Wake up and smell The Donald

MALCOLM Turnbull still just doesn’t get it – 16 months after the presidential election, he is still acting as if Hillary Clinton won.

Even more disturbingly, the entire policy leadership in Australia – the politicians generally, the bureaucracy, academia and some (most?) parts of business – are also behaving as if she did.

This might seem an odd thing to say about the Prime Minister in particular, so immediately after his return from revelling in the Oval Office glow of President Trump and wife Melania.

If there’s one thing Turnbull has always liked is a good celebrity and power smooch, starting with the late Kerry Packer and never looking back.

But while he’s literally shaking hands with and exchanging witty bon mots with Donald, it’s as if it’s really Hillary under a Trump mask and comb-over.

The cleverest thing said about Trump’s campaign was that his opponents, including almost the entire global media, took him literally while his supporters took him seriously.

Since his election, we’ve seen a version of that with Turnbull and the Down Under policy elite. Yes, yes, we know it’s a President Trump, but he’ll behave just like a president Clinton would have in two crucial ways.

First, like a conventional president would – when they say something they mean it, so they generally don’t say anything substantive.

Wrong. He’ll tweet anything and it’ll “mean” exactly what it means at the time of the tweet and no more.

Second, that as president, he would abandon his campaign promises and behave like a conventional president – embracing all the essentially bilateral multinational international agreements and processes.

So the day after Trump won, Turnbull went out of his way to kick off on exactly the wrong foot by making a very big deal – lining up Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to announce Australia’s formal commitment to the Paris Climate Accord.

Trump had said he would take the US out of the Paris accord – Turnbull acted as if that was all just blather and that President Trump would come around to behaving exactly the same as a president Clinton.

Next was the grand TPP trade deal. Again Trump said he was going to take the US out. Turnbull’s attitude was, of course, he would end up doing what a president Clinton would have and stay in. He didn’t.

Then we come to last week’s move by the US to slap tariffs on imports of steel and aluminium.

Surely a president of either party wouldn’t do that, in this era of generally free trade? That threatens to take us back to the 1930s and trade wars.

Well yes, a president Clinton wouldn’t have; but the one that’s actually in the White House doesn’t behave like every other president we’ve known.

But surely, after last week’s White House smooching, even this President Trump would exclude Australia from the tariff hit? Well, actually no.

Come on guys, wake up. It’s long past time to understand we don’t have a president Clinton.

The real president is going to be there for three more years – it could be seven.

It’s time to accept that reality, time to start taking him seriously and not literally, time to adjust our processes and policies to the reality not the expectation.

This takes on added urgency with what’s happening in China, where President Xi is also acting very unconventionally.

It’s a tough and complicated world out there – made more complicated, but not impenetrably so, by two presidents named Trump and Xi.