(Image : Tina Tiller)
(Image : Tina Tiller)

PoliticsAugust 20, 2020

A brief history of Donald Trump v Jacinda Ardern

The Bulletin editor
(Image : Tina Tiller)
(Image : Tina Tiller)

Three years. Two leaders. And a whole lot of diplomatic shade.

This week, our country was name-dropped by a celebrity (twice), except that celebrity was sitting US president Donald Trump and the name-drop was a bizarre claim that the relatively small cluster of Covid-19 cases in Auckland right now was a “big surge”. 

The prime minister, unsurprisingly, was quick to fire back, calling Trump’s claim “patently wrong”.

“I think anyone who’s following Covid and its transmission globally will quite easily see that New Zealand’s nine cases in a day does not compare to the United States’ tens of thousands, and in fact does not compare to most countries in the world,” Jacinda Ardern said.

Considering Ardern’s reputation as a kind and compassionate leader, that rebuke was about as fiery as we were ever going to get. But it’s not the first time Jacinda Ardern has played a game of back and forth with Donald Trump. In fact, it’s been almost three years of political shade.

‘Like Trump on immigration’

Before Ardern had even been elected, she was being compared to Donald Trump. It’s a claim that seems especially shocking now, with the benefit of hindsight.

“Meet New Zealand’s Justin Trudeau – except she’s more like Trump on immigration,” said the Wall Street Journal in a 2017 tweet.

Trump speaking at the White House (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Ardern wasn’t having it. When questioned on the comparison the next day by reporters, Labour’s freshly appointed leader labelled it as “offensive“.

“I absolutely refute the statement that was made there. And anyone who I think has been watching this campaign will know what was said there was absolutely false, and frankly offensive,” she said.

Just a few short months later, while sitting in her snazzy ninth floor Beehive office, Ardern would tell President Trump on the phone that she was looking forward to a productive relationship with him over the next three years.

‘No one marched when I was elected’

The first time the two leaders met was at a summit in Vietnam shortly after Ardern’s 2017 election victory. Trump, who reportedly believed Ardern was the wife of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, said Ardern “caused a lot of upset in her country” when she was elected.

“You know, no one marched when I was elected,” Ardern retorted, referring to the numerous global protests that followed Trump taking office.

It’s possible the notably thin-skinned president could’ve taken some offence at this, but Ardern said she believed the president was OK with the comment.

“[Trump] is consistent,” Ardern later told the Herald. “He is the same person that you see behind the scenes as he is in the public or through the media.”

Jacinda Ardern and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau at the ASEAN summit in Manila. (Photo: Twitter)

The ‘Anti-Trump’

“New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, is young, forward-looking, and unabashedly liberal,” a Vogue headline read in early 2018. “Call her the Anti-Trump.” It’s the same article that gave us this photo of the prime minister looking like she was about to solve a child’s murder or get in the TARDIS.

For an article that only makes five mentions of the name “Trump”, labelling Ardern as the Anti-Trump was certainly a bold claim to make. It’s also quite a reverse from being compared to the president on immigration issues a year earlier. In fact, Vogue goes on to make comparisons between Ardern and two of Trump’s biggest rivals, saying she has a mix of “Bernie Sanders’ bluntness and Elizabeth Warren’s fearlessness”.

“We’ll work with anyone,” Ardern told Vogue. Even Trump.

‘We should celebrate our diversity’

After two years in the top job, 2019 finally saw our prime minister sit down for a one-on-one with Donald Trump – but not before she had the chance to criticise him just one more time.

In July last year, Trump had, shockingly, been accused of racism, after posting tweets asking Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to the countries where they “originally came from”. Ardern, despite claiming she doesn’t like to get into other countries’ politics, condemned the comments on RNZ.

“I completely and utterly disagree with him,” she said.

Jacinda Ardern with members of the Muslim community in Christchurch. (Photo: Supplied)

“I’m quite proud that in New Zealand we take the opposite view, that we take the view that our parliament should be a representative place, it should look and feel like New Zealand, it should have a range of different cultures and ethnicities and never should a judgement be made about the origin of anyone, and their right, therefore, to be in parliament as a representative.”

‘Perfectly productive, warm’

It had all been leading up to this. The first official sit-down meeting between Trump and Ardern, which was described rather insultingly in Trump’s schedule as a mere “pull aside”. For a little country like New Zealand, however, this was a big opportunity.

In a 20 minute discussion away from prying media, Ardern and Trump reportedly talked about our gun buyback scheme and trade.

Later, Ardern told media the meeting was “perfectly productive, warm [and] solid,” which is how I’d typically describe a triple-shot flat white the morning after a night out. Obviously, this article is focused on conflict between Ardern and Trump, but if someone described 20 minutes in my company as “solid” I’d probably take that as an insult.

Unlike Barack Obama, who famously never sent a tweet following his visit to New Zealand in 2018, it took Donald Trump less than a day to get on the socials.

“Wonderful meeting!” he said.

‘They’re having a lot of outbreaks’

Today, Trump has doubled down on his comments that New Zealand is seeing a major resurgence in Covid-19 cases.

More Reading

    “New Zealand, by the way, had a big outbreak, and other countries that were held up to try and make us look not as good as we should look, and we’ve done an incredible job.

    “They’re having a lot of outbreaks, but they’ll be able to put them out, and we’ll be able put them out,” the president said.

    I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what Jacinda Ardern has to say about it.

    Keep going!
    They were cordoned off in the first lockdown in 2020 (Photo: Phil Walter/Getty Images)
    They were cordoned off in the first lockdown in 2020 (Photo: Phil Walter/Getty Images)

    OPINIONPoliticsAugust 20, 2020

    Unlawful, but necessary and reasonable: making sense of the High Court ruling on the lockdown

    Contributing writer
    They were cordoned off in the first lockdown in 2020 (Photo: Phil Walter/Getty Images)
    They were cordoned off in the first lockdown in 2020 (Photo: Phil Walter/Getty Images)

    In choosing to lead with the threat that Covid-19 poses the High Court makes it abundantly clear that it is going to cut the government a lot of slack when reviewing the overall legality of its actions in response, writes Andrew Geddis.

    Probably the most famous opening to a court judgment is to be found in the UK court of Appeal case of Miller v Jackson. Two home owners were seeking to stop the neighbouring cricket club from playing games on the club’s ground, because the ball kept on being hit over their fence and damaging their house.

    The moment you begin reading Lord Denning’s judgment, you immediately know which way he was going on this issue: “In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone. Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch. In the village of Lintz in County Durham they have their own ground, where they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well.”

    They tend it well, indeed. Unsurprisingly, Lord Denning went on to find that the cricket club should be able to continue its games despite the harm caused to the homeowners.

    Yesterday’s decision on the challenge to the legality of our level four and three lockdown measures might provide New Zealand’s public law equivalent of such a spoiler opening. Here’s how the judges commence their joint decision: “At the time of finalising this judgment, Covid-19 had infected over 21,500,000 people world-wide and killed over 760,000.”

    Reading that invokes Hudson’s cry: “Game over, man, game over!” In choosing to lead with the threat that Covid-19 poses the court makes it abundantly clear that it is going to cut the government a lot of slack when reviewing the overall legality of its actions in response.

    And so it proceeded to reject the argument of the claimant, Mr Borrowdale, that the overall lockdown measures were not actually permitted by the Health Act 1956. The nature of the legislation, the emergency situation faced by the nation, and the need to apply the law in a novel situation all called for a “fair, liberal, and remedial construction” of that statute’s wording. In other words, the court would go looking for ways to try and fit the government’s actions under that legislation’s umbrella.

    Unsurprisingly, it then found them. The powers bestowed on the director general of health, Ashley Bloomfield, by the Health Act were intended to be broad and cover the whole country. They come from a long history of allowing pretty draconian actions to preserve public health. They mean that he can, by way of nebulous “appropriate notification”, tell everyone they have to stay indoors for all but limited exceptions until he thinks it is safe for them not to.

    Equally, the way that Ashley Bloomfield went about determining which companies could carry on trading under lockdown was all OK. All he had to do was come up with a general, high level definition as being those businesses “that are essential to the provision of the necessities of life and those businesses that support them”, then hand the matter over to another government agency to decide exactly which businesses met that criteria. That was still him deciding what could be opened and what had to stay closed, as the Health Act required.

    And even when the court agreed with Mr Borrowdale on one point – that the legal framework in place for the lockdown’s first nine days didn’t actually forbid all the things people were being told they couldn’t do – it very much down-played the matter. This was largely a legal “no harm, no foul” situation. The government could have issued the right legal orders at the outset of lockdown, it just didn’t get around to doing so for a nine-day period.

    So, while the failure to create a clear legal basis for the lockdown rules from the outset meant that people’s legal rights were improperly limited, the government still acted in “a necessary, reasonable and proportionate” way. In making a declaration to that effect, the court didn’t even use the word “unlawful” to describe the situation (even though it was).

    I don’t mean this very brief summary of the court’s 293 paragraph long decision to sound cynical or dismissive. The court did its job in holding the actions of the government up to scrutiny and ensuring that they fit within the law. And as I noted before the case was heard, there certainly were very smart legal minds out there who saw matters the same way that the court did.

    So it’s not that the court got the decision wrong. Rather, it seems clear that the court’s perception of its job, and the law at issue, was very much coloured by the same collective concerns that drove the government’s response to the virus. Preventing lots of people from dying from a disease is perhaps the government’s highest obligation, and the law has to be seen as enabling the government to carry out that task.

    We are, after all, a team of five million – not a team of 4,999,997 and three High court judges.

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