Why on earth is the prime minister boasting about having “really warm” phone chats with the oaf who is now the president of the United States?

Trump is only interested in doing what feeds his monstrous ego and, to use his ugly argot, have the leaders of other countries line up to kiss his arse.

He’s hard at work on worldwide wreckage and to smooch up to him is to be an accomplice. And being his friend can be more risky than being his enemy. Just ask Narendra Modi. Take it from someone who knew, Henry Kissinger, who warned that “It’s dangerous to be America’s enemy. But it’s fatal to be America’s friend.”

Trump doesn’t deserve the small mercy of the prime minister’s warm shoulder and the president’s lack of virtue should be a primary guide for Australia in its dealings with him. They should be distinguished by cool, ruthless practicality that keeps Trump and his minions at a distance.

So as Albanese jets off to the US his mantra should be “No grovelling and no shit-eating smile photographs with Trump et al”. And he should tell this motley crew to stick their crazy urgings for Australia to increase its defence spending to 3.5% of GDP right up their jumpers or elsewhere if they’d prefer.

While he’s at that, the prime minister should give the Americans advice about their creaking government system even though they will ignore it, Trump especially.

For many reasons, the separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers in the US is, in the modern era, an inadequate protection against an executive overreach bordering on autocracy. It’s been going on for a long time and it is now probably as bad as it’s ever been, as notions of goodwill, compromise and governing for all can find no home in Trumpland.

One of the US’ “founding fathers”, Alexander Hamilton, fretted about what he called a “feeble executive” which he saw as a recipe for “ill executed” and “bad government”. He wanted an “energetic” executive with “power in a single hand” as this, he wrote, would be “best calculated to conciliate the confidence of the people and to secure their privileges and interests". If only he could see it now.

In a number of short essays in The New York Times in the early 1970s, the American historian Barbara Tuchman said that “the steady accretion of power in the executive… has become perilous to the state”. In a fit of remarkable prescience, she worried about “the growing tendency of the chief executive to form policy as a reflection of his personality and ego needs".

Tuchman said that “the only way to defuse the presidency and minimise the risk of a knave, a simpleton, or a despot exercising supreme authority without check or consultation is to divide the power and spread the authority". And now the US has a president who is a knave, simpleton, despot and convicted felon.

“Personal government,” Tuchman said “can get beyond control in the US because the president is subject to no advisers who hold office independently of him.”

Tuchman’s solution was to “substitute true Cabinet government by a directorate of six, to be nominated as a slate by each party and elected as a slate for a single six-year term with a rotating chairman, each to serve as a year…”’. She admitted, “there is a drawback that Cabinet government could not satisfy the American craving for a father-image or hero or superstar. The only solution I can see to that problem would be to install a dynastic family in the White House for ceremonial purposes, or focus the craving entirely upon the entertainment world, or else grow up”.

All this, of course, got nowhere and Americans are now paying the price via Trump’s tariffs, his transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich and many other atrocities.

Yet this leaves the door ajar for Albanese to be truly helpful to the US by urging upon its people a modified and less radical version of Tuchman’s proposals via the following five-point plan:

• Retain the office of the president under present election rules but abolish the office of vice-president.
• Require the president to select Cabinet office holders only from members of the Congress.
• Specify a minimum number of Cabinet members – say, a neat dozen.
• Reserve a three-hour session in the Senate and the House of Representatives each week the Congress is sitting to allow for Cabinet members to be questioned on what the executive is up to, with the president remaining above this affray.
• Require major matters of executive policy and administration to be decided by the Cabinet as a whole.

Such arrangements could be usefully supported if the political party opposed to the President could form a shadow cabinet of Congressional members, including a shadow president, to give accountability more concerted organisation and better focus.

Such a modest dispersal of authorities and stronger accountability would still allow for Hamilton’s “energetic” executive, noting that power “in a single hand” has definitely not been “best calculated to conciliate the confidence of the people and to secure their privileges and interests".

Having put these proposals, however elaborated, to the American people, possibly in an address to a joint sitting of the houses of Congress, Albanese could play his trump card by saying, with all the rhetorical flourish he can muster, that the elements of the system he is gifting to the US work reasonably well in Australia even with a prime minister of his talents.

Then, in exchange for this gift, Albanese could put AUKUS in a can, excuse the US from any obligations imposed on it by related agreements and ask for all the money we’ve given them to be returned although with the “no interest required” grace note.

With these triumphs embossed onto his CV, our bold prime minister could return to Australia and be nominated by the governor-general for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.