God Save the Trump, Because Nothing Will Save the Albanese
A balancing act might come unstuck if someone tugs at the rope...
At this late stage in the heinous crime that is the Gaza genocide, Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese appears to be performing a balancing act, in terms of recognising the state of Palestine on the one hand, whilst continuing the two-way trade in killing machines on the other, and the increasingly dictatorial leader of our closest ally, US president Donald Trump, doesn’t appreciate it.
The determination for Australia to recognise Palestine at the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly on 21 September 2025, followed the lead of other allies, such as the UK, Canada and France, in doing so. However, the grin-and-bear-it selfie pose that Trump granted Albanese says a lot: the mad king from Mar-a-Lago looks piqued with Albanese over his general political stance.
Those gathered at the weekly pro-Palestine protests on Gadigal land in Sydney and in Naarm-Melbourne are clear that recognition – at a moment when Israel is continuing to perpetrate a two-year-long mass slaughter and starvation program in the Gaza Strip and further, openly seeks to annex the West Bank – is an ineffective alternative to robust sanctions and a halt to the arms trade.
But one only has to switch the channel to Sky News to discover that the local MAGA cheer squad considers Albanese’s politicking on Palestine has amounted to rewarding terrorism, which is the position of president Trump, as well as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, despite his commission of mass atrocities, has had the ability to lately meddle in this nation’s domestic affairs.
Albanese’s balancing act has assisted in the mass murder of civilians in Gaza, along with the broader attempt to erase Palestinian identity, and it’s failed to appease either side of the political divide domestically or on the international stage. And as he attempts to forge an independent path from his US masters quite late in the day, it would appear that he may simply be digging his own grave.
Extraterritorial politicking
Despite suggestions to the contrary, Albanese was left off Trump’s official meeting schedule last Monday at the United Nations in New York. This was his second snubbing at the hands of the US president, although another attempt is slated for October. So, after 240-plus days of Trump’s presidency, all our PM has had the chance to do is take a quick selfie on the sidelines at the UN.
The snubbing of Albanese by the mad king has continued ever since Trump’s 20 January 2025 inauguration, and it’s transpired as this nation has handed the US two AU$800 million payments, one in January and another in July, to invest in American submarine-building capacity, so the US hopefully honours the AUKUS deal, which is under review, and sells us three attack submarines in the 2030s.
Trump’s 23 September address at the United Nations had a focus on western nations, while ignoring the 85 percent of the planet that is the Global South. The agenda he laid down for the west calls on heads of state to crackdown on “unmitigated migration” and to return to fossil fuel use, as the climate crisis and renewables, the US president suggests, are “the greatest con job ever perpetrated”.
As far as Trump’s recommendation that European nations, which appears to include the antipodean countries, commence cracking down on migrants and move towards a reversal of the global shift to climate abatement, Albanese has already recently passed laws that would facilitate a local asylum-seeker deportation drive, however he’s only just taken an opposite stance on climate.
The Albanese government announced a new carbon emissions reduction target on 18 September, a week prior to Trump’s global “drill baby drill” call, which comprises of reducing this nation’s greenhouse gas by 62 to 70 percent by 2035, with the aim of achieving net zero emissions by 2050, and this is obviously to the chagrin of the climate destroying-focused Trump administration.
And the Albanese-Trump selfie says it all. An overly enthusiastic Albanese captures his brief encounter with the king, who feigns a smile - an evidentiary image to share online - yet our PM should really be shown more respect as a leader of a nation that’s currently letting the US trample its military footprint, or force posture, in north Australia at a pace that calls for appreciation not derision.
“Nothing will save the governor general”
In a June 2020 article titled The Forgotten Coup Against ‘The Most Loyal Ally’ heavyweight journalist John Pilger elaborates upon the infamous November 1975 dismissal of then Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam by then governor general of the nation Sir John Kerr at the time when secret mid-1970s correspondence between Queen Elizabeth II and the then GG Kerr was released.
Whitlam was dismissed by the governor general, who exercised his reserve powers that allow for the sacking of the top minister. Those powers are not in the Constitution but are by convention and rest in the authority of the Crown. The GG is the King’s representative in the constitutional monarchy that is Australia, and as the king is the true head of state, toppling the government is permissible.
The regular understanding as to why the GG terminated the reformist government is the top heavy Coalition Senate repeatedly blocked the passage of a supply bill, or legislation to facilitate government funding, so the coffers were fast running dry and Kerr stepped in. According to Pilger, however, the 11 November 2025 dismissal of the Whitlam government was an “Anglo-American coup”.
The late journalist outlined that the CIA sought to overthrow “a democratically elected ally in a demeaning scandal in which sections of the Australian elite colluded”. Pilger underscored that this version “is largely unmentionable”, and adds that over the 1972-1975 reign of Whitlam, the nation “briefly achieved independence” from US tutelage, and due to its socially progressive reformist drive, the government “became intolerably progressive” for Washington.
Whitlam ordered local troops out of the US-led Vietnam war. He called for an end to French nuclear testing in the Pacific. He supported Palestinians, welcomed refugees from the CIA-led coup in Chile and drafted legislation to enact Aboriginal land rights, which was ultimately never passed.
But most disturbing for the US is Whitlam raised questions about the viability of having the Pentagon operating its second most important surveillance base on the planet, Pine Gap, in the Red Centre of the continent of many nations. Today, the joint US-Australia facility is understood to be passing intel about Gaza onto the US, which ultimately ends up with intelligence in Tel Aviv.
“The CIA referred to the governor general of Australia, Sir John Kerr, as ‘our man Kerr’,” recalled Pilger, and he also set out that Whitlam was aware the CIA, then under director William Colby, was acting against him, and he was in the midst of attempting to rid local intelligence agencies of CIA officers. So, against this backdrop, the US ordered Kerr to sack Whitlam via the House of Windsor.
Trashing Five Eyes democracy
Albanese has hardly been riding a reformist wave in office. In fact, he’s been kowtowing to US masters and embroiling the nation ever deeper into AUKUS, which Donald Trump has called upon US undersecretary of defence policy Elbridge Colby to review with an eye to its viability for the US. Incidentally, Elbridge is the grandson of the CIA director at the time of the dismissal.
The Australian prime minister is continuing to attempt his balancing act, which includes placating the mad king Donald Trump, so it might be considered that there is no reason for the White House to be concerned with his governing over a territory America is increasingly concerned with having unimpeded access over as it militarises the region for a coming war on China.
The second coming of the Trump administration doesn’t just operate in the dark either, as it is openly interfering in the political spheres of its foreign allies, and rather than diplomacy, belligerence is the new foreign policy outlook of the United States, which has been on display since day one with its repeated threats to annex Canada and to cut normal ties with its long-time neighbouring ally.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk, not long after he took a chainsaw to US departments on behalf of the Trump administration, recently made a televised appearance before the largest white nationalist rally in the UK for decades, and he openly incited the Anglo-Celtic British public to rise up against the UK government to overthrow it, as he claims it’s destroying the country via mass immigration.
Indeed, the authoritarian US Trump administration is starting to appear as if it considers its domestic crackdown, including its drive to dehumanise and deport immigrants, should be replicated by its allies and as Albanese continues his tightrope act that seeks to appease both sides of the growing political divide, he should be wary that Trump doesn’t tug at the rope to see how he might fall.
