely understandable response. Horne’s own response was unending, incandescent, outrage.
Mingled with bitterness, that outrage pervades everything Horne wrote after Whitlam’s ignominious end: largely second-rate works that have faded from memory. He had, it turned out, only one book in him – but it was, nonetheless, a book of immense importance, not least because of its tough-minded approach to Asia and its adamant rejection of non-alignment as a bastardised form of neutralism.
To say that is not to ignore the paradox that underpins the book. Horne’s discussion in The Lucky Country of Australia’s British inheritance was rich and nuanced. But as the years passed Britishness became a birth flaw to be denounced with ever greater ferocity.
Yet for all of Horne’s strident nationalism, The Lucky Country is redolent, if not derivative, of the Britain of the mid to late ’50s.
During his stint in Britain, Horne had fully absorbed the new concept of “the establishment”, coined by London columnist Henry Fairlie in 1955 to describe not simply the individuals who held and exerted political power but the whole network of institutions, practices and attitudes through which those in or near power maintained their ascendancy.
By 1960, denouncing the dead hand and crippling impact of a musty, hidebound elite had become the stock in trade of an emerging class of British commentators.
Horne brilliantly transposed that leitmotiv to Australia, just as he transposed those commentators’ biting tone and the advertising-influenced writing style of the new American journalism.
A front-page story pointing readers to an extract ‘The Lucky Country’ published in the Australian; the next day, on December 2, 1964.
But jingles are no substitute for deep analysis – and The Lucky Country’s marvellous hits come amid some disastrous misses.
No miss weighs more greatly, or has had more deleterious consequences, than Horne’s easy, airy dismissal of the extraordinary economic advance Australia had experienced since the ’40s. To describe that achievement as due to blind luck is simply absurd.
It was, in fact, achieved in the face of a world economy profoundly and increasingly adverse to primary exporters, who had to deal with plunging commodity prices, as well as the relatively slow growth, and chronic balance of payments problems, of Britain, which was still Australia’s crucial export market.
That Australia managed to not merely cope with that environment but grow rapidly was no gift of nature: it reflected the remarkable adjustment capability of its primary exporters, who, as well as turning to Asia’s emerging markets, reduced their costs more rapidly than prices were falling.
And it was the adaptiveness of its primary exporters, along with the entrepreneurship of towering giants such as Lang Hancock and Arvi Parbo, that set the foundations for the mining booms Horne derided as just due to luck.
Party’s over: Bronte Beach, Boxing Day 2024. Picture: NewsWire / Flavio Brancaleone
The belief that Australia’s prosperity was the result of good fortune rather than entrepreneurship and aspiration became one of the left’s key illusions. It framed Whitlam’s disastrous economic policies, which assumed the Australian economy was “indestructible”; it has recurred in recent years as successive Labor governments have dismissed mining, low-cost energy and agriculture as mere residues of earlier ages. The blind luck thesis had a natural appeal to the new elites who, in the decades after Whitlam’s fall, committed themselves to the fundamental remaking of Australia.
So did the overestimate of the merits of technocratic bureaucracy and the underestimate of the merits of Australian traditions that permeates Horne’s work. In that respect, Horne was right: the baby boomer generation changed Australia. And it was armed with the Whitlam-Horne vision that its leading scions became the new establishment.
By the late ’80s this new order had almost entirely replaced Horne’s reviled old second-rate elites, taking the commanding heights of cultural institutions and regulatory bodies, as well as dominating acceptable political discourse.
Undoubtedly a classic
Under first the boomers, and then their children’s generation, the longstanding policies, practices, norms and pronouns that had framed Australian life were upended, reversed, junked, repudiated.
In 1964, Horne declared that ordinary Australian people were not the problem: the elites were. Sixty years later that seems truer than at any other time in Australian history, but the elites in question are those whom Horne heralded and championed.
The great irony, though, is that the ordinary suburban Australians Horne brought to the forefront of national conversation have proven the immovable bulwark against which those new elites have collided, as they repeatedly rejected the new establishment’s wishes and projects.
Horne himself may not have appreciated this irony. But he can claim the credit for foretelling the two great protagonists in the national drama that continues to play itself out in the public square.
In the end, it is the hallmark of a classic that it is a book that can be read in a slightly or very different way by each generation, always having something new to say. Set against that test, The Lucky Country is undoubtedly a classic.
For all of its shortcuts and grievous errors, its insights still dazzle, no matter how often they are read or reread. So does its freshness, its sense of humour and perhaps most of all, its eager hopefulness and sense of aspiration.
On this joint birthday of The Lucky Country and of the newspaper that, 60 years ago, launched its career, renewing that spirit remains a task worthy of giants.
Henry Ergas is a columnist with The Australian. Alex McDermott is an independent historian.
Australia’s fortune was never dumb luck
Nick Bryant, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 December 2024
Sixty summers ago, thousands of Australians were devouring a book published in the lead-up to Christmas which became an instant Aussie classic. Unveiled in December 1964, Donald Horne’s masterwork, The Lucky Country, soon became postwar Australia’s most intellectually influential book. When I first came to live here almost 20 years ago, I consumed it in one gulp, flying, fittingly enough, from Sydney to Perth. Nothing I had ever read so brilliantly encapsulated the vast and confounding continent down below.
Not only did his polemic meet the moment – its first print run sold out in less than a fortnight – in many ways it stood the test of time. Just consider the opening riff, which finds Horne, whisky in hand, on the terrace of a hotel in Hong Kong, considering the regional implications of China: “Australia’s problem is that it now exists in a new and dangerous power situation and its people and policies are not properly re-oriented towards the fact.” He could be describing this very instant.
If Horne had received royalties for every time his most quotable line was re-quoted – “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck” – his bank balance would have rivalled his analytical clout. But other Horneian bon mots were also worthy of repetition. “Many of the nation’s affairs are conducted by racketeers of the mediocre,” he wrote, in another skewering putdown. No wonder the book remains such a literary landmark.
Yet while the prose was scintillating and the thinking of the highest order, Horne had not produced a biblical text: sacred words by which we should continue to live our national intellectual life, a work that was doctrinal and everlasting.
Just as the title has been misappropriated – The Lucky Country was meant sardonically, of course – its subtitle has been mislaid: Australia in the Sixties. Though many insights proved prescient and perennial, Horne was describing a different land. Just consider that superlative line about second-rate politicians, by which Horne meant the then-prime minister Robert Menzies and the then-Labor leader Arthur Calwell. Though it continued to resonate strongly in the ’60s, as Menzies was followed by a succession of unremarkable prime ministers – Harold Holt, John McEwen, John Gorton and William McMahon – this blanket condemnation did not apply to the ’70s, ‘80s or ’90s. Whatever you think of their politics, Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard were not second-rate leaders.
Like his long-forgotten subtitle, the words Horne penned after his famous political sledge also need rescuing from obscurity. Not only were politicians second-rate, he said, but the country “lives on other people’s ideas”. In other words, it was second-hand. As he explained in the mid-1970s, “I had in my mind the idea of Australia as a derived society … In the lucky style, we have never ‘earned’ our democracy. We simply went along with some British habits”.
At first glance, Canberra seemed to prove this aphorism. The chambers of the old Parliament House looked like a loving recreation of the Palace of Westminster. But study more closely the history of Australian democracy, and a different story emerges. Rather than being slavishly imitative, Australia has a long history of democratic innovation. It pioneered the secret ballot, female enfranchisement, preferential voting and another essential safeguard against modern-day polarisation: compulsory voting. The history of Australia’s democracy is as much singular as derivative. It speaks of Australian exceptionalism and subverts Horne’s overarching thesis that the country was lazily derivative.
Even more problematic than Horne’s original thesis is the bastardised version of his thesis, which sees Australia as being unusually lucky because it was essentially a mine and paddock with glorious views. “I didn’t mean that it had a lot of material resources,” Horne was at pains to point out in the mid-70s. Yet, it’s precisely this interpretation that continues to exert such a vice-like grip on national thinking. What makes this false rendition so crippling and self-belittling is that it underestimates the extent to which Australia has made its own luck.
For much of the past half-century, however, that is precisely what has happened. The reform era of the Hawke, Keating and Howard years created an Australian model, blending government regulation, free enterprise and social welfare provisions such as Medicare, which underpinned decades of uninterpreted economic growth. Australia survived both the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the dot com recession at the turn of the century before the resources boom kicked in. Other countries have tried to decipher the success of the “wonder Down Under” economy, which is based as much on smart policy settings, such as the Four Pillar banking structure, as coal and iron ore.
In a complete upending of Horne’s thesis, Britain has regularly pilfered Australian ideas – from Tony Blair mimicking Hawke and Keating’s “Third Way” to the Conservatives replicating Howard’s “Pacific Solution”. The Albanese government’s social media ban for children below the age of 16 is being closely monitored by other countries. Whether it’s bans on cigarette advertising or forcing tech giants to pay news organisations for access to their journalism, Australia is looked upon globally as a laboratory of reform. The historian Geoffrey Blainey was onto something when he described Australia as “one of the most experimental, and one of the most exceptionalist, countries in the history of the modern world”.
For sure, Australia can too easily succumb to the influence of others. The Trumpification of Australian conservative politics offers a timely case in point. But this is not a country, as Horne put it 60 years ago, that simply “lives off other people’s ideas”. Far from it. Indeed, as well as the 60th anniversary of Horne’s opus, this month marks the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking work that made solar a viable source of renewable energy. It was pioneered at the University of NSW by one of Australia’s unsung heroes, Professor Martin Green.
The Lucky Country is not the only book from that era that has shaped Australia’s modern-day sense of itself. Published two years later, Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance reinforced the sense of geographic remoteness and geopolitical irrelevance. These two precepts have become increasingly obsolete, as the locus of the world has shifted from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific, but also proven surprisingly obdurate.
Cultural-cringe thinking, that “disease of the Australian mind” identified by A. A. Phillips in his 1950 Meanjin essay, also feels redundant. Far more significant a force is Australia’s cultural clout, as demonstrated this year by the First Nations artist Archie Moore, who became the first Australian to win the coveted Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale.
Another overly influential work, Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness, which was published in 1960, also feels outdated at a time when local architects are winning such global acclaim with their emphatically Australian aesthetic. The 2024 World Building of the Year, for example, is a public school in Sydney’s inner city designed by the local firm FJC Studio.
Too much of Australia’s postwar intellectual architecture relies on design work from a bygone age. The problem, moreover, is compounded by mutual reinforcement. Lucky Country thinking, Tyranny of Distance thinking and Cultural Cringe thinking have created a superstructure of national self-deprecation.
The good news is that applying a wrecking ball to this kind of antique thinking creates a knock-on effect. Pillars start collapsing on each other. Edifices crumble. Consider this passage penned 20 years ago by Clive James: “When my generation of expatriates went sailing to adventure, most of us believed that what we were leaving behind was a political backwater. In fact, it was one of the most highly developed liberal democracies on Earth, a fitting framework for the cultural expansion that has since made it the envy of nations many times its size.”
As James shows here, when you demolish one shibboleth – the idea that the polity is second rate – others come tumbling down.
Australia’s self-belittling streak has its uses. It requires a leap of imagination to see a Trump-like demagogue ever emerging here, given the enduring power of the tall-poppy syndrome and the scything down of puffed-up poseurs who take themselves too seriously.
The problem is that tall-poppy thinking is too often applied to the country as a whole. That, I would suggest, is a product of how Horne’s The Lucky Country still dominates the intellectual landscape. It is a brilliant book, but 60 years after its publication, it’s one that Australia mistakenly takes too seriously.
Donald Horne, centre, with union leader John Halfpenny, left, and authors Patrick White (right) and Frank Hardy in the background, leading the singing of Advance Australia Fair at Sydney Town Hall in 1976. They were “maintaining the rage” over the dismissal of prime minister Gough Whitlam one year earlier.Kevin Berry
Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.
Countless left-wing memes about American stupidity illustrate how out of touch, self righteous, arrogant and morally “superior” many of the so-called “left” have become – unlike the Democrats whom New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said were “finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke” after having embraced a self-defeating world view of “hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation”.
The Democrats. – and indeed, our Labor party – would ignore the outcome of the presidential election at their peril. The people, for better or worse, have spoken, and it’s a pointless exercise for the Democrats to live in a fantasy world of denial, not accepting their own responsibility in the loss. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher wrote on 12 November:“ It’s also extremely condescending and arrogant to assume you know better and anyone who didn’t agree must be an idiot. In that light, I’d suggest Trump didn’t win this. The Democrats lost it in a spectacular fashion, and if you can lose it to the likes of Trump, something is majorly wrong on the left side of politics”.
There are lessons aplenty for Australian politics. The Coalition wants to spend the months leading up to next year’s election talking about migration driving up household bills. It has no actual plan for decreasing immigration or reducing inflation, but voters don’t care. They don’t do nuance. They’re disatisfied with the status quo and disappointed in the government. They’ll just want to punish the mob in charge. Sure, they’ll be burning down the house, and they’ll be in the house when it burns down (two song references there!) but they won’t care. The question will be “are you better off today than you were four years ago?” And, like in America, for a great many, the answer will be a big “no!”
Waleed Ali’s recent article on why Trump won concurs with the above: “Last week, a historically unpopular government, presiding over a period of high inflation that saw food prices especially explode, got thrown out of office. There is quite simply nothing extraordinary about that”. Former Liberal attorney general and high commissioner to the UK George Brandis wrote similar in the Herald on 18 November:“… the sheer weirdness of Donald Trump himself: narcissistic, vulgar, bombastic, mendacious, idiosyncratic, outrageous; while at the same time flamboyant, mesmerizing and on occasions very funny. He broke every rule, told every lie, did the unthinkable, said the unsayable and still came up … (you complete the pun). The epic unconventionality of Trump’s campaign dramatised a result that would probably have been the same had the Republican candidate been less unorthodox. For that reason, the outcome is fertile ground for over-interpretation and exaggeration”.
On a different but not dissimilar tack, John Carroll, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University wrote in The Australian:
“The resounding Trump victory confirms the cardinal law: politics is about power. In times of peace and prosperity, such as we in Australia have enjoyed for almost 80 years, it is easy to forget, and continue along in the hopeful illusion that life is good, people are intrinsically nice, and problems can be solved amicably …
… One of the appeals of Donald Trump to the United States electorate – I suspect his main appeal – has been that, in his bluster and braggadocio, he flexes power muscles and seems to show he is unafraid to mobilise power for his own ends. There is an intuitive understanding across middle and lower-middle America that progressive posturing and feel-good speeches will not steer the ship of state safely through turbulent waters. In contrast, Trump policy appears clear, direct, and down-to-earth – booming economy, secure borders, and resolved international conflict. When 70 per cent of Americans feel worse off than they were four years ago, they want strength in leadership and focus on their everyday interests.
…The Trump persona – aggressive, confrontational, and petulant, not to mention pathologically narcissistic – also seems to have appealed to marginalised social strata. Those living in poorer states, young black and Latino males, recent immigrants, and the old city working classes resenting their decline, all seem to have been drawn to his maverick contempt for the trendy issues of the time. His character may be suspect – indeed he is widely disliked – but he appears powerful, practical, and not of the coterie elite. In politics, power eclipses niceness”.
I republish below an opinion piece by The Australian’s editor at large Paul Kelly. It is to my mind one if the best articles I have read to date regarding the outcome of the American elections and how this may impact Australian politics. It is particularly interesting insofar as Kelly pushes back against the conservative narrative prevalent in the Murdoch media and among more extreme right wing commentators, politicians and culture warriors. Regarding Australian politics, he writes:
“If Trump succeeds he will further undermine the shaky policy framework of the Labor Party. The optics will be: Trump’s strength versus Albanese’s weakness. In this situation, the pro-Trump media and conservative drum-beaters in this country – in effect the Trump Appeasement Syndrome lobby – will demand the Peter Dutton-led Coalition follow their messiah while they will use Trump’s success to undermine Albanese. Destroying former prime minister Kevin Rudd as ambassador to the US is just the first step”.
“So what’s driving the campaign to target Rudd”, asked Hartcher on 16 November. “The Murdoch media, in short. Some other commentators have been drawn into it, too, useful idiots for the Murdoch effort. Ostensibly they demand that Rudd go because he was critical of Trump, but in reality, “this is revenge”, as Malcolm Turnbull explained this week. “This is a campaign that News Corp kicked off, and they are running a vendetta,” he told my colleague Matthew Knott. Revenge for what? Rudd founded a movement called Australians for a Murdoch Royal Commission. Murdoch’s empire was “a cancer on our democracy”, he said. A royal commission would examine the level of concentration in Australian media ownership and the conduct of the Murdoch group in particular”.
“But the Murdoch media is not monolithic”, Hartcher continues.”Its éminence grise is Paul Kelly. Kelly has the stature to make his own judgment. The campaign to remove Rudd as “a ritual sacrifice before Trump has even said anything” is “part of Trump Appeasement Syndrome”. “This shows a contempt for Australian sovereignty and a craven weakness before Trump,” Kelly wrote this week. “For any Americans wasting their time following this saga, we must look a sad, pathetic little country.”
Trump and his cabinet picks Robert F Kennedy Jr and Elon Musk
Donald Trump’s revolution leaves Albanese exposed
Paul Kelly, The Australian, 16 November 2024
The Trump Revolution is coming and, like all revolutions, its outcome will fluctuate between a glorious remaking of the existing order or a spectacular overreach and fall – maybe even a contradictory mix of both – with Anthony Albanese and Australia in front-row seats for the drama.
[In the same issue as this article, national affairs editor Joe Kelly summed up this revolution: “Trump’s sweeping “day one agenda” includes dismantling the deep state, pursuing mass deportations, imposing across-the-board tariffs, scrapping the “Green New Scam”, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, rolling back environmental regulations, ending the Ukraine conflict, unpicking pro-transgender policies, pardoning January 6 offenders, and rolling back the Biden health and education agendas. This is a blueprint to overhaul the country. Leading thinkers are already focused on which items are set in stone and which could merely be attempts to enhance Trump’s negotiating position. While Trump is a familiar political figure, this exercise reveals his policy agenda has still generated widespread uncertainty. Paradoxically, no one knows how the experiment will turn out or even exactly what it is – a recipe for a populist catastrophe, or a profound new American reinvention”.]
From the Trump appointments so far, the big “America First” play is on. The sharemarket has been excited, the bond market is wary, Big Tech is king, Beijing should be worried. President Trump Mark II is more resolute and revolutionary than Trump Mark I.
His hunger for change seems ferocious; his willingness to take risks is more pronounced. He is assembling a tribe of Trump loyalists to punch through the disintegrating Democratic scaffold. Trump demands loyalty and prioritises vindication.
Two lights are flashing – danger and opportunity. Some people will make a stack of money and others will be cast into painful obscurity.
Trump is going to remind everyone of the extent of power vested in the office of US president when pushed to the limit.
Consider the Elon Musk appointment. Surely this can’t be true. The world’s richest man, heading social-media platform X, hanging out at Mar-a-Lago, almost part of the Trump family, will now co-lead a Department of Government Efficiency – sitting outside the federal government – and while keeping all his existing corporate positions, he will pursue his pledge to cut US agency budgets by $US2 trillion ($3 trillion), or about one-third.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk will now co-lead a Department of Government Efficiency. Picture: AFP
Of course, it is true – only in America. Think about this marriage: Trump’s America meets the Big Tech oligarchs. This is a serious moment for US capitalism, great for innovation, bad for integrity. Trump likens Musk’s brief to “the Manhattan Project of our time”. How many struggling Americans are going to be punished in the process? Australian officials, long familiar with our experience of external budget audits (think Tony Shepherd in 2013), know Musk’s promise is impossible in delivery terms. It can’t be done, short of a massive anti-Trump electoral revolt from the public.
At this time, however, such quibbles don’t matter. Nothing seems impossible in the exaggerated hype of Trump’s vindication. A tariff of 60 per cent on China’s imports? Sure. Cutting a third off federal agency budgets? No problem. Licensing the king of Big Tech, loaded with conflict-of-interest federal contracts, to stage a shooting gallery across the entire federal bureaucracy? Great idea. It’s called purging the deep state.
Change on the scale Trump wants generates both high excitement and high risk. Nobody can be sure of the consequences because these things have never been tried before and we don’t know where the line will be drawn between impression and reality. How long before Trump and Musk fall out?
Trump’s appointments show his priority to purge the “deep state” institutions of justice and intelligence. Given his history, these seem non-negotiable personal passions for Trump. He appointed former Democrat, now Trump loyalist, Tulsi Gabbard as director of national security despite, or perhaps because of, her sustained support for Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
He appointed a professional provocateur, Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, as attorney-general with Gaetz, already at political war with the Justice Department he is supposed to run, praised by Trump, who said Gaetz will end “the partisan weaponisation of our justice system”. That means a purge.
Trump has appointed Republican congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney-general. AFP
The wilful naivety of Trump’s apologists in this country looks embarrassing given Trump’s resolve to impose his will on the intelligence community, justice and the FBI. Gabbard’s appointment is highly dubious and Gaetz’s should be overruled, with The Wall Street Journal saying it would “undermine confidence in the law” and would be used for “political revenge”.
Trump’s mind seems a cross between powerful insights into the flaws of the Obama-Biden-Harris age and the vindictive fantasies of all rebels pulling down the established order.
But Trump’s experiment will resonate far beyond America. Markets seem alert to the inflationary consequences of his fiscal policy. The combination of Trump and our tight labour market will further weaken Anthony Albanese’s hope of an interest-rate cut before the election.
But the big picture consequences are far larger. At a time when most Western democracies are burdened by disillusion, poor economic and social outcomes and leadership that lacks either conviction or courage, Trump arrives as a giant on the stage of history.
He mocks the orthodox governing model. Much of Trump’s appeal is because he presents as a change agent against leaders running a failed status quo, witness the dismissed Biden-Harris team. More than 70 per cent of Americans felt their country was going in the wrong direction.
Trump’s win is the antithesis of Albanese’s victory in 2022 when Albanese ran on reassurance, incrementalism and “safe change”. Trump consigns “safe change” to the dustbin of history. He will steamroll Albanese’s “safe change” into the gutter. Trump’s American political strategy is the complete opposite of Albanese’s Australian strategy.
Of course, America is not Australia; we are different countries and in different moods. Yet the stakes for Australia cannot be denied – the more Trump succeeds, the more Labor’s policies will look feeble, ineffective and missing the big picture.
At almost every point in his agenda, Trump is diametrically opposed to Labor’s framework.
Consider the list: Trump wants savage public-sector cuts, a reduction in federal bureaucratic numbers, a purging of regulation, cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 per cent (half that of Australia), extending income tax cuts, imposing punitive tariffs on China where Australia is just restoring trade normality, repudiating free trade by resurrecting across-the-board tariffs, more support for oil and gas, walking out of the Paris Agreement on climate, dismantling environmental obstacles to development, cracking down on immigration, launching a domestic war on all forms of identity politics, boosting US defence spending and disdaining global institutions.
It is folly to think Trump won’t be influenced by the chasm between himself and Albanese. It’s good he told Albanese on the phone that Australia was the “perfect friendship”. Let’s cut to reality – if Trump has initial success in fuelling the animal spirits of the US economy, the governance model for Western democracy will be shaken to its foundations. Parties of the radical right will gain fresh traction everywhere.
It is folly to think Trump won’t be influenced by the chasm between himself and Albanese. AFP
If Trump succeeds he will further undermine the shaky policy framework of the Labor Party. The optics will be: Trump’s strength versus Albanese’s weakness. In this situation, the pro-Trump media and conservative drum-beaters in this country – in effect the Trump Appeasement Syndrome lobby – will demand the Peter Dutton-led Coalition follow their messiah while they will use Trump’s success to undermine Albanese. Destroying Kevin Rudd as ambassador is just the first step.
Of course, it might not evolve this way. It might be the precise opposite. You never know with Trump. He may overreach from the start, prioritising vengeance, smash too many institutional norms and, drunk on hubris, alienate even his own voters.
But last week Trump sent another message of profound significance for Australia – he is riding with the China hawks. This means Trump will expect Albanese to muscle up and toughen up against China. Forget the idea of Trump going cool on Australia – he likes us, he’ll go hot on Australia and expect more action from us to reinforce his China hawks.
This is surely the coming message from the appointment of Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and Congressman Mike Waltz as his National Security Adviser.
Waltz, in a jointly written essay for The Economist, said the US must wind up the Ukraine conflict and direct its assets towards confronting and deterrence of China. Rubio warns China is “far more dangerous” than the old Soviet Union and poses the central threat of the 21st century. They will drive deeper US rivalry with China.
Rubio supports AUKUS. That’s the good news – but under Trump the US support for AUKUS means more action and commitment from Australia against China. That’s the transactional deal, got it?
China’s President Xi Jinping. AFP
How does this fit with Albanese’s “stabilisation” agenda with China? Answer: not comfortably. History tells us that Australian domestic support for the US alliance falls when there’s a US president we don’t like, witness the fall in popular backing for the alliance under George W. Bush. Now we will likely have in Trump a US president who expects us to get more hawkish on China while domestic support for that Trump-induced option will plummet.
It’s better for Australia that Trump rides with the China hawks, not the China doves. But you cannot miss the problem. Paul Keating sees it and fell upon the remarkable political monitor poll in The Sydney Morning Herald showing that 57 per cent said Australia should avoid taking sides in any war between the US and China, with only 16 per cent disagreeing. Extraordinary stuff.
Keating said this repudiated Albanese’s “lock-in” military arrangement with the US, the AUKUS agreement and the assumption Australia is tied to the US in any conflict.
Trump’s China policy looks ominous for Labor – his tariff strategy will weaken our trade with China while his overall “get tough” strategy will intensify anti-Trump sentiments within the public in Australia and ignite a debate within Labor, with protests the party is too accommodating of Trump’s anti-China stand. It will be dangerous and unpredictable.
The broader political takeout from Trump’s victory is the failure of Democratic Party progressivism – economic and cultural. This is a mammoth event. Of course, direct political lessons cannot be simply transposed from America to Australia. These are very different countries. Yet it would be unwise to assume there is no connection point for Australia from this epic US election.
Here are three propositions – that US progressives are no longer the party of the working class or the non-college educated; that US progressivism contains the seeds of its own destruction, witness the Trump counter-revolution; and that the deepest faith of the progressives – that Trump is a threat to democracy – didn’t work because the progressives constitute their own threat to democracy.
Let’s consider the first proposition – in effect, the voter realignment. Australian pollster Kos Samaras wrote post-election that low-income, working-class voters were heading right-wing. This realignment would reshape politics including in Australia and was tied to the changing nature of left-wing politics with its new priorities around climate change, social justice, urban fashions and housing.
Analysis by the Financial Times shows that in the US poorer and less-educated voters think Republicans best represent them, with the Democrats now the party of high-income and college-educated voters.
Trump won a majority of households with incomes of less than $100,000 while the Democrats won more support from the top third of the income bracket. Education is a sharp line of division – nearly two-thirds of voters without a college degree supported Trump.
Samaras warns the realignment in Australia deepens the divide between urban and rural voters and between professional and low-income voters, “creating fertile ground for conservative and populist leaders”. Is the urban professional class slowly suffocating Labor? Obviously, Dutton will be exploiting this divide at the coming poll.
On the second proposition, most progressives and elites in Australia are in denial, unable to admit what is happening, despite the defeat of the voice referendum at home and the evidence in the American election – many people voted for Trump on cultural grounds, pointing to a counter-revolution.
There are numerous pro-Trump commentators hailing the moment. Many exaggerate, yet the trend is manifest. Writing in the Financial Times, respected analyst John B Judis said Democrats must dissociate themselves from support for “gender-affirming care”, their opposition to strong borders, their backing of equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity on racial issues, their indifference to the plight of working-class men, just dismissing Trump supporters as racists and sexists, and their focus on imminent planetary apocalypse to justify draconian climate action.
He said the priorities of many voters who deserted the Democrats are decent jobs, safe streets and a proper safety net. But Judis warns even action on these fronts will fail politically “if Democrats don’t sever their identification with cultural radicalism”.
Labor hasn’t gone as far as the Democrats – but it is largely and proudly a progressive party now, and this risk is potent. Most progressive leadership elites in Australia don’t understand the consequences of the cultural positions they champion. Their cultural ignorance is astonishing and dangerous. They need to read the long masterclass provided in July this year by David Brooks in The New York Times.
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Brooks said that with the demise of religion, US public life became secular in recent decades with “science and reason” becoming the methods by which the nation could be held together. It is now obvious that this answer, championed by the elites, has failed. “By the 21st century, it became clear that Americans were no longer just disagreeing with one another,” Brooks said. “They didn’t even perceive the same reality.”
Was there anything to fill this moral void? As usual, the left produced an answer – identity politics. Brooks said: “This story provides a moral landscape – there are those bad guys over there and us good guys over here. The story provides a sense of belonging. It provides social recognition.” It is orientated around proper esteem for and inclusion of different identity groups.
The problem, however, is the incompatibility of identity politics with the liberal principle of equality – that regardless of identity we are bonded by a common humanity. This is the foundation stone of our liberal democracy. Undermine this principle and our society is undermined. As Brooks says, “the problem with this form of all-explaining identity politics is that it undermines democracy”.
Trump’s voters don’t offer such sophisticated reasoning for their vote. But their visceral distrust of how they are being treated says this is what they feel in their bones. It is reinforced by numerous examples across their lives, telling them they don’t really count.
The more progressives in Australia push this ideology, the more they guarantee a backlash. Dutton knows this – he just needs to judge how far it has gone in Australia and how much to advance the counter-revolution.
This leads directly to the third proposition. The Democrats were consumed by the idea of Trump as a threat to democracy. Ultimately, this was the Harris campaign – and the argument was correct. Watching Trump’s backers in this country trying to pretend black was white was pitiful intellectual dishonesty. Trump refused to concede he lost in 2020 – of course he was a threat to democracy.
But what the Democrats didn’t get was the point brilliantly made by political scientist Yascha Mounk – some exit polls suggested that people felt Harris was a greater threat to democracy than Trump. “This hints at the fundamental fact of the past decade,” Mounk said. “A fact that elite discourse still has not fully confronted: citizens’ trust in mainstream institutions has been absolutely shattered. Corporations and the military, universities and the courts, all used to enjoy a certain modicum of residual trust. That trust is now gone. It is unlikely to return any time soon.”
It is gone because of the left’s march through the institutions, the story in both America and Australia. Progressive activists took charge, while established leaders were weak and ignorant. When people look across the landscape – universities, bureaucracies, cultural bodies, corporates, government departments – they see progressive values, great and small, shoved in their faces. It’s not the democracy they voted for
In That Howling Infinite 
Boom. Boom. Boom. The second presidency of Donald Trump burst like a clap of thunder across the whole American nation, across the whole world.