When Donald Trump won in 2016, I wrote that this was the first technological revolution in which the losers were able to vote.

“In the Industrial Revolution of the 18^th and 19^th centuries”, I wrote, “plenty of people lost their jobs and became poorer and the rich got much richer, but the property qualification for voting in elections and the brutal police state of the time meant the losers weren’t able to do much about it.

“The 21^st century technology revolution … also boils down to the pursuit of money and power: Those who have them have been pushing an agenda of global free trade, immigration and innovation for 40 years.”

And in 2016, the losers spoke.

In 2024, post-Covid inflation can be added to those things: That is, a 25 per cent increase in the American consumer price index over the past four years (in Australia, 22 per cent).

Segregation at work

This time Trump has won the popular vote as well as the electoral college.

Once again there’s more to it than technology, immigration and inflation, although those are the instruments of disadvantage and anger.

As David Brooks wrote in the New York Times after the election last week, a piece headed “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?”: “Society (has) worked as a vast segregation system, elevating the academically gifted above everybody else. Before long, the diploma divide became the most important chasm in American life.

“High school graduates die nine years sooner than college-educated people. They die of opioid overdoses at six times the rate. They marry less and divorce more and are more likely to have a child out of wedlock. They are more likely to be obese. A recent American Enterprise Institute study found that 24 per cent of people who graduated from high school at most have no close friends. They are less likely than college grads to visit public spaces or join community groups and sports leagues. They don’t speak in the right social justice jargon or hold the sort of luxury beliefs that are markers of public virtue.”

Questions remain

Two or three big questions now arise for Australia:

• Will America’s guardrails hold?
• Does Trump’s victory provide a pathway for Peter Dutton to beat Anthony Albanese next year?
• What will it mean for the temperature of the planet?

Trump is obviously a loose unit at best, a tyrant at worst, and is better prepared, and better supported by the right-wing agenda called Project 2025, than he was in 2016, so the guardrails of democracy and proper government will be more important over the next four years than they were eight years ago.

An important check on federal power is the fact that most of the electoral, policing and economic power in the US sits with the states, and is dispersed between Democrats and Republicans.

Also, the “bond vigilantes” are sleeping, not dead, and the Federal Reserve remains independent, a least until chairman Jerome Powell’s term ends in May 2026 (asked on Thursday whether he would resign if Trump asked him to, Powell said: “No”). If the budget deficit gets out of hand, or looks like it will, or if inflation is resurrected by tariffs, interest rates would rise and strangle Trump’s administration.

Mid-terms cycle

Another guardrail is the country’s perpetual election cycle, with the mid-terms starting within 12 months of inauguration in January. As UK Tories discovered, you can go from chocolates to boiled lollies fast.

What lessons in Trump’s victory for Peter Dutton? The Oz had quite the scoop on Saturday: “The Weekend Australian can reveal the Coalition … will seek comprehensive briefings on what worked and didn’t work during the US election campaign.”

I can save them the trip to Mar-a-Lago: Go hard on inflation and immigration, don’t accuse migrants of eating cats and dogs and go easy on the misogyny and having professional wrestlers goggle-eyed on steroids rip their singlets off at rallies.

And perhaps the main lesson: Let the “liberal elites” shoot themselves.

As someone wryly noted on Twitter/X last week: “So it turns out running an 81-year-old, replacing him four months before election day, and then having that replacement refuse to give interviews for three of those months is a terrible strategy. Who knew?!?”

Albanese uninspiring

Anthony Albanese is trying hard to lose the election. The Voice referendum was a debacle, reduced immigration targets won’t be met, housing supply targets won’t be met, he and Jim Chalmers are rabbits in inflation’s headlights, and now – amazingly – he has announced that under-16s will be banned from social media, without having any idea how to do it.

All Peter Dutton has to do to become PM next year is shut up and shake his head in disbelief, but he can’t shut up, and won’t do that, so he might lose because he is not Donald Trump. The No.1 requirement for a populist is to be popular.

As for the global temperature, it is now much less likely that it will be kept below 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial level, as targeted in the Paris Agreement of 2015.

Six months into his first presidency, Trump withdrew America from the Paris Agreement; this time he could go further and withdraw from the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change altogether. That treaty is the foundation for international climate talks.

Heat’s on

Even if he doesn’t withdraw from global climate action, Trump is likely to scuttle it by cutting, or even eliminating US funding for renewable energy developing countries, and “drill, baby, drill” instead, as he puts it.

Trump has called Biden’s signature climate policy, the Inflation Reduction Act, the “green new scam” and promised to dismantle it, but that won’t be easy. Many companies have fastened their corporate lips to the IRA teat and will complain loudly if the tax credits dry up.

Nevertheless, it’s most likely that Trump’s second term will be another setback for progress on climate action, which means that the world should prepare for more floods like Valencia’s, more hurricanes like Helene and Milton, higher sea levels and more heat.

That is unless Trump flips and decides to follow Ronald Reagan on this subject (Reagan was alarmed by global warming and wanted action to prevent it. That was before the fossil fuel lobby mobilised).

Anything is possible.

Alan Kohler writes weekly for The New Daily. He is finance presenter on the ABC News and also writes for Intelligent Investor.