Trump’s Racist Rhetoric Hurts the Cause of Global Democracy

To understand the damage done to Australian interests by President Donald Trump telling four of his political opponents from ethnic minorities to “go back home”, think of how it sounds in China.

Here is the president of the US dividing the American people into two racially defined classes where foreign-born people of colour, or their descendants, have less right to speak than “real” white Americans.

Anyone who doubts whether Mr Trump’s comments were racist, should ask how they would feel if someone told the member for Wentworth, Dave Sharma, who was born in Canada and moved to Australia as a child but is of Indian background, to go back to India before he started telling Australians what to do.

Of course, Mr Trump tweets a lot of dumb stuff and his words have a transparent political purpose of mobilising anti-immigrant elements of the Republican Party and keeping the spotlight on four young Democrat women, known as The Squad, who are pushing the party to the left.

But think how these comments could become grist for the mill of China’s propaganda machine. When people criticise China’s treatment of its Uighur minority or its slow undermining of Hong Kong’s rule of law, Beijing will point to Mr Trump’s remarks to show that America is just as bad or worse.

China, or other oppressive regimes, will play the “What about?” card: Do not criticise our policies, they say. What about the things Trump is doing to the Democrats?

That comparison is nonsense. Mr Trump’s remarks do not reflect what America is like in reality. America’s history of fighting for, and defending, civil rights of migrants is unparalleled.

But Mr Trump’s language casts doubt on fundamental shared values in which Australia has a vital interest. America’s moral leadership on human rights is a stronger weapon than America’s military might in the battle to defend the democratic liberal world order.

Unlike British Prime Minister Theresa May and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has so far refrained from condemning Mr Trump’s comments.

But if Mr Morrison is asked, he must find a way to distance himself from Mr Trump’s words, even if that spoils the mood for his trip to the US in September.

In her final speech as British prime minister, Ms May warned on Thursday about the need to speak out against the increasing brutality of public discourse.

Although it was in the immediate context of the Brexit debate her words have wider significance. “Ill words that go unchallenged,” Ms May said, “are the first step on a continuum to ill deeds, towards a much darker place where hatred and prejudice drive not only what people say, but also what they do.”

In remarks that were clearly a veiled comment about Mr Trump’s slogan of America First, she then attacked the view of world politics as a “zero-sum game where one country can only gain if others lose. And where power, unconstrained by rules, is the only currency of value”.

Politics has always been a rough game but as a British prime minister, Ms May was not speaking as a naive romantic. It is significant that she has pointed out this dangerous tendency in the global debate. It is not clear who is to blame or where the lines of what is allowed are to be drawn. But it would certainly help if the President of the United States used his authority to proclaim the humanistic values for which America is so admired.