Donald Trump trespassed on the federal election and poisoned Peter Dutton's campaign

By Alan Kohler

• Topic:Australian Federal Elections

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When I got home from voting on Saturday, I was confronted on social media by a picture of Donald Trump dressed as a pope.

He had posted the picture himself, would you believe, and then the official White House account reposted it.

A day earlier, a reporter had asked the US president who he would like the cardinals to elect as the next pope, and Trump replied: "I'd like to be pope. That'd be my number one choice."

That night as I watched the Coalition getting smashed at the polls, I thought about that picture and the fact that Trump had celebrated his first 100 days with a "worship and prayer event" in the White House and by declaring — again — that Joe Biden had been the worst president in US history. It was the opposite of grace.

The Coalition's attempt to have it both ways — to retain net zero by 2050 as policy using a nuclear energy fantasy while preferencing One Nation in 57 electorates — has been exposed as an egregious failure.

Australians saw through it and dealt with Peter Dutton as if he were Donald Trump.

Then I watched Dutton's gracious concession speech in which he said that after congratulating Anthony Albanese and wishing him well, he told him his mother would be proud of him. And after pointedly acknowledging the traditional owners of the land, the prime minister was equally gracious about his defeated opponent.

They both went out of their way to be the opposite of Trumpish because they can now see clearly that the US president, and the world's predominant politician, has become political poison.

The statistics tell the story

First Canada, then Australia.

On January 21, the day Donald Trump was inaugurated, the Conservative Party of Canada was polling at 44.8 per cent and the centre-left Liberal Party of Canada sat on 21.9 per cent. It was going to be a landslide.

At the same time, the Australian Labor Party's two-party preferred polling was at 48.9 per cent and the Coalition was 51.1 per cent: Labor was in trouble and Dutton looked set to pull off an incredible victory. It would have been the first loss by a first-term government since the Great Depression.

When the Canadian election was held on April 28, 97 days into Trump's second term, the Liberals won the popular vote, and its leader Mark Carney became prime minister. The leader of the conservatives, Pierre Poilievre, lost his seat.

How Labor won

The Australian people speak, delivering Anthony Albanese "a win for the ages".

In Australia, the polling had flipped by election eve: Labor, 52.9 per cent to the Coalition's 47.1 per cent. And last night when counting closed, it was much worse for the Coalition than anyone expected: 56.1 to 43.9. Labor had won an historic landslide.

Oh, and Peter Dutton lost his seat.

Trump hadn't been saying that Australia should become America's 51st, or perhaps 52nd state, as he had of Canada, almost deliberating stirring them up, but as Tony Barry and Barrie Cassidy wrote last week: "The Trump effect has https://www.theguardian.com/co..." data-component="Link">cruelled Peter Dutton's campaign

"Nothing else — no other single factor — can explain such a dramatic collapse in support in just a few short weeks," they wrote.

A lot of Dutton's wounds were self-inflicted. His poor campaigning in particular and the nuclear energy policy that served to unite the Coalition by providing a path for the National Party to go along with "net zero by 2050", turned out to be a big mistake.

The Trump effect and the war against woke

But it's remarkable how quickly Trump has become a negative for conservative political movements around the world, only six months after he rode a global wave of right-wing populism to victory.

How did this happen?

Two key reasons stand out: authoritarianism and hypocritical religiosity.

Trump's behaviour is clearly anti-democratic — he's even talking about running again in 2028 and his public cabinet meetings are fawn fests.

He is also leading a hectic semi-religious revolution through executive orders and emergency declarations that are based primarily on dogma and half-baked, unscientific beliefs, while posturing as an almost Messianic religious figure.

The question commonly asked about the second Trump presidency is: what's really going on?

Is it a pre-planned autocratic takeover, like that of Victor Orban in Hungary, or even Hitler in 1930s Germany?

Or maybe it's mainly a reshaping of the global economy in America's favour along the lines of the paper published by Trump's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Stephen Miran, last year, headed: "A User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System". This is what the financial markets think is going on.

Or is it about Russell Vought, the author of Project 2025, using Trump as a real-life experiment in Unitary Executive Theory, the extreme constitutional law system to which he subscribes and in which the president of the United States has sole authority over the executive branch?

Some are suggesting the Trumpists are a sort of modern anarcho-syndicalist movement or the sans-culotte revolutionaries of late 18th-century France trying to burn down the system entirely in order to rebuild it.

Others think that they are simply a group of idiots led by an idiot who stumbled into power and are, inevitably, making a hash of it.

But the idea that perhaps makes the most sense of everything is that Trump is the figurehead of a fervent ideological revolution against wokeism, and that a better analogy for him is not Hitler, or Orban or Robespierre, but Pope Paul III who, in the mid-16th century led a counter-reformation against Protestantism.

At the risk of over-burdening the metaphor, the Catholic Church would be the right-wing neoliberalism that ruled the world in the 1980s and 90s, and "Protestantism" the "woke mind virus" — that is, action against climate change, pro-immigration, DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), affirmative action, transgender rights, and left-wing stuff in general. The "https://www.worldhistory.org/a..." data-component="Link">Martin Luther and 95 Theses

Wokeism grew steadily after that, based on feminism and environmentalism, but really took off in the US in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter movement.