Will any Prime Minister “Love Actually” Donald Trump?

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Hi, it's PK here, host of the new politics podcast, Politics Now.

I'll be joined by the ABC's sharpest political minds to break down the biggest political stories of the day.

It's called Politics Now, and you can find it and follow it on the ABC Listen app.

So, ordinarily, we spend a week meticulously crafting each episode of this show, but sometimes when the news is moving so fast our production schedule kind of falls apart.

This is one of those times.

I don't want to call it unprecedented because chaos is very precedented these days, but essentially at the moment, once a week, a story is coming along that in any other time would be the story of the year.

My guest today is Dr.

Emma Shortis, an old friend of the show, director of the Australia Institute's International and Security Affairs Programme, host of the podcast After America, and writer of a book of the same name.

We initially booked her to talk about some aspects of the Musk-Trump breakup that we couldn't cover in last week's episode, but since then, massive protests have broken out across America over Trump's deportation policy.

The Trump administration has upended Australia's long-term defence strategy by reviewing the AUKUS Agreement.

And oh, yes, Israel and Iran seem to have started the war we've all been worried about for years.

Conveniently, all those things are very much inside Emma's area of expertise.

So it's a good thing we already had her booked.

G'day Emma.

Thanks for being here.

Pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

Last time we spoke was in Washington.

And we caught up a few times while we were both there to cover the election.

And the last thing, I don't know about what you did after we caught up for the last time we were in Washington, but the last thing that I did before leaving for the airport was I went and filmed a scene for our series America's Last Election in Lafayette Square.

And it involved, you know, me walking across Lafayette Square where Trump and his little group of advisors walked across after banishing protesters from the square in the midst of the George Floyd protests in 2020, walking over to the church near the side of the square and doing his photo op op

with

the Bible, the famous Bible showing off photo op.

And I've been thinking about that event

so much in the last little while for a number of different reasons, so many different reasons.

One being

that the people around him were so hesitant.

and getting in his way when he was trying to deploy the National Guard at the time and to, you know, move on protesters and

that kind of thing.

Are you as obsessed with that little period of time as I am?

The comparison between then and now?

I am.

Yeah.

I mean,

the last thing I did in the States was actually quite similar.

I went for a walk kind of around the mall and went to try and get a look at the White House and kind of just, you know, vibe it and see what was happening.

But you couldn't get there because everything was kind of barricaded because they were building all of the infrastructure for the inauguration.

So, DC has been kind of barricaded really

on and off ever since, you know, I mean, since that exact period that you were speaking about.

So, yeah, I do think about it all the time,

particularly in the context of exactly what you said,

that Trump did have people around him who were still enabling him.

You know, I don't think we should let them off the hook, but who

were kind of curbing his very worst instincts.

You know, that was the period when he was asking people in the White House, why can't you just shoot them?

Why can't you just shoot them in the legs about protesters?

And all of that makes what's happening in LA, you know, completely unsurprising.

Like, Trump has wanted to do this kind of thing for a decade.

But part of the reason he can do it now is because he doesn't have those people around him.

He's got people encouraging him, people who want him to do this.

People who want him to go further.

People like Stephen Miller, you know, Pete Hegseth is gunning for this kind of stuff as as well.

Chrissy Noam

is completely on board and kind of acting as the face of a lot of this.

And so none of it, I think, is surprising, but because that period you identified was always going to lead to exactly this place.

Aaron Powell, we're doing an episode that's coming out in a couple of days, which is about really Trump trying to

change the public perception of immigrants to

try and paint them all as villains and that kind of thing.

We're not going to be talking a whole lot about what is specifically happening in Los Angeles and in protests around the country and the situation that we're seeing on the streets.

So can you tell us a little bit about what the legality is of what we're seeing from Trump and the deploying of the National Guard and the pushback that we're seeing from the state government in California in the form of the governor, Gavin Newsom?

Yeah, it's all pretty extraordinary, isn't it?

I mean, I think the first thing I would say to that, Matt, is that

the legal issues are fairly straightforward

in that, you know, Trump's, particularly the deportation program, is deporting people without recourse to due process, which is not constitutional.

This is all very straightforward.

And we can kind of talk about that and talk about the intricacies of that.

But the problem is that the Trump administration doesn't care.

We are operating in a different reality now where those kinds of constitutional checks and balances, while they still exist, they haven't been completely undermined, you know, are just not respected by the administration.

You know, being undocumented in the United States is not a crime, it's a civil issue, not a criminal issue.

And, you know, deporting people arbitrarily without allowing them recourse to due process at times, allegedly when they are citizens, you know, this is how bad this process is, is of course illegal, but they don't care.

And

this is, again, this is the kind of new reality in which we are operating.

And I think that's why Gavin Newsom, who is a kind of classic like California Democrat, you know, with the hair and the teeth, and people understand him as like,

or Trump framed him, I suppose.

Republicans framed him as a radical leftist, but he's nothing of the sort.

You know, he's a centrist.

Like, we would almost, I think, in the context of Australian politics, consider him a kind of inner-city liberal.

He's a Malcolm Turnbull type.

He fits very much into what we would understand as a Malcolm Turnbull type, Mr.

Harbor's I'd mention.

I think that's exactly right, you know, the Californian version of that.

But Newsom has come out incredibly strongly against what Trump is doing for very good reason, you know, because you have Kirsty Noam, you know, in a press conference quite literally saying, we are here to liberate California from its burdensome leadership, i.e., we are here to overthrow a democratically elected state government.

That goes to some fundamental issues that Republicans historically have said are critical to them in terms of states' rights.

And so I think Newsom had no choice but to fight back in the way that he is doing.

And, you know, clearly has a lot of,

if you just go by how much

attention his most recent or one of his most recent speeches is getting, clearly there's a huge appetite for that.

Well, he seems positively delighted by the entire thing to a certain extent he uh I mean his um come and get me tough guy kind of thing he I mean he's seen an opportunity yeah absolutely he totally has no one has ever I mean apart from Donald Trump no one has ever been more uh excited about getting a mug shot um than than than than Gavin Newsom he would love it and he'd look very handsome in it I'm sure he'd have the hair done and

so

yeah I mean it's just fascinating how different it is when Trump has people around him who are there to enable him.

I mean, you know, they obviously have their own feelings and opinions and probably offer options to him.

But once he decides something, they actually go out and do it, as opposed to in the first administration when there were so many people who Trump would tell them to do something and they just

never do it.

Yeah.

You can't imagine Mark S.

Barr allowing the deployment of the Marines, for example.

No, absolutely not.

And in fact, and in fact, in the hours and days after that event in Lafayette Square,

which we were talking about, you know, he's sort of wrestling with and talking to Mark Milley, the head of the Joint Chief of Staff, about basically how can we not do what the president is ordering us to do?

What is, you know, how can we figure out a way to not do it?

Because we're not going to do it.

Which makes it kind of interesting what we've seen, you know, in the midst of this, which is kind of being covered up to a certain extent by this and i don't mean that in a in a in a cover-up kind of a way but it's just being overwhelmed by

the events on the streets too many things which is which is the the the schism the the break-off between what we would understand as the tech right

uh and and elon musk and his his doge cronies um and trump what do you make of that

and this this breakup between Musk and Trump in the midst of this going on.

I mean, the first thing I would say is that I think Trump and Musk were always going to fall out.

Like, there's just not enough room for egos of that size in the Oval Office.

Like, it was just always going to happen.

They both have main character syndrome.

There was no way Musk could win that fight with the actual president.

Right.

So that was always going to happen.

Whether it was, you know, whether the reason was just pure ego or an ideological clash, maybe we'll never be able to untangle that.

There have been suggestions, like you will have seen this as well, that it was, it partly began with that briefing that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was going to give Musk on China and

essentially.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

No, okay.

Tell us, tell us.

Yeah, sure.

So I think it was Cara Swisher, the tech jono, who kind of understands Musk, I think, better than almost anybody,

who has suggested that one of the triggers was this briefing that Hegseth was supposed to give Trump on Pentagon kind of war games, war planning with China.

Trump didn't like the visuals of Musk having access, I suppose, to that kind of information.

The briefing was swiftly cancelled.

It was kind of framed as a bit of a...

rebuke, I suppose, to Musk.

So there's a suggestion that that's one of the tipping points.

But again, there was always going to be a tipping point, wasn't there, because of those ego clashes.

And I think it's also true that Musk probably was one of the only voices in an administration overwhelmingly dominated by China hawks who may have been advocating for restraint because of very clear personal interests in the Chinese economy and in electric vehicle production in particular.

You know, that wasn't benevolence or anti-war on Musk's part.

That was entire self-interest, as is everything.

So, you know, I think.

Oh, no, but Musk is also a person who, I mean, apart from the fact that he benefits from it, he's a person who

strongly believes in the idea of a globalized economy and

of, you know, this country makes this and we make that and then you put them together and then that's a good way for everything to work.

And Trump,

for

complicated Trumpy reasons, wants that to not exist at all.

And so, yeah, I mean, that was a strong, massive ideological break between the two of them.

Absolutely.

And I think it reflects the kind of broader ideological clashes within the Trump coalition.

You know, that it's like it's kind of represented by Musk and Trump.

But Trump assembled quite a diverse coalition on the right that included the more kind of libertarian end of the spectrum, which arguably Musk is on, I think.

And Trump was always going to betray that wing of the coalition.

You know, when it comes to things like mass surveillance, for example, the role of the quote-unquote deep state and national security, you know, Trump staffed his whole administration, as I said before, with hawks and kind of national security types.

And so there was always going to be that kind of clash.

Musk occupies a kind of weird space in that, in that, you know,

he's kind of libertarian until it suits him.

You know, he's happy to subject other people to mass surveillance and data collection as long as it kind of doesn't affect him and his allies directly.

And so there are all these weird kind of ideological nuances and clashes going on, and also just kind of boys playing power games in that.

So again, it's kind of hard to untangle it all, I guess.

One of the things, obviously, we can now clearly see that the Doge program was essentially pointless from the start and

has not even come close to achieving even its massively scaled back goals.

And anything that they have achieved has been undone by the congressional

spending bill, which will presumably pass in some form.

There's sort of a temptation to go, okay, well, Doge, Doge, let's forget all about it and move on to other things.

But is that forgetting some of the people that are really going to suffer from the limited amount of work that Doge was actually able to do?

Yeah, I think it is.

I think that it will take us a while, I think, to understand the legacy of Doge and what it

has done.

And some of that, Matt, involves, you know, people in DC and Virginia in the surrounding area, which is all, you know, it's a public service town.

That you often have,

you know, a two-parent household where both people were employed by the federal government and both people have lost their jobs.

And, you know, that means moving.

That means that people have to move because the jobs in that area are all public servant jobs.

And you have thousands of people now who are unemployed looking for the same kind of work, right?

Competing against each other.

So, I mean, the base cruelty of that, I think you can't underestimate.

That kind of betrayal takes a long time to recover from.

The skills loss is also very significant in terms of the way the US government functions, which is archaic as well.

There was a lot made rightly, I think, of the fact that Doge was sending in children, effectively, teenagers,

to run complicated government systems that were effectively written in analog,

and have been functioning that way for sometimes decades.

And then you have people only trained in

modern code writing coming in and wrecking these systems.

you know the the ongoing legacy of that I think is potentially at least really significant and I think we also have to view it in the context of what else is happening in the federal government as well

you know I was really like I can't stop thinking about the

dismantling of USAID the the effective kind of foreign aid program of the United States government which one recent Boston University study has suggested has already resulted in 300,000 deaths worldwide directly through the immediate cessation of health programs or disease prevention programs.

And that's a conservative estimate.

That is a horrifying legacy, and it was completely avoidable.

Well, it's a man-made disaster.

Exactly.

And it kind of defies understanding as well, I think.

The numbers are so high.

But that's the kind of legacy that we're talking about.

Aaron Powell, what about when it comes to research into, you know, there's obviously there's been these cuts made to the CDC and

to research institutions.

Do you think that that will have long-term effects?

Or is there...

Because I understand there is some effort by

these agencies to go, oh, actually, just come back to work, please.

We just realised what you actually did.

Please come back to work.

Yeah, yeah.

The most recent example being all of the Iranian specialists in Voice of America.

I know.

I know.

Who were put on administrative leave and have been quickly called back.

Why would we need people who are experts in Iran and the Farsi language?

Why would we need those people?

I mean...

Yeah, exactly.

And I think to go back to your original question, you know, in terms of the CDC and health research in particular, you know, there are lots of stories of potentially really significant research and development programs around cancer research, for example, having their funding unilaterally withdrawn, especially when they're associated with Ivy League universities.

And, you know, as much as that system was not perfect, it was making pretty significant contributions to global health research.

You know, the United States is one of, or was one of the leaders there.

And so the long-term effects, I think, of that are very hard to measure because

how do you measure the impact of a research program on cancer prevention or cure that never went ahead, you know, that that was stopped kind of in its tracks.

That's a very difficult thing to measure.

And in terms of the United States role and reputation, again, that's potentially catastrophic.

And I've seen a few examples of governments, I think it was, I can't remember if it was Norway or Denmark, you know, investing millions of dollars in attracting those kinds of researchers to their own countries, you know, seeing this as an opportunity and offering world-leading researchers like stability and safety, which they don't have in the United States.

Like it's gotten so bad that many of these researchers, often, you know, who aren't American, they may not have citizenship, but have come to Ivy League University because they are the best, don't want to stay in the United States for very good reason.

And I think, you know, you combine that loss with what RFK Jr.

is doing in the health department, you know, firing all of the vaccine advisory board and replacing them with quote-unquote vaccine skeptics, which I think is a horrendous term.

But, you know, those, the flow-on effects of that.

Hmm.

Not sure.

Not too sure about vaccine.

I guess that makes me a skeptic.

Yes.

It's a fascinating.

Yeah.

Fun little term

they got there.

I want to ask you about Miles Taylor.

He was the guy who wrote the

anonymous letter to the New York Times, the anonymous.

Yeah, yeah, that guy.

I know.

He was the chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration.

He wrote this letter to the New York Times, which was published to much fanfare, basically saying that there is a big cabal of people inside of the Trump administration who are working to undermine his worst impulses and stop him from becoming an authoritarian dictator.

He's now now the subject of a number of investigations that have been launched by the Trump administration.

But he said the other day that the military crackdown in California is a manufactured crisis.

The end goal is more menacing than you think.

He's basically saying that sending the Marines into Los Angeles is not really about

this protest.

It's about some future protest.

Do you see some truth in that?

I do.

I'm not sure if it's about some future protest, but I think

Taylor is right in that Trump and the people around him have been waiting for an opportunity like this.

They've been waiting for a pretense, effectively, to send in the military against what they would describe as a sanctuary city or

a blue state,

effectively.

And we know this because Trump told us,

he made it clear during his first administration.

And then during the election campaign, he talked about deploying the military against what he described as enemies from within.

So I think Trump was always going to attempt to do this.

The question was when and what pretense he would use.

And LA gave him one.

It clearly gave him one.

I don't think the administration was necessarily prepared for the kind of backlash that that would engender.

You know, even from within the ranks of the Marines, like there are stories trickling out about Marines who are deeply uncomfortable with what's happening, some who have applied to not be deployed because of their conscientious objection to that.

So I don't think they have anticipated that.

I don't think they've anticipated.

Thank you, but I've noticed

that they're not going to be used to arrest fellow citizens, which is expressly prohibited.

I don't think the Trump administration is prepared for that or for nationwide resistance.

What's he going to do if protests emerge, as they are across the United States?

You can't send the Marines everywhere.

That's just logistically impossible.

But I also think we can't underestimate the strengths of that right-wing bubble.

You know, you will have seen as well the kinds of AI images that are circulating on right-wing social media of Los Angeles, you know, showing it on fire,

showing looting and directing all of that kind of against people who would appear to be immigrants.

You know, that is pretty convincing.

And I think Trump genuinely believes a lot of what he is seeing.

You know, he's kind of simultaneously your worst racist uncle, and also

a kind of genius of retail politics.

Like, both things can be true at once.

And so, I mean, I guess to kind of circle back to your question, you know, I'm not sure it was always about quashing other protests so much as continuing the assertion of a long-standing authoritarian agenda.

The last thing I want to ask you about before I let you go is, you know, obviously your special area of attention and research is not just into what is going on inside of America, but also Australia's relationship with America.

We're now seeing a situation where the US has decided to review whether or not the AUKUS military alliance actually follows the America First agenda.

This is basically an alliance, obviously, where Australia pays America

extraordinary amounts of money

in exchange for maybe some submarines one day.

What do you make of this?

We did polling at the Australia Institute in May asking Australians if they'd prefer a closer alliance with the United States or a more independent foreign policy.

And more than half chose a more independent foreign policy.

And that, in the context of Australian feeling about the security, the historic Australian feeling about the security alliance, that is a potentially at least seismic shift and anticipating where that is going to go, I think, is fairly straightforward, given what Trump is doing.

You know, Australians are reacting directly to how Trump is behaving in the United States and in the world.

And I think I don't want to...

make too much of a sweeping generalization, but the Australian kind of national security establishment is so unprepared for that kind of change in sentiment.

And that's why you see, you know, this pursuit or this insistence that AUKUS needs to be saved, that we need to offer Trump whatever he wants, whatever he needs, just to be nice to us and make sure he'll give us these submarines.

That push within that establishment is still so strong because it's just so fundamentally unprepared for this shift in

feeling and thinking about the United States.

That is driven by what Trump is doing.

You know, Trump has made it so clear he does not care about the United States' traditional allies.

Like he's literally threatened to invade Canada, right?

Like it's an extraordinary development.

And I think the Australian government, as difficult as it is, is going to have to respond to that new reality.

And

I certainly would advocate for taking the opportunity to get out of AUKUS, which was a terrible deal even before Trump, but also to pretty radically rethink our broader relationship with the United States under Trump.

Yeah.

I mean,

I've been thinking about

the...

This is going to seem like a very strange pivot, but I promise it'll come back to being logical.

I've been thinking about the movie Love Actually

and how silly Love Actually seems in so many different ways and how often Love Actually is criticised for being unrealistic in all these different ways.

And one of the biggest criticisms that I had had of that movie was of the entire plot that Hugh Grant goes through as the British Prime Minister.

He's, you know, got a crush on one of his staff, which is pretty weird.

But then the American President, Billy Bob Thornton, rocks up and he flirts with the staff member.

And then Hugh Grant does a big press conference with Billy Bob Thornton where he says, actually, we're going to be, we're going to have a much more separate foreign policy from the United States.

And we're not going to just do whatever America says anymore.

And I was like, a British prime minister would never do that.

That would never happen.

No, there would never be a bilateral press conference where there was, you know, tension between a prime minister of an allied country and the United States.

But now, I mean, I'm just waiting for

who the first allied leader is going to be to go fool Hugh Grant in one of those meetings.

You know, it's obviously not going to be Kierstara.

Keir Starmer seems to have some sort of a touch with Donald Trump.

It's not going to be Frederick Mertz.

So anyway, maybe that's what Albanese should do.

You know, jump in there.

Anything is possible, Matt.

Take a leaf out of Hugh Grant's book.

A fascinating conversation, Emma.

We obviously could keep talking forever.

And in fact, we've asked you to come back next week anyway, haven't we?

You have.

I'm excited to come back.

Because no doubt more things will happen.

No doubt.

I'll catch you this time next week.

Great.

See you then.

Thanks, Matt.

Emma will be back for another episode next week.

And together we will do our best to answer your questions about, let's just say, all of the things that we've discussed and whatever the news throws at us this week.

Please email your questions to ifyourelistening at abc.net.au.

This episode was produced and edited by Cinema Nippard.

Kara Jensen McKinnon is our supervising producer.

I'm Matt Bevan.

I'll be back on Thursday.