Albanese should be avoiding Trump like the plague. Why is he (and Australia’s toytown media) chasing him?

After a thumping election win off the back of the electorate’s deep antipathy towards Donald Trump and the chaos he represents, the prime minister has allowed securing a meeting with the Mad King to become some sort of test of his foreign policy credentials. One he ended up failing, because Trump is wholly unreliable and chaotic.

Which prompts the question: what exactly is Anthony Albanese’s strategy now re: Trump?

The media’s obsession with an Albanese-Trump meeting at the G7, where Australia was a guest attendee, reached absurd levels this week, especially for something that would have been little more than a meet-and-greet, canvassing the broadest of issues. With the world ablaze, genocide openly perpetrated, basic norms overthrown daily, and Australia’s geostrategic position fundamentally altered, our media shrunk the entirety of Australia’s foreign policy down to two men having a handshake. It was a classic demonstration of the parochial, toytown nature of the Australian media.

Albanese and his team did little to allay this nonsense, with the prime minister fielding questions about what he would discuss with Trump on the sidelines of the G7 last week before revealing “I do expect to meet the president on the sidelines of the G7 meeting in Canada in three days time, on Tuesday. We do have a meeting scheduled,” on Saturday.

It was always predictable that the meeting might never happen. Not merely was there Israel’s illegal, unprovoked attack on Iran, there was the bigger issue that Trump hates sharing the stage with anyone, and may have been worried about entering a room filled with people far smarter and more articulate than he is, out of the range of the cameras crucial to his sense of self.

The failure of the meeting to go ahead — which, according to the Australian media, is the real import of Trump rage-quitting the G7 gathering — is now being used by News Corp and the Coalition as evidence of Albanese’s failure. Albanese mulling whether to try to attend the forthcoming NATO summit and meet Trump there does nothing to dispel that narrative.

Except, News Corp and the Coalition now don’t matter. They’re just angry old men yelling at clouds. The electorate just voted en masse against the Coalition-News Corp alliance, which spent most of the months before May 3 promising to ape Trump right down to his more obscure policies.

And for what, exactly, is Albanese pursuing a meeting with Trump? To reverse the “reciprocal” tariffs that might be struck down by US courts or reversed by Trump in another moment of chaos, or curbed when Congress awakens from its slumber and starts acting on its constitutional role of regulating trade? To stop the economically trivial steel and aluminium tariffs that actually benefit one of the key Australian “victims” of them, Bluescope Steel?

Or is it to receive assurances about AUKUS? Keir Starmer, it’s reported, secured assurances from Trump about AUKUS as he scrambled at the president’s feet to pick up papers from Trump’s free trade deal “with the European Union”. But have a look closely at those reports — preferably from non-Australian sources — and you’ll see it’s Starmer saying that AUKUS will proceed, not Trump.

What those obsessed with an Albanese-Trump meeting refuse to acknowledge is that Trump is fundamentally chaotic. Any agreement with him is always subject to being revised or abandoned without warning. Ask Canada and Mexico, which laboriously negotiated a replacement for NAFTA during Trump’s first administration, so that Trump could laud a “colossal victory” and “the largest, fairest, most balanced, and modern trade agreement ever achieved”. That didn’t stop Canada and Mexico from being the first targets of his punitive tariffs in January — putting aside that Trump now wants to annex Canada.

Australians aren’t exactly clamouring for their country to get closer to Trump. According to a recent Lowy Institute poll, nearly two-thirds of Australians don’t trust the US to act responsibly. Trump ranks about on par with Xi Jinping in terms of voter expectations about his role in world affairs — far below Albanese himself, who is viewed as being just behind Emmanuel Macron.

Or to put it another way, the electorate has a quite different view of foreign policy than that on offer from News Corp and the Coalition, and indeed from most of the mainstream media and the defence establishment here.

And, for that matter, from the government itself. Albanese’s pre-election strategy in relation to Trump was to keep his distance, but do nothing to alienate the Mad King, in keeping with the “safe pair of hands” image he wanted to cultivate at the election. The Coalition’s incessant screeching about his failure to stop tariffs, or his inability to get a phone call with Trump, if anything, actually helped him.

That strategy no longer seems to apply. The government allowed Albanese’s attendance at the G7 to be all about meeting Trump — not about the fact that Australia was a guest at a meeting of the West’s largest economies at the invitation of Canada’s Mark Carney. The focus should have been on using the meeting to build partnerships with like-minded Western powers, including Australia’s most powerful neighbour, France, who are all in the same boat in relation to the abandonment of any position of international responsibility by the United States. Any meet-and-greet with Trump might have been a nice addition, but not core business for Australia given our current strategic circumstances.

That would have reflected the views of the electorate, and served Australia’s interests far more effectively than obsessing over Trump. And, yes, the media and the Coalition would have jumped up and down about another alleged failure with the Mad King, but perhaps that would only have worked to bolster Albanese, as it did before the election.

There’s good sense in Albanese meeting with European powers at the NATO summit — especially as the plan was to send the government’s village idiot, Richard Marles — but not in order to meet Trump, who may not attend anyway. He should stop looking like he’s chasing Trump and go back to his successful strategy of keeping his distance.