The impact of Trump 2.0 on Australia is evidence of how American we suddenly aren’t | Van Badham

Australians have found the behaviour of our American cousins challenging of late. Cultural differences yawn as wide as the Pacific between us. We were not sad to see “the baby wombat grabber” go.

The first mistake made by Montana-based tourist Sam Jones, Online Influencer, was to snatch a joey from its mother at night. Her second mistake was to sway the frightened creature in front of some gormless chucklehead who filmed her – giggling – and to upload the footage to the internet.

Her video roared across local social media like measles after an RFK Jr confirmation. Australians united in vim; there were headlines, mass petitions and demands for her deportation.

Last month, the killing of up to 10 wombats in the Victorian town of Venus Bay was crueller and more disgusting but did not obsess the discourse. Was it because Jones created a handy audio-visual to publicise her marsupial-monstering nitwittery that she faced such clamouring scorn?

Or did Sam Jones’ most relevant mistake to Australians lie in being a chaotic dickhead … while American?

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, finds himself weeks out from an election navigating – as the modern leader must – the capricious behaviour of the nuclear-armed chaotic dickhead Americans re-elected as their president. Australians may have hoped our image as a floating zoo at the end of the world with cube-shitting mammals may have spared us Trump’s Make America Like the Start of the Great Depression Again tariffs policy but, unusually, luck has failed us. Steel and aluminium exports will be hit with a 25% tariff, beef may be next – while our largest export to the United States turns out to be vaccines and related products and hahahahaha, dear Christ but doom is certain.

Given Annexing Canada is both an active Trump policy and so insane it wasn’t even suggested in Project 2025, Australian leadership must deftly manage an evolving geopolitical economic reality that most closely resembles a bus driver on an eight-day coke bender who has just locked his passengers in the vehicle to joyride through a minefield with a rabbit in his pants. Albanese’s colleague Ed Husic called Trump’s tariffs against Australia “a dog act” – he was deployed, one surmises, because he’s minister for science, so Trump’s GOP can’t acknowledge he exists. Resisting temptation to retaliate (with a tariff on “your stupid face”, perhaps?), Albanese described Trump’s move as “unfriendly”. Within 24 hours, he suggested wombat-botherer Sam Jones go Fafo with some crocodiles. Maybe there was something on his mind.

Still, you’d rather be him than Peter Dutton, whose notoriously underdeveloped judgment muscle was exerted in praise for Trump as a “big thinker” barely a month and US$4tn-since-wiped-from-US-stock-valuations ago. Beyond Trump’s splatterfest of the world economy and therefore your super balance (medicate before you look), the overwhelming impact of Trump 2.0 on Australians is evidence of how American we suddenly aren’t.

Our two countries share a history as outposts of brutal British imperialism and the legacy of the coloniser’s language, yet at key points in our twinned story, our decisions have diverged.

America received entrepreneurial puritans while Australia’s criminal class settler-colonists banged by the beach. America chose revolution from Britain, Australia the slow path of reform. America’s structuralised slavery ended only after violent civil war. Australia’s historical exploitation of enslaved people was limited and ended through the efforts of a nascent labour movement, if one motivated by racist “they take our jobs” attitudes of the time.

The differences weren’t overwhelming when we were both liberal democratic states, fighting together for freedom in the first and second world wars … but does America, like, even do that any more?

Generations of migration and cultural reckoning (or non-reckoning) with local Indigenous cultures have since mobilised our societies towards different values that Trump’s extremity underlines. The deep polarisation he cheerleads confronts Australia’s “go along to get along” culture of compromise; his conservative policing of other people’s behaviour meets our “each to their own” tolerant shrug. Rather than the competitive individualism Trump personifies, Australian “mateship” persists as a virtue rooted in deep camaraderie, mutual support and egalitarian friendship, forged in the recognition on this burning, flooding, even-the-baby-wombats-hate-you land; you depend on each other, or you die.

So while citizens of this sparser, less-dramatic country stay enthralled by the many US entertainment products we consume, it’s the very visibility of American culture to us that affirms our alienation from it. The internet may “speak American” but in the wake of Americans complaining online about healthcare, struggling through a mismanaged disaster or mourning another mass shooting, Australian pity speaks back in a register between “how can you let this happen?!” and self-satisfied relief.

Cultural relationships are timely for Australia to consider. As Trump forsakes old alliances, the world realigns. The EU tightens its bonds, Canada grows closer to Europe; could we? China seeks out new spheres of influence. Outer rim figures from the Australian Labor party are suggesting the old Commonwealth relationships are worth re-formalising. In the scenario of nations obliged to choose between authoritarian allies, do we feel more secure with a peace-through-trade partner or a peace-through-rage-tweeting-and-Diet-Coke one?

At least you know what you don’t want, baby wombat.

It’s narcissistic and reckless, and it’s causing us distress. And everyone wants it gone, before the damage gets worse.

• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist