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Donald Trump’s second presidency will do more than shatter America’s politics. It will expose a deeper betrayal: the lie that equality and human rights could be justified by prosperity.
For decades, we have clung to the comforting illusion that morality and markets are not only aligned, but a trade — that granting rights would unlock wealth, that fairness would secure growth, and that inclusion was the price of advancement. This was the progress myth: the belief that values could thrive so long as they paid their way.
But Trump’s return will tear apart this illusion. Justice was never the failure — it was the victim of systems that demanded it serve an economic purpose. The betrayal was never about either the gain of universal rights or a perceived loss of privilege — it was about the bargain that made equality conditional.
The progress myth reduced justice to a transaction. In America, values are marketed as an investment: gender equity boosts productivity, racial justice unlocks potential, and LGBTQIA+ inclusion drives innovation. Rights are no longer principles; they are strategies. But justice cannot raise GDP and dignity cannot be monetised. These were fabrications, equality was the Happy Meal you order to get the toy.
When prosperity failed to materialise for vast swathes of America, when towns crumbled, jobs vanished and wealth pooled in unreachable hands, the blame fell on the values bought, not the system that sold them. Trump weaponised this disillusionment with devastating clarity, offering an even darker bargain: abandon justice and fairness, and prosperity will return.
Globally, the betrayal played out on a larger scale. Human rights became tools, instrumentalised to legitimise economic systems that widened inequality. When globalisation faltered, these values were discarded as easily as they had been embraced. Trump’s presidency accelerates this betrayal, reframing the UN as an obstacle to sovereignty and justice, as a luxury in hard times. Values that once legitimised global trade are now sacrificed to a new economic order of leverage and power.
The same betrayal now repeats itself in the promises of technology. AI, automation and digital transformation are hailed as the next great progress, a force to liberate humanity from routine and create boundless opportunity. But technology does not liberate; it replaces. It consolidates power in the hands of those who control it.
Like globalisation, technological progress is sold as a universal good while deepening inequalities, within and beyond borders. Trump’s America will champion this narrative, racing toward technological dominance while discarding the values that were supposed to guide progress. The betrayal remains unchanged: justice is instrumentalised and then abandoned when it is no longer convenient.
There has never been a natural connection between justice and prosperity — this is the lesson America offers. The systems that tied them together did so to legitimise themselves, not to uphold values — this is the mirror Trump holds up.
Societies that tether their legitimacy to prosperity or their values to outcomes set themselves up for collapse. A society that treats equality as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself, breeds resentment when the promised end does not arrive. A society that justifies rights through growth loses the moral foundation that makes it cohesive. Values must stand alone, not as sacrifices, but as shared commitments that define what a society believes in, even when it is tested. Justice is not a strategy. Equality is not a transaction.
Trump’s second presidency will tempt us to abandon our values entirely, to frame equality as a burden we cannot afford and fairness as expendable. But the betrayal was never about equality. It was about the systems that instrumentalised it. Justice was never meant to justify itself through outcomes. It was meant to define who we are. This is not just America’s reckoning. It is ours. And for Australia, which has always enjoyed a bipartisan commitment to fairness, we must hold to our culture.
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