Albo's Trump card
The Labor government is trying to maintain an equilibrium by avoiding Donald Trump's wrath without sucking up to him.
As Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th US president on Monday (Tuesday AEDT), doubling down on his America First Agenda to “tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens”, Anthony Albanese stuck to his ‘less is more strategy’ in dealing with Trump 2.0.
Albanese has still only had one conversation with the new president, a day after Trump won the 5 November election. And unlike Justin Trudeau, who subsequently was ridiculed by Trump in a series of social media posts, Albanese did not attempt to meet Trump in person at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida (which he could have done before, after or during his trip to South America for the APEC and G20 summits in November).
Asked on the ABC’s 7.30 program on Monday night whether he had received assurances by Trump that Australia would not be subject to his tariffs, Albanese merely referred to the “constructive discussion” he had with him in November and repeated the fact that the US “enjoyed a trade surplus with Australia”. The highlighting of the trade surplus, which is the same strategy Malcolm Turnbull used when Trump was last in office, is also being deployed by Asian countries to differentiate themselves from China.
Albanese is essentially following Lowy Institute executive director Michael Fullilove’s how-to guide for US allies dealing with Trump, published last year in The Atlantic, where he urged leaders to maintain an equilibrium by neither sucking up to Trump nor hurling insults at him.
