Eight years ago, almost to the day, Japan’s then-prime minister Shinzo Abe flew to New York to become the first foreign leader to meet with US president-elect Donald Trump.
Inside the Obama White House, they were not amused. Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, emailed the heads of foreign missions to convey the president’s displeasure at Abe’s move and remind them it was a breach of protocol for other nations’ leaders to meet with an incoming US president while another was still in office.
He indicated that any other leader who chose to do what Abe had done could find themselves denied landing rights in the United States.
This is a big part of why Anthony Albanese will ignore critics’ breathless demands that he make a quick side-trip to Florida on his way home from the Apec and G20 summits in South America to try to soothe any lingering animus in the Trump camp over ambassador Kevin Rudd’s past free character assessments of the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president.
It’s not something the prime minister can or should do. President Joe Biden is unlikely to be any more inclined than his Democrat predecessor to facilitate a parade of kowtowing leaders, this time to the Mar-a-Lago estate. Besides, it would be a shockingly bad look.
Herein lies the great dilemma for both Rudd and Albanese as regards the Trouble With The Old Injudicious Commentary. No foreign leader should be allowed to dictate who can and can’t serve as Australia’s representative based simply on vengeance or personal dislike. But Donald Trump ain’t no ordinary leader. So there’s what should happen – that all is forgiven and as adults they move on – and then there’s what might.
Rudd is hardly alone in having held and shared disparaging views about Trump in the past. If the re-elected president can overlook similarly unflattering remarks by the bloke he’s now picked to be his vice-president, JD Vance, and the bloke who’ll be his secretary of state, early-stage rival Marco Rubio, then why should he single out that guy from Australia for punishment?
Trump’s capacity to forgive seems reliant on twin tests of repentance and usefulness.
Rudd’s status as a former prime minister and his deep knowledge of China in particular mean there’s no question he has been an asset to Australia in Washington. Nobody but nobody in the circles that count is saying he’s done anything other than an excellent job since he took up the post.
But it’s not whether he’s good for Australia that matters. It’s whether he serves the interests of the US and especially Donald J Trump. As Rudd’s predecessor and former Liberal senator Arthur Sinodinos put it in an interview for Guardian Australia’s Australian Politics podcast, it will be about demonstrating to Trump “why America needs countries like Australia and what we bring to the table”.
“That’s because his focus is America First, so we want to make sure it’s not America only.” Sinodinos stressed that while Rudd would certainly play a role in that, the primary relationship was between the president and the prime minister.
“Ambassadors all have their uses but at the end of the day that’s the primary relationship and that’s the one through which the business - the real business – gets transacted in terms of Australia and the US working together,” he said. “So what I’m saying is, I don’t know if the president’s going to be sitting around thinking about the fact that Kevin is still in in DC, or not.”
But those observations were made a week ago, when the griping on what Rudd had said about Trump in the past still had limited traction. Then Sky News ramped up its reporting of Rudd’s old Trump epithets even further, unearthing a 2021 video of him calling Trump “the village idiot”. Suddenly it was all over the front page of the also-Murdoch-owned New York Post – Trump’s apparent newspaper of choice.
Then came a social media post by senior Trump adviser Dan Scavino featuring Rudd’s congratulatory statement declaring that Australia looked forward to working closely with Trump, under the provocative image of sand flowing through an hourglass.
The congratulatory statement had been issued around the same time that Rudd was scrubbing old tweets that called Trump “the most destructive president in history”. That move – mystifyingly not made before the US election but after – subsequently catapulted Rudd into the New York Times and prompted questions to officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who happened, uncomfortably, to be appearing before a Senate estimates hearing in Canberra as the Times story went live.
They were duly grilled about a different statement Rudd had posted, this time on his personal website, explaining that the deletions were “out of respect for the office of President of the United States” – and, by omission, seemingly not out of respect for Trump – and that the deleted observations had been made when he was an independent commentator.
“This has been done to eliminate the possibility of such comments being misconstrued as reflecting his positions as Ambassador and, by extension, the views of the Australian Government,” the statement said.
Under opposition questioning, departmental secretary Jan Adams explained the department had been “aware of the intention” to delete the posts but that it had been done at Rudd’s initiative. She emphasised that the explanation had been posted on his personal website, seeming to imply this conveyed a degree of separation not terribly apparent in the real world.
And then Scavino was appointed Trump’s deputy chief of staff.
Suddenly the first of the twin recovery tests – the repentance bit – looks a lot more challenging. How to crab-walk away from the embarrassing sledges while at least one very large media organisation is giving them relentlessly high priority? A week ago Sinodinos ventured that the ex-PM might try to just laugh it all off in dealings with Trump officials. Seems a bit harder now.
The politics are complicated, including domestically.
Even Rudd’s greatest critics in the federal Coalition back home – who, in the past, have disparaged him even more than some of his own colleagues – are trying to lean more heavily towards condemning Albanese for appointing Rudd than the ambassador himself.
It’s a faux distinction really, because any kind of political engagement in the public debate about Rudd’s ongoing suitability for the job has the effect of adding to the pressure. None of that is especially helpful to Australia’s interests, given who the American people have chosen to lead them for the next four years.
Both Rudd and Australia – meaning Albanese – now have to try to push past it all and prise open any closing doors, on Pennsylvania Avenue, on the Hill and elsewhere in Washington DC.
Trump won’t formally send Rudd packing and Albanese certainly won’t withdraw him. The issue will be whether those around the incoming president see making life hard for the outspoken former prime minister as a higher priority than maintaining good and close relations with a longtime ally. If they do, and the doors close, it may just all become untenable.
And in that event, sometime next year, Rudd may decide that he has something much more important that he needs to do.
Only time, and Trump, will tell.
