Donald Trump is a bully, not a strongman. And Australia will pay for his destruction as he panders to the mega-rich

The Guardian

08-03-2025

For six weeks we watched as Donald Trump – primped with golden hair, bronzer, fat pens and a zigzag signature – played the lead role in his new series, The Strongman. It was solid, not great, television, driven by an unspoken, looming threat – what will he do next?
This makes sense if you understand that on the way to creating a new world order of unfettered, red-blooded, male-dominated American capitalism, there is also a cultural revolution. As Stephen Marche writes in the Atlantic: 'Washington today can be understood only as a product of show business, not of law or policy.'
True to the norms of show business, performance is all. There can only be one hero, everyone else must genuflect or cheer. So for weeks, other leaders, men who recognised that their power was not God-given or made in a TV studio, used the best tools their cultures bequeathed when dealing with erratic old men. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, charmingly patted The Strongman on the knee and quietly corrected him, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, came bearing an invitation from a real king. Lower-order Australians raised on a diet of neoliberalism offered lower-order Americans squillions of dollars – for defence and industry.
Unlike President Teddy Roosevelt, who in 1902 invited Vida Goldstein to advise on how America might copy Australia and give women the vote, few women of substance crossed the portal to this Oval Office.
And then The Strongman momentarily dropped his guard, overreached and became his true self, The Bully, while his wingman, JD Vance, sat itching to lay a killer punch on the war-weary president of Ukraine.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy sat quietly, the loss of his people and country heavy on his shoulders, until he was goaded into trying to set the record straight.
Trump must have loved being able to land his line: 'This is going to be great television.' No wonder some commentators thought it was planned. Close watchers thought it was one of those stoushes that got out of hand when the wingman's ignorance was challenged.
Any woman who has ever been treated as though they were from another, lower, species recognised the tactics. Belittle, gaslight, talk over, threaten, demand gratitude and dismiss.
It has long been clear that women were to be Trump's first target. He has made no secret of his contempt for women for decades, choosing to believe his mythic self-creation: 'When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.'
He quickly turned to attacking diversity, equity and inclusion policies, suggesting that the fatal collision between the Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines plane was the result of DEI. He began outlawing such policies, not just in government departments funded directly by the state, but every organisation that received grants, and every business that had a connection with the government. That included all the big ones of the old and new economy; public money is the lifeblood of many American enterprises.
The speed with which corporations fell into line was astonishing. The values that had been trumpeted for decades – of inclusion, opportunity, reflecting the diversity of society and tapping the best talent even if they weren't white men – evaporated. Forget the triple bottom line, sustainability and equity.
The Australian branches of American companies followed the directives from head office – scaling back policies that had begun to change the face of their workforces. The Australian Stock Exchange appeared to embrace the opportunity and abandoned new diversity reporting plans for listed companies.
Australian legislation to impose stronger gender and equity requirements on companies with government contracts still awaits Senate approval but it has started to change the nature of work and the opportunities available to women, as the income inequality data this week showed. It has been slower for other under-represented groups. The opposition, which has never managed to ensure appropriate representation of women in its own party, grasped the prospect of abolishing rules that ensured the public sector workforce reflected society.
The DEI attack was the first telltale sign of the sort of society Trump wants to create, one dreamt of for years by global libertarian thinktanks. The destruction of USAid underlined this single-mindedness, along with removal from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization, and undermining the National Institutes of Health.
These institutions are not window dressing. They did real good, gathered useful information, saved lives and enabled societies to function with a degree of humanity and safety. They softened the blows of unfettered capitalism and recognised the power of interconnectedness.
I write this waiting for Cyclone Alfred to cross the coast a kilometre from my house – ferocious winds and rain are threatening the worst. This is not random but a cyclone propelled too far south by tropical water temperatures, supercharged by the global heating that capitalism has refused to constrain.
American power is unprecedented. Its military bases dot the globe, its companies drive national economies, its popular culture shapes minds. But sticking to his script, the alacrity of The Strongman's determination to go it alone and create opportunities for the mega rich is astonishing.
Fifty years of effort to save capitalism from itself, to be inclusive, to respect the environment and rule of law, to use unprecedented knowledge to ameliorate likely impacts, has been jettisoned. Instead, the tech revolution, embraced by The Strongman and powered by the worst imperial notions, will leave a trail of extraordinary destruction and missed opportunities for a better, fairer world.
And in the wake of another International Women's Day, it is worth stating the obvious: women and the poor will suffer most.
Julianne Schultz is the author of The Idea of Australia