The last few days have demonstrated that the centre of Donald Trump’s politics is less policy than personal patronage — who is in the room, and who isn’t.
Overnight, it was confirmed that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese isn’t getting a meeting with the US president in New York this week. As Finn McHugh and Jennifer Duke wrote in today’s Political Capital, it’s more evidence of Trumpworld’s general ambivalence towards the Albanese government.
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Response to the Albo snub has predictably split along partisan lines, with the Coalition seeing it as evidence that the US-Australia relationship has totally collapsed, and Labor pushing the claim it proves the alliance is so robust that it doesn’t even need a check-in.
It’s easy to overegg the importance of a missed connection in Manhattan. But it’s also true that with AUKUS looking fragile and seemingly not very high on Trump’s list of often idiosyncratic priorities, any chance for Australia to make its case face-to-face is clearly valuable. (One assumes there’s a paragraph about this somewhere in The Art of the Deal.)