11 hours ago
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When not firing off social media posts threatening potential war crimes against 93 million Iranians, Donald Trump is busy quietly killing the so-called American dream. With gasoline at US$4 a gallon, credit card debt hitting a record US$1.28tn, and stagnating wages, Americans are struggling to detect the prosperity their president promised them. Regardless, Trump plans to spend a record $1.5tn on the military in 2027 – a 40% increase for the Pentagon at a time when farm bankruptcies have increased by 46%.
But if Trump’s illegal war on Iran has taught us anything, it is this: Americans will pay any price for freedom, except if it increases the price of groceries or gasoline. People in the Maga heartlands tolerated the erosion of civil liberties, democracy and the rule of law during the first year of Trump’s second presidency but they will be unforgiving if their standard of living declines.
My wife and I moved from Fremantle to New York for our careers 15 years ago, bringing our three small children with us. All of them are US citizens. But we recently took a family decision to return to Australia. To be honest, it feels like an escape.
At the time of Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, I was the president and CEO of the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT) – the world’s largest torture rehabilitation organisation, headquartered in Minneapolis. Since 1985 CVT has provided clinical care to more than 200,000 survivors from 88 countries. But within days of re-entering the White House, Trump froze US$20m of our funding and I had to furlough 430 staff. We were ordered, by perfunctory email, to shutdown lifesaving programs in remote refugee camps across the Middle East and Africa.
CVT fought the cuts all the way to the supreme court. We lost and those wounds were still weeping when Trump sent thousands of ICE agents to Minneapolis in January. Six of our clients – torture survivors who were all in the US legally – were abducted off the streets.
Two were snatched by ICE when they arrived at their immigration check-in appointments. One was able to text his CVT therapist before masked federal agents bundled him into a car. His simple message read: “I need help.” All six were flown to a detention centre in Texas – 1,800km from Minnesota.
The most common thing I heard from Americans when Trump was elected the first time in 2016 was that “this is not us”. The evidence was convincing. Trump lost the popular vote and only ascended to the presidency because of the peculiar arithmetic of the electoral college.
Not this time. Trump won the popular vote by 77.3m to 75m in 2024. At the time of ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis, a local colleague said: “What frightens me is the realisation I was wrong. People voted for this. This is who we are now.”
In addition to being a malignant narcissist, Trump is a bully who has declared his desire to be “dictator for one day”. Trump once said of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un: “He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
Like North Korea, anyone who publicly criticises Trump – from Jimmy Kimmel to the former Maga darling Marjorie Taylor Greene – becomes an enemy of the state. Pliant prosecutors have already tried to indict the former FBI director James Comey. More political persecutions will surely follow, especially if the war in Iran ends badly, the Epstein files remain only partly released and the midterm elections approach.
Other freedoms are also being corroded, including a potential plan to repeal laws that protect same-sex marriage. Or as my LGBTQ+ daughter put it to me: “‘Make America Great Again’ feels a lot like ‘America hates me again’.”
Immigrants feel especially vulnerable. I have Latin American friends who no longer speak Spanish on the subway. African immigrants are disguising their accents. Even in New York, the threat of abduction by masked ICE agents is palpable, regardless of whether you are in the country legally or not. Ending up in Alligator Alcatraz or a Salvadorian prison remains every migrant’s nightmare.
If America’s diminished democracy survives until the next presidential election in 2028, Trump will not quietly relinquish his grip on power. Even though he is constitutionally prohibited from running again, I was recently in North Carolina where supporters were already wearing red “Trump 2028” hats. Steve Bannon, Maga’s dark prince, has described Trump as “an instrument of divine will” and insists “we need him for at least one more term”, regardless of the law.
Winston Churchill once quipped that an appeaser of authoritarianism “is one who feeds a crocodile – hoping that it will eat him last”. I left the United States because I will not bend my knee to the aspiring Caesar of Mar-a-Lago, regardless of whether I am the next to be devoured, or the last. I no longer wish to live in a country where performative cruelty has become the guiding principle of government. Instead, I want to return to a country that believes in simple things, like democracy, human rights and science. That is why I have come home.
