Philippa Kaur

On June 21, the United States launched airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities – Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan – pounding deeply buried centrifuge sites with bunker-busting bombs.

Conducted jointly with Israel, the operation took place without formal congressional authorisation, drawing sharp criticism from lawmakers that it was unconstitutional and “unlawful”.

Read more:
Why the US strikes on Iran are illegal and can set a troubling precedent

Much of the political debate has centred on whether the US is being pulled into “another Middle East war”.

The New York Times’ Nick Kristof weighed in on the uncertainties following the US’ surprise bombing of Iran and Tehran’s retaliation.

Even US Vice President JD Vance understood the unease, stating:

People are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy.

These reactions have revived comparisons with George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq: a Republican president launching military action on the basis of flimsy weapons of mass destruction (WMD) evidence.

Hauntingly familiar?

While the surface similarity is tempting, the comparison may in fact obscure more about President Donald Trump than it reveals.

Comparisons to the Iraq War

In 2003, Bush ordered a full-scale invasion of Iraq based on flawed intelligence, claiming Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs. And while the war was extremely unpopular across the world, it did have bipartisan congressional support.

The invasion toppled Iraq’s regime in just a few weeks.

What followed was a brutal conflict and almost a decade of US occupation. The war triggered the rise of militant jihadism and a horrific sectarian conflict that reverberates today.

So far, Trump’s one-off strikes on Iran bear little resemblance to the 2003 Iraq intervention.

These were precision strikes within the context of a broader Iran-Israel war, designed to target Iran’s nuclear program.

And, so far, there appears to be little appetite for a full-scale military invasion or “boots on the ground”, and regime change seems unlikely despite some rumblings from both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yet the comparison to Iraq persists, especially among audiences suspicious of repeated US military interventions in the Middle East. But poorly considered analogies carry costs.

For one, the Iraq comparison sheds little light on Trump’s foreign policy.

Read more:
The US has entered the Israel-Iran war. Here are 3 scenarios for what might happen next

Trump’s foreign policy

To better understand the recent strikes on Iran, we need to look at Trump’s broader foreign policy.

Much has been made of his “America first” mantra, a complex mix of prioritising domestic interests, questioning international agreements, and challenging traditional alliances.

Others, including Trump himself, have often touted his “no war” approach, pointing to large-scale military withdrawals from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq,and the fact he had not started a new war.

But beyond this, Trump has increased US military spending and frequently used his office to conduct targeted strikes on adversaries – especially across the Middle East.

For example, in 2017 and 2018, Trump ordered airstrikes on a Syrian airbase and chemical weapons facilities. In both instances, he bypassed Congress and used precision air power to target weapons infrastructure without pursuing regime change.

Also, from 2017 to 2021, Trump authorised US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, enabling airstrikes that targeted militant cells but also led to mass civilian casualties.

Trump’s policy was the subject of intense bipartisan opposition, culminating in the first successful congressional invocation of the War Powers Resolution – though it was ultimately vetoed by Trump.

And in 2020, Trump launched a sequence of attacks on Iranian assets in Iraq. This included a drone strike that killed senior Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani.

Again, these attacks were conducted without congressional support. The decision triggered intense bipartisan backlash and concerns about escalation without oversight.

While such attacks are not without precedent – think back to former US President Barack Obama’s intervention in Libya or Joe Biden’s targeting of terrorist assets – the scale and veracity of Trump’s attacks on the Middle East are much more useful as a framework to understanding the recent attacks on Iran than any reference to the 2003 Iraq war.

What this reveals about Trump

It is crucial to scrutinise any use of force. But while comparing the 2025 Iran strikes to Iraq in 2003 may be rhetorically powerful, it is analytically weak.

A better path is to situate these events within Trump’s broader political style.

He acts unilaterally and with near-complete impunity, disregarding traditional constraints and operating outside established norms and oversight.

This is just as true for attacks on foreign adversaries as it is for the domestic policy arena.

For example, Trump recently empowered agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to operate with sweeping discretion in immigration enforcement, bypassing legal and judicial oversight.

Trump also uses policy as spectacle, designed to send shockwaves through the domestic or foreign arenas and project dominance to both friend and foe.

In this way, Trump’s dramatic attacks on Iran have some parallels to his unilateral imposition of tariffs on international trade. Both are abrupt, disruptive and framed as a demonstration of strength rather than a way to create a mutually beneficial solution.

Finally, Trump is more than willing to use force as an instrument of power rather than as a last resort. This is just as true for Iran as it is for the US people.

The recent deployment of US Marines to quell protests in Los Angeles reveals a similar impulse: military intervention as a first instinct in the absence of a broader strategy to foster peace.

To truly understand and respond to Trump’s Iran strikes, we need to move beyond sensationalist analogies and recognise a more dangerous reality. This is not the start of another Iraq; it’s the continuation of a presidency defined by impulsive power, unchecked force and a growing disdain for democratic constraint. More

President Donald Trump’s second term as president will surely go down in history, though of course, just six months into his four-year term, much of this story has yet to be written.

But it is already clear that most Americans will not be able to read exactly what Trump has said, as they have with previous presidents, during his current term in the White House.

The White House has removed the official transcripts of Trump’s public remarks from its government website, NBC News reported in May 2025, replacing the written transcripts with select videos and audio of Trump’s public appearances.

White House officials told NBC News that this switch should help people get a fuller, more consistent and accurate sense of Trump by watching and listening to him, rather than reading what he says verbatim at official events.

Government stenographers are also still recording and transcribing all of Trump’s remarks, though these are no longer being published on the White House’s website or elsewhere. It is not clear where or how those transcriptions are being saved.

For years, translators, reporters, students, historians and presidential scholars like me have used official presidential transcripts to understand a president’s exact words and track government decisions. Without these written transcripts, it becomes harder to get the full story of exactly what the president has done or said.

President Donald Trump, joined by members of his cabinet, delivers a statement on natural disaster preparedness in the Oval Office at the White House on June 10, 2025.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

A partial history

A nation’s history is etched in its records. The preservation of official proceedings provides the bedrock for understanding a country’s past and navigating its future.

A growing chorus of historians, public officials and transparency advocates is raising alarms about how the Trump administration is curating and potentially manipulating the government’s records and actions.

The White House’s recent decision to not share official, written transcripts of what the president has said is not the first time this issue has emerged under Trump.

As I wrote in 2021, the first Trump administration did not consistently submit the transcripts of the president’s political rally speeches to the National Archives, as was the custom with previous presidents. The National Archives is an independent government agency within the executive branch that preserves the nation’s historical records.

This official recordkeeping is important, and it’s more than a tradition – it’s a legal obligation. A law called the Presidential Records Act of 1978 says that everything a president does in office – from making speeches to writing emails – belongs to the public.

This includes not just formal speeches, but also public remarks and oral exchanges, which are traditionally included in a compilation of presidential documents.

My examination of this compilation for 2025 appears to show a gap in such records from mid-April 2025 onward. While the transcript of Trump’s full remarks when speaking with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was published on this government site on April 18, for example, publicly available documents from May only include a checklist of White House press releases, a digest of White House announcements and a list of acts that the president signed into law.

In the absence of complete official records from government sources, external, independent organizations that also monitor the presidency, like The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have become crucial repositories.

The American Presidency Project diligently logs and, when transcripts are unavailable, provides video of public presidential messaging, striving to create as complete a record as possible for all curious viewers and readers.

Workers secure scaffolding on the side of the National Archives building in Washington on April 2, 2025.
Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

Washington’s letters up in flames

The fight over keeping an honest record of presidents is a problem that comes up again and again in American history.

Perhaps the most powerful example of losing historical records comes from the country’s very first president, George Washington. He knew he was setting an example for all future presidents and kept very careful records. He wanted to leave a complete story of his life and his work for the future.

But there is very little of it left.

After Washington died, his wife, Martha, burned most of the letters they wrote to each other to keep their lives private.

Washington left his official papers to his nephew, Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington. But Bushrod gave many of them to Chief Justice John Marshall, who was writing a book about the president. The papers were not treated carefully, and many were damaged. To make matters worse, Bushrod would often tear off scraps of Washington’s writings and give them to people as souvenirs.

The result is that Americans have an incomplete picture of their first president. What now exists is a weaker version of the real story, created more by what other people did than by what Washington himself had planned.

Memories fade, and people are not around forever.

The main way that the U.S. can preserve its story is through accurate records. The current arguments over saving transcripts and official papers are about more than just rules. They are about the future. The records that Trump and other presidents leave behind will decide if people in the future see them as they really were, or just how they wanted others to view them. More

Even the most ardent supporters of the alliance with the United States – the notional foundation of Australian security for more than 70 years – must be having some misgivings about the second coming of Donald Trump.

If they’re not, they ought to read the two essays under review here. They offer a host of compelling reasons why a reassessment of the costs, benefits and possible future trajectory of the alliance is long overdue.

Review: After America: Australia and the new world order – Emma Shortis (Australia Institute Press), Hard New World: Our Post-American Future; Quarterly Essay 98 – Hugh White (Black Inc)

And yet, notwithstanding the cogency and timeliness of the critiques offered by Emma Shortis and Hugh White, it seems unlikely either of these will be read, much less acted upon, by those Shortis describes as the “mostly men in suits or uniforms, with no democratic accountability” who make security policy on our behalf.

White, emeritus professor of strategic studies at the ANU, was the principal author of Australia’s Defence White Paper in 2000. Despite having been a prominent member of the defence establishment, it is unlikely even his observations will prove any more palatable to its current incumbents.

Shortis, an historian and writer, is director of the Australia Institute’s International & Security Affairs Program. She is also a young woman, and while this shouldn’t matter, I suspect it does; at least to the “mostly men” who guard the nation from a host of improbable threats while ignoring what is arguably the most likely and important one: climate change.

The age of insecurity

To Shortis’s great credit, she begins her essay with a discussion of a “world on fire” in which the Trump administration is “locking in a bleaker future”.

Black Inc

This matters for both generational and geographical reasons. While we live in what is arguably the safest place on the planet, the country has the rare distinction of regularly experiencing once-in-100-year floods and droughts, sometimes simultaneously.

If that’s not a threat to security, especially of the young, it’s hard to know what is. It’s not one the current government or any other in this country has ever taken seriously enough.

White gives a rather perfunctory acknowledgement of this reality, reflecting an essentially traditional understanding of security – even if some of his conclusions will induce conniptions in Canberra.

While suggesting Trump is “the most prodigious liar in history”, White thinks he’s done Australia a favour by “puncturing the complacency” surrounding the alliance and our unwillingness to contemplate a world in which the US is not the reliable bedrock of security.

Shortis doubts the US ever was a trustworthy or reliable ally. This helps explain what she calls the “strategy of pre-emptive capitulation”, in which Australian policymakers fall over themselves to appear useful and supportive to their “great and powerful friend”. Former prime minister John Howard’s activation of the ANZUS alliance in the wake of September 11 and the disastrous decision to take part in the war in Iraq is perhaps the most egregious example of this unfortunate national proclivity.

White reminds us that all alliances are always transactional. Despite talk of a “history of mateship”, it’s vital to recognise if the great power doesn’t think something is in its “national interest”, it won’t be doing favours for allies. No matter how ingratiating and obliging they may be. While such observations may be unwelcome in Canberra, hopefully they won’t come as a revelation.

Black Inc

Although White is one of Australia’s most astute critics of the conventional wisdom, sceptics and aspiring peace-builders will find little to cheer in his analysis.

A good deal of his essay is taken up with the strategic situations in Europe and Asia. The discussion offers a penetrating, but rather despair-inducing insight into humanity’s collective predicament: only by credibly threatening our notional foes with nuclear Armageddon can we hope to keep the peace.

The problem we now face, White argues, is the likes of Russia and China are beginning to doubt America’s part in the “balance of resolve”. During the Cold War both sides were confident about the other side’s ability and willingness to blow them to pieces.

Now mutual destruction is less assured. While some of us might think this was a cause for cautious celebration, White suggests it fatally undermines the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons.

Even before Trump reappeared, this was a source of angst and/or uncertainty for strategists around the world. The principle underpinning international order in a world in which nuclear weapons exist, according to White, is that

a nuclear power can be stopped, but only by an unambiguous demonstration of willingness to fight a nuclear war to stop it.

Trump represents a suitably existential threat to this cheery doctrine. Europeans have belatedly recognised the US is no longer reliable and they are responsible for their own security.

Likewise, an ageing Xi Jinping may want to assure his position in China’s pantheon of great leaders by forcibly returning Taiwan to the motherland. It would be an enormous gamble, of course, but given Trump’s admiration for Xi, and Trump’s apparent willingness to see the world carved up into 19th century-style spheres of influence, it can’t be ruled out.

Australia’s options

If there’s one thing both authors agree on it’s that the AUKUS nuclear submarine project, the notional centrepiece of Australia’s future security is vastly overrated. It’s either a “disaster” (Shortis) or “insignificant” (White).

Likewise, they agree the US is only going to help Australia if it’s judged to be in America’s interest to do so. Recognising quite what an ill-conceived, ludicrously expensive, uncertain project AUKUS is, and just how unreliable a partner the US has become under Trump, might be a useful step on the path to national strategic self-awareness.

Shortis thinks some members of the Trump administration appear to be “aligned with Russia”. Tying ourselves closer to the US, she writes, “does not make us safer”. A major rethink of, and debate about, Australia’s security policy is clearly necessary.

Policymakers also ought to take seriously White’s arguments about the need to reconfigure the armed forces to defend Australia independently in an increasingly uncertain international environment.

Perhaps the hardest idea for Australia’s unimaginative strategic elites to grasp is that, as White points out,

Asia’s future, and Australia’s, will not be decided in Washington. It will be decided in Asia.

Former prime minister Paul Keating’s famous remark “Australia needs to seek its security in Asia rather than from Asia” remains largely unheeded. Despite plausible suggestions about developing closer strategic ties with Indonesia and even cooperating with China to offer leadership on climate change, some ideas remain sacrosanct and alternatives remain literally inconceivable.

Even if we take a narrow view of the nature of security – one revolving around possible military threats to Australia – US Defence Secretary Pete Hesgeth’s demands for greater defence spending on our part confirm White’s point that,

it is classic Trump to expect more and more from allies while he offers them less and less. This is the dead end into which our “America First” defence policy has led us.

Quite so.

Australia’s strategic elites have locked us into the foreign and strategic policies of an increasingly polarised, authoritarian and unpredictable regime.

But as Shortis observes, we cannot be confident about our ability, or the world’s for that matter, to “just ride Trump out”, and hope everything will return to normal afterwards.

It is entirely possible the international situation may get worse – possibly much worse – with or without Trump in the White House.

The reality is American democracy may not survive another four years of Trump and the coterie of startlingly ill-qualified, inhumane, self-promoting chancers who make up much of his administration.

A much-needed national debate

Both authors think attempts to “smother” a serious national debate about defence policy in Australia (White), and the security establishment’s obsession with secrecy (Shortis), are the exact opposite of what this country needs at this historical juncture. They’re right.

Several senior members of Australia’s security community have assured me if I only knew what they did I’d feel very differently about our strategic circumstances.

Really? One thing I do know is that we’re spending far too much time – and money! – acting on what Shortis describes as a “shallow and ungenerous understanding of what ‘security’ really is”.

We really could stop the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza if Xi had a word with Putin and the US stopped supplying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the weapons and money to slaughter women and children. But climate change would still be coming to get us.

A bushfire in the Grampians National Park, Victoria.
State Control Centre/AAP

More importantly, global warming will get worse before it gets better, even in the unlikely event that the “international community” (whoever that may be) agrees on meaningful collective action tomorrow.

You may not agree with all of the ideas and suggestions contained in these essays, but in their different ways they are vital contributions to a much-needed national debate.

An informed and engaged public is a potential asset, not something to be frightened of, after all. Who knows, it may be possible to come up with some genuinely progressive, innovative ideas about what sort of domestic and international policies might be appropriate for an astonishingly fortunate country with no enemies.

Perhaps Australia could even offer an example of the sort of creative, independent middle power diplomacy a troubled world might appreciate and even emulate.

But given our political and strategic elites can’t free themselves from the past, it is difficult to see them dealing imaginatively with the threat of what Shortis calls the looming “environmental catastrophe”.

No wonder so many of the young despair and have little confidence in democracy’s ability to fix what ails us. More

After United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested multiple people on alleged immigration violations, protests broke out in Los Angeles.

In response, police and military personnel have been deployed around the greater LA area.

Authorities have been using “less lethal” weapons against crowds of civilians, but these weapons can still cause serious harm.

Footage of an Australian news reporter being shot by a rubber bullet fired by police – who appeared to deliberately target her – has been beamed around the world. And headlines this morning told of an ABC camera operator hit in the chest with a “less lethal” round.

This has provoked debate about police and military use of force.

Read more:
In Trump’s America, the shooting of a journalist is not a one-off. Press freedom itself is under attack

What are ‘less lethal’ weapons?

As the term suggests, less lethal (also called non lethal or less-than-lethal) weapons are items that are less likely to result in death when compared with alternatives such as firearms.

Less lethal weapons include weapons such as:

pepper spray
tear gas
tasers
batons
water cannons
acoustic weapons
bean-bag rounds
rubber bullets.

They are designed and used to incapacitate people and disperse or control crowds.

They are meant to have temporary and reversible effects that minimise the likelihood of fatalities or permanent injury as well as undesired damage to property, facilities, material and the environment.

Fatalities can still occur but this does not necessarily mean the weapon itself caused those.

In Australia in 2023, for example, 95-year-old aged care resident Clare Nowland was tasered, fell backwards, hit her head and died from her head injury.

In 2012, responding to a mistaken report about an armed robbery, police physically restrained, tasered and pepper sprayed 21-year-old Roberto Curti multiple times. He died but his exact cause of death (and whether the use of less lethal weapons played a causal role) was not clear.

Do these weapons work to quell unrest?

The impetus for police and military use of less lethal force came about, in part, from backlash following the use of lethal force in situations where it was seen as a gross overreaction.

One example was the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, when police officers in a black township opened fire on an anti-apartheid protest, killing 69 civilians.

In theory, less lethal force is meant to provide a graduated level of response to events such as riots or protests, where the use of lethal force would be disproportionate and counter-productive.

It is sometimes described as the “next step” to use after de-escalation techniques (like negotiation or verbal commands) have failed.

Less lethal weapons can be used when some degree of force is considered necessary to restore order, neutralise a threat, or avoid full-blown conflict.

How well this works in practice is a different story.

There can be unintended consequences and use of less lethal force can be seen as an act of aggression by a government against its people, heightening existing tensions.

The availability of less lethal weapons may also change perceptions of risk and encourage the use of force in situations where it would otherwise be avoided. This in turn can provoke further escalation, conflict and distrust of authorities. More

No travel can be considered completely safe. There are inherent risks from transportation, criminal activity, communicable diseases, injury and natural disasters.

Still, global travel is booming — for those who can afford it.

To reduce the chances of things going wrong, governments issue official travel advisories: public warnings meant to help people make informed travel decisions.

Sometimes these advisories seem puzzling – why, for example, does the US still have the “safest” rating despite the ongoing volatility in Los Angeles?

How do governments assess where is safe for Australians to travel?

A brief history of travel advisories

The United States pioneered travel advisories in 1978, with other countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland following.

Australia started providing travel advisories in 1996 and now runs its system under the Smart Traveller platform.

To determine the risk level, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) draws on diplomatic reporting, assessments from Australian missions overseas about local security conditions, threat assessments from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and advice from Five Eyes intelligence sharing partners (Australia, the US, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada).

The goal is to create “smart, responsible informed travellers”, not to restrict tourism or damage foreign relationships.

DFAT has stressed its system is not influenced by “commercial or political considerations”.

Soft power and safety

In theory, these advisories are meant to inform travellers, keep them safe and reduce the burden on consular services.

However, they can also subtly reflect politics and alliances.

While travel advisories are presented as neutral, fact-based risk assessments, they may not always be free from political bias.

Research shows governments sometimes soften their warnings for countries they are close with and overstate risks in others.

A detailed analysis of US State Department travel warnings from 2009 to 2016 found only a weak correlation between the number of American deaths in a country and the warnings issued.

In some cases, destinations with no record of US fatalities received frequent warnings, while places with high death tolls had none.

In early 2024, Australia issued a string of warnings about rising safety concerns in the US and extremely strict entry conditions even with an appropriate visa.

Yet, the US kept its Level 1 rating – “exercise normal safety precautions” – the same advice given for places such as Japan or Denmark.

Meanwhile, Australia’s warning for France was Level 2 — “exercise a high degree of caution” — due to the potential threat of terrorism.

Experts have also criticised Australia’s travel warnings for being harsher toward developing countries.

The UK, a country with lower crime rates than the US, also sits at Level 2 — putting it in the same risk level as Saudi Arabia, Nicaragua and South Africa.

Read more:
In Trump’s America, the shooting of a journalist is not a one-off. Press freedom itself is under attack

Inconsistencies and grey areas

The problem is, the advisory levels themselves are vague: a Level 2 warning can apply to countries with very different risk profiles.

It’s used for places dealing with terrorism threats like France, or vastly different law and respect for human rights such as Saudi Arabia, or countries recovering from political unrest such as Sri Lanka.

Until early June 2025, Sweden was also rated Level 2 due to localised gang violence, despite relatively low risks for tourists. Its rating has since been revised down to Level 1.

Travel advisories often apply a blanket rating to an entire country, even when risks vary widely within its borders.

For instance, Australia’s Level 1 rating for the US doesn’t distinguish between different regional threats.

In June 2025, 15 people were injured in Boulder, Colorado after a man attacked a peaceful protest with Molotov cocktails.

Earlier in 2025, a major measles outbreak in West Texas resulted in more than 700 cases reported in a single county.

Despite this, Australia continues to classify the entire country as a low-risk destination.

This can make it harder for travellers to make informed, location-specific decisions.

Recent travel trends

Recent data indicate a significant downturn in international travel to the US: in March 2025, overseas visits to the US fell by 11.6% compared to the previous year, with notable declines from Germany (28%), Spain (25%) and the UK (18%).

Australian visitors to the US decreased by 7.8% compared to the same month in 2024, marking the steepest monthly drop since the COVID pandemic.

This trend suggests travellers are reassessing risk on their own even when official advisories don’t reflect those concerns.

The US case shows how politics can affect travel warnings: the country regularly experiences mass casualty incidents, violent protests and recently has been detaining and deporting people from many countries at the border including Australians, Germans and French nationals.

Yet it remains at Level 1.

What’s really going on has more to do with political alliances than safety: increasing the US travel risk level could create diplomatic friction.

What travellers can do now

If you’re a solo female traveller, identify as LGBTQIA+, are an academic, come from a visible minority or have spoken out online against the country you’re visiting, your experience might be very different from what the advice suggests.

So, here are some tips to stay safe while travelling:

Check multiple sources: don’t rely solely on travel advisories – compare travel advice from other countries
Get on-the-ground updates: check local news for coverage of events. If possible, talk to people who’ve recently visited for their experiences
For broader safety trends, tools like the Global Peace Index offer data on crime, political stability and healthcare quality. If you’re concerned about how locals or police treat certain groups, consult Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, or country-specific reports from Freedom House
Consider identity-specific resources: there are travel guides and safety indexes for LGBTQIA+ travellers like Equaldex, women travellers (Solo Female Travelers Network) and others. These may highlight risks general advisories miss.

Travel advisories often reflect whom your country trusts, not where you’re actually safe. If you’re relying on them, make sure you understand what they leave out. More

Former chairman Zia Yusuf has rejoined Reform after quitting days previously. Yusuf had said he no longer wanted to work to get the party into government when new MP Sarah Pochin called for a ban on burqas in the UK. However, he seems to have had a change of heart and will return, ostensibly to lead the party’s “department of government efficiency”.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s bromance, however, is on much rockier ground. There’s no sign of the world’s richest man reconciling with the US president, his former employer.

These spats, at first glance, might seem like little more than, put politely, teething problems in (relatively) new political operations. Or, a little less politely, the unedifying spectacle of people in or seeking power being completely unable to act like adults.

However, it also points to something more akin to a canary in the coalmine for radical right parties around the world. Their increasing reliance on an ultra-wealthy donor class presents an ideological puzzle that may not be solvable.

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Reform currently operates on what has been described as vibes alone. That is to say, there’s very little meaningful common ground between the people who vote for Reform and the party elite. The only continuity is their sense of anger at the current political system.

This, as we are seeing in election after election, is an incredibly powerful (and compelling) force. The problem is, of course, that you can’t oppose forever. You often end up having to actually do something. All boxers, Mike Tyson will be glad to tell you, have a plan – until they get punched in the face.

And what makes them such a powerful force at the moment, is precisely that which may cause challenges further down the line. At least for me, given it’s my bread and butter research-wise, I see this when I follow the money.

And I’m increasingly asked a lot of questions about the kind of people who are either giving money to Reform – or who Reform are courting (and at the moment it is decidedly the latter which is the case).

My position is that they very broadly fit into three categories. First are disaffected traditional Conservatives who are increasingly seeing a party – in the words of Farage – “worth investing in”. In the donations figures released on June 10, these are represented by bussinessmen Bassim Haidar and Mohammed Amersi.

Then you have a Silicon Valley-reared tech-bro libertarian. This group already runs on a “move fast and break things” philosophy so the idea of an insurgent party which proclaims, on entering parliament, that “the fox is in the henhouse” naturally appeals.

The final pot of money is filled via small donations, ballooning membership and a whole chunk of votes from a disaffected white working-class population to whom the language of economic and cultural grievances resonates.

There are some places where the interests of these groups align – most notably a distaste for government interference and red tape (though not necessarily a smaller state in terms spending on public services). They also share a sense that progressive politics, broadly defined, ought to be pegged back a bit (but with an emphasis on a bit).

They differ on a great deal else, to the extent that you can only really please two out of the three, but never everybody. And, unfortunately, without all three the project starts collapsing. This is what we have been seeing in the fractious relationships between Trump and Musk and Farage and Yusuf.

Two out of three ain’t bad – but it’s not enough

Yusuf (and Musk) are very much representative of the new tech-bro class. And, when Yusuf called questions about banning the burqa “dumb” he was speaking at both an ideological and organisational level.

At the ideological level it is, frankly, a bit rich for his blood, because “philosophically I am always a bit uneasy about banning things which, for example, would be unconstitutional in the United States”.

Organisationally, it pushes Reform much closer to what journalist Fraser Nelson calls “a tactic more akin to the old BNP”. Indeed, Reform started “just asking questions” about burqas at the same time as it started twisting footage to claim that Anas Sarwar, leader of Scottish Labour, wants to prioritise the needs of Pakistanis.

This kind of dog-whistle politics appeals to some, but puts off a lot more, including, I think, some of the (saner) tech-bro right.

Indeed, Ian Ward at Politico perceptively notes that if we want to explain the current Musk-Trump meltdown we should look back to Christmas 2024, when cracks first started appearing over immigration policy.

The tech-bro right are, generally speaking, much less hardline on the flow of people than the Maga-populist right (think Steve Bannon and Tommy Robinson). In fact, they are pro-high skilled immigration as it tends to benefit them and their business interests.

Tech-bros also like the idea of moving fast and breaking things in theory. But when things start moving fast and actually breaking in practice (or Tesla stocks start to plummet), they tend to get a bit freaked out.

In other words, it’s not just that they don’t like government, they don’t like governing and the inevitable compromise that comes with it. When they say move fast and break things, I get the sense what they really mean is “leave me alone so I can make billions in peace”.

Musk and Trump have been exchanging barbed social media posts since the former left the White House.
EPA/Francis Chung

This, of course, is quite appealing to traditional hedge-fund conservatives, but is also the politics that literally built the economic grievances that much of the white-working class support for the populist radical right is, in turn, built on.

Two out of three ain’t bad, but you do need all three. So, don’t be surprised if despite Farage’s seemingly genuine affection for Yusuf, it all falls apart again before long.

Ultimately, Reform will need to decide how they are going to spin these plates. The good news is that it might well be that they can, indeed, get by on vibes alone until the next general election. The bad news, unfortunately, is that winning an election is the easy bit. Just ask Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer. After all, everyone has a plan. More

The video of a Los Angeles police officer shooting a rubber bullet at Channel Nine reporter Lauren Tomasi is as shocking as it is revealing.

In her live broadcast, Tomasi is standing to the side of a rank of police in riot gear. She describes the way they have begun firing rubber bullets to disperse protesters angry with US President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants.

As Tomasi finishes her sentence, the camera pans to the left, just in time to catch the officer raising his gun and firing a non-lethal round into her leg. She said a day later she is sore, but otherwise OK.

Although a more thorough investigation might find mitigating circumstances, from the video evidence, it is hard to dismiss the shot as “crossfire”. The reporter and cameraman were off to one side of the police, clearly identified and working legitimately.

The shooting is also not a one-off. Since the protests against Trump’s mass deportations policy began three days ago, a reporter with the LA Daily News and a freelance journalist have been hit with pepper balls and tear gas.

British freelance photojournalist Nick Stern also had emergency surgery to remove a three-inch plastic bullet from his leg.

In all, the Los Angeles Press Club has documented more than 30 incidents of obstruction and attacks on journalists during the protests.

Trump’s assault on the media

It now seems assaults on the media are no longer confined to warzones or despotic regimes. They are happening in American cities, in broad daylight, often at the hands of those tasked with upholding the law.

But violence is only one piece of the picture. In the nearly five months since taking office, the Trump administration has moved to defund public broadcasters, curtail access to information and undermine the credibility of independent media.

International services once used to project democratic values and American soft power around the world, such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, have all had their funding cut and been threatened with closure. (The Voice of America website is still operational but hasn’t been updated since mid-March, with one headline on the front page reading “Vatican: Francis stable, out of ‘imminent danger’ of death”).

The Associated Press, one of the most respected and important news agencies in the world, has been restricted from its access to the White House and covering Trump. The reason? It decided to defy Trump’s directive to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America.

Even broadcast licenses for major US networks, such as ABC, NBC and CBS, have been publicly threatened — a signal to editors and executives that political loyalty might soon outweigh journalistic integrity.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is more used to condemning attacks on the media in places like Russia. However, in April, it issued a report headlined: “Alarm bells: Trump’s first 100 days ramp up fear for the press, democracy”.

A requirement for peace

Why does this matter? The success of American democracy has never depended on unity or even civility. It has depended on scrutiny. A system where power is challenged, not flattered.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution – which protects freedom of speech – has long been considered the gold standard for building the institutions of free press and free expression. That only works when journalism is protected — not in theory but in practice.

Now, strikingly, the language once reserved for autocracies and failed states has begun to appear in assessments of the US. Civicus, which tracks declining democracies around the world, recently put the US on its watchlist, alongside the Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Serbia and Pakistan.

The attacks on the journalists in LA are troubling not only for their sake, but for ours. This is about civic architecture. The kind of framework that makes space for disagreement without descending into disorder.

Press freedom is not a luxury for peacetime. It is a requirement for peace. More

Last week, President Donald Trump ordered an investigation into “who ran the United States while President Biden was in office”, alleging top aides masked the “cognitive decline” of his predecessor. The announcement referenced revelations in a new book by journalists Jake Tapper (CNN) and Alex Thompson (Axios).

Original Sin made headlines last month for revealing that Biden’s declining physical and cognitive health had been hidden from the public by his closest aides and his loyal but overly protective wife, Jill Biden.

Whatever merit there is in Trump’s order must be seen alongside his bottomless cynicism. He seizes on the two authors’ investigative journalism to continue tarnishing his predecessor’s reputation, while doing everything in his power to bully news companies such as CBS over almost meritless defamation cases and to cut the funding of public media organisations PBS and NPR.

Review: Original Sin – Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Hutchinson Heinemann)

In November 2020, Biden was seen by many as a hero. He won the American election and saved the country from Donald Trump, who scholars judged among the worst presidents in the nation’s history, not least because just over 384,500 people died from COVID-19 that year.

Today, just as many see Biden as a villain. He said he would be a “bridge” president. He knew he would have ended his second term aged 86 if he had won and served it, so said he would hand over to a successor well in time for the 2024 election. But he didn’t. Not until three and a half weeks after his wincingly bad performance in a debate with Trump last June.

By then it was too late for his Democratic Party to go through its usual primaries process. Biden anointed his vice president Kamala Harris as his successor, but with only 107 days to campaign before the election, it is more accurate to say he gave her what football commentators call a “hospital pass”.

Donald Trump regained the presidency. Four months into his second term, all but his most loyal supporters (and this time he has made sure to surround himself only with loyal supporters) think it is already much worse than his first.

Whatever Biden achieved in his presidency is being forgotten amid the horror at watching America’s democratic institutions assaulted by an authoritarian leader determined to undo Biden’s policies, especially on climate change.

What on earth happened? How much responsibility does Biden bear? Did the news media subject Biden to sufficient scrutiny before the debate last June? Was everyone except the MAGA base suffering from a new variant of what conservative commentators long ago dubbed “Trump derangement syndrome”?

In short order, the answers are: Biden declined faster and worse than had been anticipated; a lot; the media possibly didn’t scrutinise him enough, but it’s more complicated than that – and, yes, “Trump derangement syndrome” was a factor, though not quite in the way conservative commentators thought.

Did the news media subject Biden to sufficient scrutiny?
Andrew Harnik/AAP

Clooney’s alarm

Original Sin’s most spectacular revelation was that at a Democrat fundraising event last year, Biden did not appear to recognise George Clooney – who as well as being an actor, is a longtime Democrat supporter and a friend of the president.

Clooney was shocked by Biden’s frail appearance. “Holy shit,” he thought, according to the authors, as he watched Biden enter the room, taking tiny steps with “an aide guiding him by his arm”. The book describes the excruciating moment in detail:

“You know George,” the assisting aide told the president, gently reminding him who was in front of him.“Yeah, yeah,” the president said to one of the most recognizable men in the world, the host of this lucrative fundraiser. “Thank you for being here.”“Hi, Mr. President,” Clooney said.“How are ya?” the president replied.“How was your trip?” Clooney asked.“It was fine,” the president said.It was obvious to many standing there that the president did not know who George Clooney was. […]“George Clooney,” the aide clarified for the president.“Oh, yeah!” Biden said. “Hi, George!”

George Clooney and bystanders were shocked when Biden didn’t recognise his film-star friend at a 2024 fundraiser.
Manuel Balce Ceneta/AAP

A Hollywood VIP who witnessed the moment told the authors “it was not okay”, describing it as “uncomfortable”. Clooney felt he had to sound the alarm publicly, which he did in an impassioned opinion piece for The New York Times a few weeks later, on July 10. He wrote about how he loved and respected Biden, but

the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.

Just days after publicity about the book began, news broke that Biden has stage four prostate cancer – and that he had not had a prostate test for more than a decade.

The ‘loyalty police’

Tapper and Thompson’s book derives not only from their day jobs, but from reporting they have done since last November’s election, including interviews with 200 people. Some of them, even now, prefer to speak on background rather than be named.

Through them, they tell a bracing story with three main themes.

First, there is the unblinking loyalty of close aides. Chief strategist Mike Donilon had been with Biden since 1981. Bruce Reed was a speechwriter and longtime political consultant. Steve Ricchetti had been Biden’s chief of staff when he was vice president, and was also a friend who would watch the morning political shows with him. All four of Richetti’s children worked in the Biden administration, the authors write.

Jill Biden’s longtime aides, Annie Tomasini and Anthony Bernal, were fiercely protective of the Bidens as much as the office of the president. “Are you a Biden person?” they would ask, leading other aides to label them the “loyalty police”.

Collectively, the close aides were known as The Politburo. Kamala Harris’ aides called them a “cabal of the unhelpful”. Time and again, they responded to queries about Biden’s health with firm assurances he was doing fine – even though the president needed to be supplied with cue cards when he was meeting his cabinet secretaries.

Jill Biden’s fiercely protective aides were labelled ‘the loyalty police’.
Stan Gilliland/AAP

Biden, like previous presidents, had an annual medical check-up and was given a clean bill of health. But doctors outside the White House noted that his cognitive abilities were not tested. Asked about this, aides – and Biden himself – would say he passed a cognitive test every day of his presidency, which was a superficially plausible but practically meaningless statement.

Some aides genuinely believed in Biden, while others harboured doubts. The latter suppressed those to focus on the task of defeating Trump in 2024. One told Tapper and Thompson: “He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years – he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.” Which sounds pretty much like the plot of the 1989 movie, Weekend at Bernie’s, except the situation was anything but comic.

Biden’s aides admonished journalists, including Alex Thompson, for even raising the issue of the president’s health. Worse, they shielded Biden from what his own pollsters were saying about his dire prospects for re-election.

The oldest presidential candidates

For Biden, work usually began at 9am, included two hours in the afternoon for “POTUS time”, and finished at 4.30pm when he had dinner. Availability for evening events was limited. By 2024, cabinet secretaries in the Biden administration told Tapper and Thompson that Biden could not be relied upon to be available at 2am for the kind of emergency the presidency can require.

Everyone knew, or at least suspected this. In 2020, Biden and Trump were the two oldest people to contest the presidency. When the 78-year-old Biden won, he became the oldest serving president in a country that has no upper age limits in the congress or the senate.

After the Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, born the same year as Biden, froze in public a second time, in 2023, his fellow Republican Nikki Haley said, “The Senate is the most privileged nursing home in the country […] You have to know when to leave.”

When the Democrats did unexpectedly well at the 2022 midterm elections, Biden’s aides took that as a sign he should run again, rather than note the level of protest in the midterm vote, which came soon after the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v Wade decision on abortion.

The opinion polls, though, were telling. An early November 2022 Ipsos poll had the president’s approval rating at a low 39%, Tapper and Thompson report. Two thirds of those surveyed said they thought the country was on the wrong track. When Ipsos ran a poll after the midterm election, 68% said Biden might not be up for the challenge of running in 2024. Worse, almost half of Democrats agreed.

Joe Biden’s onstage fall at the United States Air Force Academy in 2023 was an unwelcome sign of his physical aging.
Andrew Harnik/AAP

Biden’s aides may have been right to marvel at what their boss could still do, and to resent the media harping on about Biden’s age while turning a blind eye to his cheeseburger-chomping, Coke-slurping political nemesis, only four years younger. The bitter fact for them is that by 2020 Biden looked and sounded frail while Trump looked and sounded commanding.

Trump may have lied repeatedly during the debate last June, but in a real sense that was not news; Trump lies as easily as he breathes. What was news was watching a mumbling, open-mouthed US president freeze on live television.

Grisly anecdotes and Hunter Biden

Original Sin is replete with grisly anecdotes about Biden’s decrepitude. “The guy can’t form a fucking sentence”, thought one aide attending to him onboard Air Force One. This leads to the second main theme: the tragic circumstances that appear to have accelerated the decline.

It is well known that personal tragedy has scarred – and in crucial ways shaped – Biden’s life and career. He lost his first wife, Neilia, and their one-year-old daughter, Naomi, in a car accident in 1972. Their young sons, Beau and Hunter, were in the car. They survived but Hunter suffered a fractured skull, an injury with lifelong effects, according to Tapper and Thompson.

Joe Biden with his sons and first wife Neilia (centre), who died with their daughter Naomi in a 1972 car accident.
AAP

Beau served as an army officer in the Iraq war. On his return, he was elected attorney-general of Delaware in 2006 and 2010. He planned to run for governor in 2016. But a year earlier, the brain cancer for which he was first treated in 2013 recurred; he died in May 2015. In a worrying precursor to later actions, the Bidens kept Beau’s illness a secret. “Beau’s death aged him significantly,” a longtime Biden confidant told Tapper and Thompson. “His shoulders looked smaller. His face looked more gaunt. In his eyes, you could just see it.”

A year later, Hunter Biden became addicted to crack cocaine. Ashley, Biden’s daughter by his second wife Jill, also struggled with addiction. Both spiralled downwards after Beau’s death, which weighed heavily on their father. As the authors write:

After Beau’s death in 2015, Biden desperately and understandably clung to Hunter. He would privately refer to him as ‘my only living son.’ But Biden aides felt that Hunter manipulated his father’s blind love for his own aims. The president struggled to say no to Hunter. Aides felt that he had tragically become Hunter’s chief enabler.

In 2021 Hunter published a memoir, Beautiful Things, and travelled round the country in an effort to provide hope to others struggling with addiction. The memoir’s candour provided valuable information to David Weiss, a special counsel appointed by Attorney-General Merrick Garland in 2023.

Weiss had been previously appointed by the first Trump administration to investigate the contents of a laptop Hunter Biden left at a repair shop. Biden had not interfered with Garland’s decision, as he did not want to be seen as behaving the way his predecessor had.

Weiss charged Hunter Biden over his possession of a handgun while being addicted to cocaine. A plea deal broke down and Hunter faced trial in 2024. The Biden family attended each day of the trial. Biden felt guilty, believing Hunter would never have been on trial if he wasn’t the president’s son.

There is little doubt the Republicans weaponised Hunter Biden’s actions, but he gave them plenty of ammunition. He had had an extramarital affair with his brother’s widow and had introduced her to cocaine, to which she became addicted. There is more, but you get the (tawdry) picture.

Then, after the election in November, Biden did what he had repeatedly said he wouldn’t, exercising his power as president to pardon his son. It may have been the understandable action of a besieged father, but Biden did not frame it that way, blaming Garland, wrongly, for pursuing the case.

After the November 2024 election, Biden pardoned his son Hunter.
Evan Vucci/AAP

Equally to the point, the authors report that Trump’s lawyers took note, believing the Hunter Biden pardon “gave them a great deal of leeway on whether they could pardon and free from prison the hundreds of convicted January 6 insurrectionists” from the 2021 Capitol riot. Which of course Trump did as soon as he took office in January 2025.

The old adage has it that two wrongs don’t make a right. But for a politician who had won the presidency promising to be everything Trump was not, it was a fatal, final blow to Biden’s credibility.

The media ‘missed a lot’

The third theme of the book asks how much of all this the news media reported during Biden’s presidency. Some, but not all of it – including some by Thompson, who recently won a White House Correspondents’ Association award for his disclosures.

Both he and his co-author acknowledge they and other journalists did not dig hard enough to reveal the extent to which the Biden administration was hampered by the president’s declining health. Said Thompson:

Being truth-tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We – myself included – missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of it […] We should have done better.“

It is worth keeping this in perspective. The news media’s failings in the lead up to the Iraq war in 2003 were more significant. Then, too many journalists swallowed the administration’s lines justifying its decision to invade a country, while the work of those who did report sceptically was buried well inside the newspaper. There, it “played as quietly as a lullaby”, as The New York Times’ first public editor, Daniel Okrent, wrote in 2003.

The war’s reporting led to a lot of soul searching in American newsrooms. If there was a coverup in the media about the Biden administration, it wasn’t very effective, wrote media critic Jon Allsop in the New Yorker. “Not least because the majority of the public thought Biden was too old long before the debate.”

The other element infecting both the mainstream media and social media is divisiveness, rancour and hostility. It is hard, for journalists and the public, to see political information other than through a hyper-partisan lens. I felt this acutely when reading the section in Original Sin about Biden getting drawn into the FBI’s investigation of Trump for withholding classified documents – when the FBI found Biden had done essentially the same thing. (Though it should be stressed Biden, unlike Trump, cooperated at all times.)

‘Well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’

It was through this investigation that special counsel Robert Hur’s recording of a long interview with Biden came to light. Journalists were backgrounded that Hur was a right-wing operative; he was anything but that, write Tapper and Thompson. He treated Biden fairly and respectfully. In the interview, excerpts of which run to seven pages of the book, Biden rambles and needs regular reminding of facts – including the year his son Beau died.

In Hur’s report, released in 2024, he found Biden had inappropriately retained classified documents but he did not recommend pressing charges. To a jury, Hur concluded, Biden would present “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”. He was making the kind of decision prosecutors routinely make about the likelihood of a conviction.

Hur was attacked by the White House and much of the media as a partisan warrior who had brought up the death of the president’s son in the interview, when it was Biden who mentioned it himself. If Hur really had been a partisan warrior, the authors write, he would have recommended continuing with the prosecution.

Special Counsel Robert Hur was branded a right-wing operative, but was ‘anything but’, write Tapper and Thompson.
Nathan Howard/AAP

Several months later, after the disastrous Biden-Trump debate, friends and colleagues texted Hur saying he must have felt vindicated. “Hur told them that all he felt was sad. How could anyone look at Joe Biden at that debate and not feel bad?”

It is true that aides, and sometimes the news media, have covered up previous presidents’ health issues, such as Franklin Roosevelt’s paralysis from polio, John Kennedy’s debilitating back pain that required heavy doses of painkillers, and Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s disease.

Tapper and Thompson argue the coverup of Biden’s health problems is the most consequential in presidential history.

Underplays Biden’s achievements

The authors successfully prosecute their case about Biden’s responsibility for his own demise. Perhaps worried they may not be believed by Democrat supporters, they continue amassing evidence well beyond that point, which means the minutiae of aides continuing to deny the reality of Biden’s decline becomes repetitive.

Their relentless focus on Biden’s decline also means they underplay both his achievements as a president and the breadth of his character. At one point, they admiringly refer to Richard Ben Cramer’s book about the 1988 presidential campaign, What it Takes, which includes Biden’s failed attempt to win the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

Cramer’s book is a massive 1,047 pages. He interviewed more than a thousand people and took so long on the book it came out during the next presidential campaign, in which Bill Clinton was elected.

One reviewer, Richard Brownstein, wrote of it: “Presidential elections are the white whale of American journalism – and in Cramer they have found a manic Melville.” But it is written in an intimate, novelistic style, taking the reader deep into the lives and thoughts and feelings of the candidates, George H.W Bush, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, Richard Gephardt, Gary Hart and Biden.

Cramer told Robert Boynton in an interview for his 2005 book, The New New Journalism, he was amazed political journalists spend so little time talking to childhood friends, family and early colleagues.

If you want to understand how someone got to the point where he [sic] is a credible candidate for president of a nation of 250 million people, you’d better godamn-well know how he is wonderful. But most journalists don’t care about that.

As such, Cramer provides a deeper, richer portrait of Biden as an idiosyncratic and flawed, but also impressive politician, who was a force of nature in his youth. By comparison, Original Sin reads like an autopsy: which in a way, it is. If you want to remember why Biden became an effective politician in the first place, seek out a copy of What it Takes.

In the end, though, whatever achievements Biden had as president are being overtaken by his disastrous decision to try to hang on for a second term. By the evidence presented in Original Sin, “Honest Joe” was, like many politicians, prey to ego and overvaulting ambition, and prone to secrecy when it suited him.

He and his aides thought – and astonishingly still do think – he was the person best able to repel the return of a person they feared (with good reason) would do enormous damage to the country. Biden said this after the November election, earning Harris’s ire, for which he apologised, and Donilon affirmed it in an interview with the authors early this year.

The savage irony is, by their actions, Biden and his team eased Trump’s path to victory last November. Now, it is not just Americans but the rest of the world who are left to deal with the second Trump administration. More