Updated ,first published
Washington: US President Donald Trump has nominated a former Republican congressman to become the next American ambassador to Australia, 15 months into his presidency.
Trump named former Virginia representative and academic David Brat for the role on Monday (US time). As per protocol, the nominee must be confirmed by the US Senate before taking up the job.
There has been no US ambassador in Canberra since Caroline Kennedy departed in late 2024, although it is not unusual for presidents to take some time to appoint ambassadors to Australia.
A conservative Republican who was part of the Tea Party movement, Brat came to prominence in 2014 when he achieved what The New York Times called “one of the most stunning primary election upsets in congressional history”, defeating the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Eric Cantor, in the Virginia district.
He campaigned largely on the grounds that Cantor was not conservative enough on the issue of immigration. Cantor had been serving his seventh term.
Brat, 61, was born in Detroit and gained a bachelor of arts from Michigan’s Hope College, before obtaining his masters in divinity at Princeton Theological Seminary, and a PhD.
He went on to become an economics professor at Virginia’s Randolph–Macon College, and returned to academia after losing the 2018 election. He lost to Democrat Abigail Spanberger, who is now the governor of Virginia.
Brat’s current role is as senior vice president of business relations at Liberty University, a private, evangelical Christian university. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment about his nomination.
There had been speculation in Washington that Trump was looking to appoint a wealthy business executive or someone from the entertainment industry to be his ambassador to Australia.
Multiple sources also said they had heard Trump encountered difficulty finding someone who was happy to live in Canberra.
In October, days after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s visit to the White House, Trump told this masthead he had one or two people in mind for the job, and he wanted to find someone Albanese would “like”.
A 2014 profile in New York magazine noted that while not all of Brat’s academic output was religious, it was clearly his passion, and he “could easily be the next big rock-star Christian academic”.
A piece in The New Yorker around the same time called him “the Elizabeth Warren of the right”, as well as “a free-market purist and a devotee of Ayn Rand”, the Russian-American writer and philosopher.
Trump, who was at that time not in politics but was once again considering running for president, posted on Twitter (as it was then called) after Brat’s primary victory.
“As I have said, the Tea Party is alive and well and fighting hard for the USA. BIG WIN TODAY!” Trump wrote.
In a 2022 interview with MAGA media personality Steve Bannon, two weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Brat urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept a “deal” offered by Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war.
The deal involved Ukraine surrendering territory, adopting permanent neutrality, severely limiting its military and renouncing claims to NATO membership. It was later described by the Atlantic Council think tank as “a call for unconditional surrender and a blueprint for the destruction of the Ukrainian state”.
But Brat said to Bannon at the time: “As a Christian brother, I would tell him [Zelensky]: if you do not close on this deal, Kyiv, the other major cities, are going to be just devastated.”
Last year, Brat defended Trump’s tariffs in an interview with a local Virginia TV station, saying they were aimed at rebalancing unfair trade practices and bringing manufacturing back to the US.
The Australian government has strongly criticised Trump’s tariffs on Australian exports, pointing out the US already enjoys a trade surplus with Australia.
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.