Having worked for the Democrats in the United States and as chief of staff to Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Bruce Wolpe has credentials. Few in Australia are better placed to examine the implications for Australia, and particularly the Labor government, of a possible Trump return in 2024.

Trump’s Australia, according to Wolpe, reflects how ‘our confidence that American democracy can and will endure is crumbling’. Wolpe seeks to understand the implications of that crumbling for the United States and for the world. Wolpe is utterly convinced that if a second Trump term does come about, ‘American democracy as we know it will have come to an end’. This can and should ‘call into question Australia’s alliance with the United States’. This dramatic framing means that Trump’s Australia is imbued with Wolpe’s own angst over these possibilities – angst that the book rightly argues more Australians, especially politically powerful ones, should share. Wolpe’s entirely valid fears are informed by his own particular politics, which will be familiar to readers engaged with the history (and present) of American liberalism.

On page one, Wolpe is unashamed in his admission that he ‘never really understood – I still don’t – how the United States could go from Barack Obama to Donald Trump’. Like so many of his compatriots, Wolpe feels unable, or may just be subconsciously unwilling, to come to grips with Trump and what he represents. But Wolpe’s writing makes clear that he does understand. Although he contends that the origins of Trump’s successful campaign for the presidency go back to 2008, Wolpe is cognisant of the long threads of American history and particularly the ‘original sin’ of slavery. Wolpe knows that Trump is at least in part the logical conclusion of that history, and not an aberration from it.