Why are we still taking Donald Trump literally?

How darkly ironic it is that Donald Trump’s re-election to the presidency of the United States should be followed so quickly by a round of the very global diplo-summits (COP, APEC, the G20) of whose existence Mr Trump’s election is perhaps the deepest American repudiation.

Mr Trump does not attend these meetings (he hovers above them, a beaming tangerine Zeppelin) but our own prime minister turned up to them all, repeating his sensible mantra that Australia is a trading nation, that free trade is good for the world and good for America, that a rules-based system benefits us all.

And all that is true and would be perfectly fine, were there not mounting grounds to suspect that the next big geopolitical rearrangements won’t derive from the incremental clause-tweaking of earnest trade officials in Lima convention centres, but rather from the meaty tectonics of approximately half a dozen men (Trump, Putin, Bibi, Xi, Khamenei, Kim) each of whom has a significant army, and enough of whom have daddy issues to make things interesting.

This is the new high table of world diplomacy. It’s been going that way for a while; even under the Democrats, the US has starved the World Trade Organization, while over at the OECD, poor Mathias Cormann’s valiant attempt at a global minimum tax to corral tax-dodging multinationals was pretty much becalmed even way back when President Biden was still capable of cogently ordering a cheese steak.

What is baffling is that anyone at all still bustles about expecting that things will still work as they used to. That normal codes of diplomatic bureaucracy will still work in the same way, that free trade breaches will be punished, that being accused of a war crime will mean something, and so on.

Literalism in politics is kind of dead, or at least heading that way, and we can’t say we weren’t warned.

Somehow the field is still full of literalists

It’s now eight years since The Atlantic’s Salena Zito made probably the most pellucid observation of all about Trump — BEFORE he won, not after: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

Trumpwise, we are a win, a loss, and another win down the track from then, and somehow the field is still full of literalists, asking with furrowed brows and palms turned heavenward how it is that America can possibly elect a convicted felon, how it is that Donald Trump can call climate change a hoax and promise a 60 per cent tariff on Chinese imports and somehow still spoon Elon Musk, a green-car billionaire whose vehicles won’t even get out of bed without Ganfeng Lithium. Or how Robert F Kennedy Jr’s stated aim to blow up the “industrial food complex” could possibly make him a good health secretary for a president who is a registered cheeseburgerian.

One year ago, another writer at The Atlantic — James Parker, in an ancillary note to a column that was otherwise principally concerned with the merger between World Wrestling Entertainment and the newer, crunchier Ultimate Fighting Championship — made a series of prescient observations about Donald Trump.

“Pro wrestling is a thunderdome of images, the human comedy at near-celestial scale,” Parker explained. “Its lingo, its carny slang, expresses some kind of hierarchy of awareness, but where wrestling begins and where it ends, no one can say … Booming characters preen and dominate; nuance is banished. This is heavy-metal America.”

In this audience, turning up and enjoying the show doesn’t make you an idiot. What makes you an idiot is believing it all to be real.

For the true cognoscenti in the room, half the fun is watching the rubes who aren’t in on the joke, while the initiated take “an ironist’s or an aesthete’s pleasure in the pageantry and the bombast and the medieval moral drama”, as Parker put it.

Pro wrestlers adopt elaborate, outsized characters for their work in the ring. Some are “babyfaces” (heroic types) while others are “heels” (villains), who break rules, cheat, cause offence, do anything to generate “heat” — a torrid reaction from the crowd.

“Much of Trump’s most appalling public behaviour — say, that impression of a disabled reporter — is in the repertoire of a classic heel,” wrote Parker. “To loudly deplore it, to boo and hiss, only reassures his fans.”

The only direction for the dial is up

When Trump appeared at the Republican National Convention in July this year, he was introduced not by a GOP grandee as tradition would ordinarily dictate, but by Dana White, the owner of Ultimate Fighting Championships. Who himself was preceded by the famed wrestler (babyface-turned-heel) Hulk Hogan, in layered T-shirts with a nuclear half-life of approximately 60 seconds.

These casting decisions were greeted with an orchestrated howl of contempt and disbelief from the non-Trumpy sections of the commentariat; exactly as the showman had planned, one suspects.

Likewise, Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, a bro-down at which comedian Tony Hinchliffe told racist jokes and Tucker Carlson gibed that Kamala Harris hoped to become the first “Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor” in the White House.

Screeches and boos from horrified rubes are an indispensable element of the WWE spectacle. And like the pro that he is, Trump knows that in order to keep outrage fresh, the only direction for the dial is up.

Viewed through this lens, his recent cabinet appointments make perfect sense.

The Department of Justice is to be run by a man accused of obstructing it. Defence will be run by a weekend TV host with a six-pack and a questionable tattoo.

The health secretary will be a man who cannot tolerate the pollution of America’s potable water supply with fluoride but thinks nothing of dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park.

How can all this possibly work?

It already has.

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Hyper-literalism down under

In Australia, we’ve had our own instance of hyper-literalism in recent weeks, with various conservative figures and News Corp outlets getting their undies in a bunch over former prime minister and now ambassador Kevin Rudd, calling for his sacking because he has called Donald Trump a “village idiot” among several other uncomplimentary epithets.

This is funny for two reasons.

First: If there’s one thing Donald Trump clearly loves even more than pasting an enemy, it’s watching that enemy be forced to approach on bended knee. If Mr Rudd is prepared to close his eyes and think of Queensland, his mandated obeisance alone will be a more than pleasing trinket to the Orange One.

Second: The last time an Australian prime minister actively insulted an American president — a serving one at that — The Australian was oddly silent on the question of whether the resultant diplomatic froideur from our major ally was a resigning matter. Even though the PM in question was the very same Kevin Rudd.

Why? Because that particular insult was delivered with the active connivance of the newspaper itself. Mr Rudd was hosting The Australian’s editor Chris Mitchell for late-night drinks at Kirribilli in October 2008, and invited Mitchell to eavesdrop while he jumped on a call with the leader of the free world, George W Bush.

Later, the Rudd office approved a reported version of the exchange to appear as a scoop on the paper’s front page, which made much of Mr Rudd’s ease and confidence and contained, halfway through the account, this fateful line: “Rudd was then stunned to hear Bush say ‘What’s the G-20?'”

Obviously, to leak details of a leader-to-leader phone call is bad enough. To leak a line that makes the US president look like an idiot is quite a bit worse. And Mr Bush was indeed a touch frosty with his handshake when meeting Mr Rudd in Washington just weeks later.

But the relationship recovered, because even back then, when diplomatic convention provided some degree of predictability, these things didn’t end up amounting to all that much.