Former conservative congressman to become new US ambassador in Canberra

US President Donald Trump has finally appointed an ambassador to Australia – David Brat, a conservative former Republican congressman.

The post has been vacant since Caroline Kennedy, appointed by the Biden administration, left in late 2024.

Brat, 61, still has to be confirmed by the US Senate to take up the post. He served two terms in the US House of Representatives, representing a district in Virginia before being defeated in 2018.

He entered Congress after surprisingly defeating then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a Republican primary in Virginia in 2014. Brat was backed by the conservative Tea Party movement at the time.

In Congress, he was a member of the Freedom Caucus, which is the most conservative bloc of Republicans.

Brat was trained in business administration and has a PhD in economics and a degree in divinity.

After his congressional defeat, he was appointed dean of Liberty University’s School of Business, and recently served as its senior vice president of business relations. The university is a conservative, evangelical Christian institution in Virginia.

Brat links religion, and notably Protestantism, to markets and capitalism. According to a Time magazine profile in 2014, “his core argument is that capitalism and Christianity should merge.”

Brat supported Trump’s 2025 tariffs as necessary to put “more capital back in the hands of Americans”, according to David Smith, a US politics expert at the University of Sydney.

At a news conference Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was asked whether Brat was someone he could work with, given that “the new US Ambassador has previously accused intelligence agencies of orchestrating a conspiracy to remove Donald Trump, of spying on Republicans [and has] demanded that Ukraine give into Russian demands?”

Albanese said, “I’ll work with whoever is determined to be the ambassador. That is a decision for the United States. I understand that the President will put forward David Brat as ambassador, and there’s a process of confirmation that occurs through the US processes. We respect the sovereignty of countries to put forward ambassadors, just like we expect our choices to be endorsed.”