Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, politicians who copy Trump exude a uniquely snivelling, craven subservience, all the while believing themselves to be the tough guys.
Witness Australia’s very own Peter Dutton licking the arse of a foreign despot, by plagiarising Trump’s threats against diversity and inclusion programs and plagiarising Trump’s gleefully reckless gutting of the government workforce. The timing really emphasises the rhetorical cheating.
These destructive policies help their respective nations in much the same way as would stabbing ourselves in the face with a fork. Diversity is widely known to promote efficiency and efficacy, and (lest I contradict fascist thought) is just morally good. There are better and worse ways to promote diversity (and sometimes we make mistakes in how we go about it), but there can be no doubt about the importance of the goal. To oppose diversity and inclusion is to oppose fairness, egalitarianism and human dignity.
And those “wasteful” government workers? They stick together the whole bloody country. If you want to have a nation, in any meaningful way, you need a strong public service to act on behalf of it. And we aren’t just talking about frontline services to the public (as important as that is). The public service must have the resources to analyse, strategise, plan, and organise things behind the scenes. If it lacks the workforce for this, then it actually ends up spending even more money outsourcing those functions to enormous for-profit consultancies. And that’s just a recipe for waste and corruption.
Dutton’s alignment to Trump is hardly surprising, at first glance. Dutton is stunningly racist. He represents the regressive barbarism of Australian politics that would rather bludgeon someone in the streets than to stoop to critical self-examination. He knows how to rile people up, to build a monster out of fear, to make an enemy of good-will itself, so that his politics can appear to be the answer.
But Dutton is also congenitally incapable of generating his own ideas. He has to import them. Trump himself is probably no more able to generate ideas, but does serve as the key centre of mass around which the new fascist movement has coalesced. And (in crayon) the key insiders of that movement feed Trump all the ideas he needs.
Whatever the dubious provenance of Trump’s ideas, trying to ape Trump doesn’t really work on a couple of levels. First, he’s utterly, inhumanly incompetent. In term one, even his supporters began to see this once he actually had to do something himself, aside from blaming others. His political instincts work for him in an election campaign when he has a foil, a powerful opponent to belittle and tear into, but he wasn’t able to adapt to actually being in charge. And so, being the understudy of a fatuous clown probably isn’t good politics for anyone else in the long run.
Second, you certainly can’t pretend to be like Trump when you’re actually interacting with him, as the Australian government surely must on a regular basis. Trump doesn’t want to be a franchise. He wants to be the uncontested king, the gravitational mass at the centre of the entire universe. There can only be one of him; if there were two, they’d fight each other to the death.
Thus (while Trump is still alive), other political leaders face two choices: they must either resist and retain some dignity, or thoroughly debase themselves before Trump with everyone watching. There’s no in-between, or going-around.
So what’s Prime Minister Dutton going to do when it comes to a trade war between the US and Australia? What’s Prime Minister Dutton going to do when Trump, perpetually aggrieved, demands Australia pay some insane tribute to the US, for whatever hilariously spurious reason, and holds the ANZUS Treaty to random?
It was bad enough watching John Howard’s obsequiousness towards US president George W Bush, back in the early 2000s. But Howard’s intellect towers over Dutton’s, and W is a moral giant next to Trump. And Dutton is already debasing himself in public.