Barnaby Joyce was planning to make the pilgrimage to the Mar-a-Lago shrine to Donald Trump midyear. He’d been invited on an all-expenses-paid trip. His wife, Vikki Campion, had another idea. Woolbrook Public School was due to hold its community barbecue at the local Bunnings and Barnaby and Vikki were rostered to work it.

“Your children go to Woolbrook Public School,” Barnaby recounts Vikki telling him. “You’re not going.” He cancelled the trip to the US.

Trump is a false idol and his local franchisee is dumping the brand

Peter Hartcher

Now that the American electorate has repudiated Trump, the decision is looking especially smart. The national swing against his Republican Party across all House elections tallied to 8 per cent, according to the News24 numbers man Tom Connell. For scale, that’s double the size of the swings in the previous three US midterms. The last time there was a swing of 8 per cent was in reaction to the economic devastation of the global financial crisis, when Barack Obama was in the White House.

It’s only the fourth time since World War II that both the US House and Senate have flipped from one party to another in the same midterms.

Donald Trump suddenly is more radioactive than an Iranian nuclear reactor. Across the world, right-wing populist parties are backing away from him. In Australia, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation quickly and quietly removed from its website an article offering itself as the local franchisee of the Trump brand: “Want Trump’s action and style, then it’s One Nation you need”, ran the headline.

Reinforcing the close identification was a photoshopped picture of the two great leaders, Hanson and Trump, together. Oops. It must have seemed so clever and exciting at the time it was published, January 23, 2025, the week Trump was inaugurated for his second presidency.

The midterms pronounced a harsh verdict on Trump’s affiliated billionaires, too. The Republican billionaires on the ballot, Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio and Rick Jackson in Georgia, lost to Democrats. And Elon Musk’s record campaign funding for Republicans of some half a billion dollars was powerless against the popular will. Musk proved more useful to the Democrats as a loathed campaign target than to Republicans as a generous campaign support. So it’s not surprising that another Australian acolyte of Trump’s, billionaire Gina Rinehart, has gone very quiet since the midterms.

In Europe, France’s National Rally, Germany’s AfD, Italy’s The League and Futuro Nazionale parties, and Spain’s Vox all distanced themselves from Trump in comments after the midterms. Neither did Britain’s Nigel Farage of the Reform UK party try to defend the Republicans’ “complete and utter rout”.

Is the right-wing populist franchise bust? Trumplike leaders in five countries have lost national elections in the past year and a half. All were populist right-wingers with autocratic tendencies. All had proudly affiliated themselves with Trump.

In Poland, Hungary, Serbia and Brazil, the Trumplike leaders failed. Trump’s Brazilian buddy, Flavio Bolsonaro, cried “fraud” and took political asylum in the US. Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić lost to an upstart student-led movement that didn’t even have a leader. The Student List party had to hold discussions to decide which of them would claim victory on election night. Trump’s Israeli ally, Benjamin Netanyahu, lost his parliamentary majority, though he remains in office while negotiations over a new government continue.

“The Trump brand is lost,” says Stanford University political scientist Francis Fukuyama. “Donald Trump has become toxic. No foreign political party is going to want to get close to him.

“The main issue that united them was immigration but that’s gotten under control in most areas and it’s no longer the same burning issue. What holds populist nationalist together now is the style, more than anything else, that allows them to be racist and insulting.“

And, in countries where they’ve held power, “these populist parties aren’t good at governing. Hungary used to be one of the richest countries in Europe; Viktor Orban ran it into the ground with cronyism and corruption.”

Yet while the Trump franchise may be bust, Fukuyama says that it’s too early to dismiss right-wing populists as a force. He points out that Marine Le Pen is poised to win the presidency of France in April. Italy is due for election next year, too, with potential gains for the far right.

“We may have a couple more moves in that direction,” Fukuyama tells me, “but a lot of wind has come out of the sails of the populist nationalists”.

The implications in Australia are several. We shouldn’t lose sight of the very big picture. Despite fears to the contrary, liberal democracy is alive and well. The world has been in a “democratic recession” since the global financial crisis. The number of democracies has been shrinking. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual democracy index surveys 167 nations and counts only 26 as full democracies. It has not counted the US as a full democracy since 2015; it classifies it as a “flawed democracy”. Trump tested the limits of the system. In his last term and again this term.

In the US, elections are administered by the states, as the Constitution stipulates, and not the federal government. But, in recent months, Trump strained to seize election powers from the states so that Washington DC could control the outcome of the midterms. But Congress refused to pass his so-called SAVE America bill. State governors and legislatures resisted his efforts. The courts dismissed Trump’s attempts to litigate his way to control over the ballots. The media remained robustly untamed. The checks and balances were under pressure yet held.

The greatest check, however, was the American public, who turned out strongly and voted decisively. Trump accepted the result. This concession is not personally painful to him. He still has his post, his profile, his billions and opportunities to make billions more, and considerable power.

It’s too early to declare US democracy safe. We’ve yet to see how Trump behaves when his time in the White House ends. But, for now, the world’s most important democracy has reasserted its credentials as a functioning democracy.

The Democrats now have the opportunity to put “liberal” back into US liberal democracy, by which I don’t mean leftist policies; I mean the restoration of citizens’ rights and constitutional limits on executive power. All of this acts as a deterrent to politicians in other nations, including Australia, to mimic Trump’s worst autocratic instincts.

For the Australian political parties? First, One Nation. It realises that it has overstepped. “The core message is that performative charlatanry has a shelf life and will be exposed ultimately,” says politics professor emeritus at Monash University, Paul Strangio. One Nation’s vote share stalled in June. The US midterms “must punch a hole in One Nation to a degree”.

What lessons does Barnaby Joyce’s draw for One Nation? “Don’t go too far,” he tells me, before quoting Tacitus: “From wisdom comes moderation”.

Yet the party retains some policies that are far from moderate. Its immigration policy, for instance, promises a net outflow of people for three years. This is impractical for the functioning of the economy. But One Nation’s shuffling embarrassment over its Trump fetish is not any sort of salvation for the Albanese government. Because while Trump’s politics and policies are in another universe to Labor’s, they share one big feature in common – both are incumbents.

Incumbency is a liability in a time of inflationary discontent. It is a destroyer of governments. Labor needs to show that it can help to solve inflation, not just find scapegoats for it. “They need to show that they have a plan,” advises Strangio. Senior Labor figures agree.

The Liberals are Australia’s biggest potential beneficiaries of this post-midterms politics. As one senior Liberal puts it: “The slavish devotion of some on the Australian political right to right-wing populism – that we must do what they’re doing if we want to win – has been completely blown up.

“The US elections show that economic performance is still the most important credential. The rubbish about Trump being a uniquely gifted politician is exposed. The laws of politics are immutable – if you make people’s lives worse, they will punish you.

“To focus on economic competence is a very good pathway for us to take if we want to return to government. We don’t have to do crazy things.”

Liberals, get off your knees. Trump is a false idol. And his local franchisee is dumping the brand; you can stop trembling at her feet. Can you recover your standing as the most credible economic manager? The opportunity is before you.

Will Barnaby accept a future invitation to Mar-a-Lago? “I’ll have to check the barbecue schedule”.

Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/trump-is-a-false-idol-and-his-local-franchisee-is-dumping-the-brand-20261107-p61c0d.html

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