Without wishing to rain on the Australian Labor Party’s victory parade, when our prime minister was congratulated and praised by Donald Trump the day after Labor won the 2025 federal election, alarm bells should have been ringing to alert his advisers.

In what was reported as a “very warm” conversation, Trump claimed he and Anthony Albanese were "very friendly" but also claimed never to have heard of Peter Dutton.

For some years, Dutton has been a semi-regular visitor to the US where he mixed happily with the Trump people, and has been pictured with Ivanka and assorted Trump disciples to prove it. But disowning admirers is customary for this US president when someone he knows has suffered a loss or a fall from grace, so we would be wise to take anything he has said about our leaders with a packet of salt. And the prime minister would do well to exercise scepticism.

With that in mind, it’s worth recalling that Trump is, perhaps, the most consummate showman and confidence trickster playing to contemporary audiences on the global stage. Given that he was likely grooming Albanese in the afterglow of Labor’s election victory on a relatively small stage in the Southern Hemisphere, a test for Australia’s prime minister may come in June when both leaders are scheduled to attend the G7 meeting in Alberta.

Before this meeting, Albanese and his advisers might do well to heed the words of the former FBI director James Comey who wrote in the New York Times about what it was like working with Trump before the president summarily fired him in 2017. Comey made the point that the trouble “starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what ‘everyone thinks’ and what is ‘obviously true’ wash over you, unchallenged (until) he pulls all of those present into a silent circle of assent".

From those groups who dutifully appear to consent with their silence, Comey distinguished rare individuals such as former four-star Marine Corps general and secretary of defence, James Mattis. In 2019, “Mattis resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realise what had happened, before he could start lying about the man … It takes character like Mr Mattis’ to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites".

Like Mattis, in August 2017 former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull distinguished himself in a telephone call with Trump by refusing to sit in silence and instead pushed back robustly on Trump’s bully tactics. By doing so, Turnbull got his way on a refugee settlement deal despite Trump’s distaste for the terms of the deal favouring Australia.

It was notable that Trump’s reported praise of Albanese included these words: “I can only say that he’s been very, very nice to me, very respectful to me.” On Trump’s scale of hyperbole, they are words of high praise, but they are also words that Trump will expect Albanese to live up to in future exchanges, notably in Alberta if they get to spend time together.

By that time Trump may well have succeeded in expanding his presidential power to the extent of offering to sell Albanese the Brooklyn Bridge, and making the offer seem all the more real with the issuing of an executive order. Much like canals, bridges are traditionally transactional items used by conmen to showcase their audacity. Just ask the Panamanians. His next move could be to offer to sell Albanese the Sydney Harbour Bridge. If that seems ridiculous, try Trump’s proposing to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he must make amends for starting the war with Russia.

Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating suggested, in a 2024 television interview, that Albanese and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles had become beholden to a foreign policy and defence posture that suited the United States, rather than Australian interests. In what amounted to scathing personal character assessments, Keating said they had sold out because they had “fallen for the dinner on the White House lawn”.

Keating is not the first person to have observed Albanese’s inclination to seek approval from important and powerful people, including from bastions of the conservative establishment, and Albanese would not be the first leader of a small nation to be susceptible to flattery from the leader of a superpower. That said, it is not a forgivable character flaw when the flatterer appears to be best described by adjectives such as capricious and narcissistic, and obsessively propounds a policy to his MAGA base of America First.