Anthony Albanese’s date with Donald Trump went so well that he floated the idea of using their first get-together in his 2028 election ads.
The Australian Prime Minister basked in the US President’s flattery as he blitzed his first trip to the White House since Mr Trump was elected, almost a year ago.
The trip was delayed and long-awaited, but delivered both in substance, style and fireworks. Of those, there were plenty.
Left to right: US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgman, Vice President JD Vance, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and US President Donald Trump. Photo: Latika M Bourke
Mr Trump roasted Kevin Rudd in a humiliating exchange.
The fire was ignited when Sky News Australia’s Andrew Clennell asked if past criticisms made by Kevin Rudd were a factor in delaying the visit. Trump turned his fury on the Australian Ambassador to the United States, whom he claimed not to know.
‘I don’t know anything about him, I mean if he said bad, then maybe he’ll like to apologise, I really don’t know,’ Trump said.
He then turned to Albanese to verify the question.
‘Did an ambassador say something bad about me? Don’t, don’t tell me, where is he? Is he still working for you?’
A grinning Albanese said: ‘Yeah, yeah’ and pointed to Rudd who was sitting across from Trump.
‘You said bad?’ Trump asked Rudd.
‘Before I took this position Mr President,’ Rudd confirmed.
‘I don’t like you either. I don’t and, and I probably never will,’ Trump told him.
Rudd was appointed Ambassador to the United States when Joe Biden was President.
He had previously called Trump the most destructive president in history, and on the morning of Trump’s re-election, felt it was a sensible idea to release a statement drawing attention to his critical social media posts, saying he had now removed them.
This drew the ire of one of Trump’s advisers, Dan Scavino who posted on X a GIF of a sand timer, suggesting Rudd was living on borrowed time.
The Rudd issue was always a ticking time bomb set to explode, and that happened on Monday. Trump sought to humiliate Rudd in pretending not to recognise the man sitting across the table from him. He has met Rudd and been asked about Rudd’s comments before, then by Nigel Farage on GB News, on behalf of his friends at Sky News Australia, which is part-owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia.
Rudd spent his post-political career crusading for a Royal Commission into Murdoch’s media empire, convinced it was the reason he lost the prime ministership at the hands of his colleagues, many of whom took immense pleasure in seeing him taken down on live television by the vindictive president.
The opposition demanded Rudd’s sacking, saying Albanese’s laughter showed the former PM was now a punchline to a joke.
Albanese’s decision not to defend Rudd at the time was in contrast to how the UK’s Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer dealt with a similar set of circumstances earlier this year.
Then Trump launched into an attack on Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim Mayor, saying he was nasty and terrible. Mr Starmer intervened, holding out his hand to interrupt the US President and defend his Labour colleague.
‘He’s a friend of mine,’ Mr Starmer said at the time, also with a laugh, but one that had a tone of gentle pushback.
Once away from the White House, the Prime Minister backed Rudd in the job for a full four-year term and said that he had observed Trump absolving the former PM.
‘All is forgiven, he said that while you were exiting the room,’ the prime minister told reporters during a press conference at the Australian Embassy in the United States before heading home.
Albanese’s Washington triumph is due to Rudd and the former prime minister is Australia’s best foreign policy asset. He is not just a strategic thinker but has deep connections and is highly valued and rated by both sides of Congress.
‘I’m glad you’re still gainfully employed,’ Michael McCaul, the Republican congressman and co-chair of the Friends of Australia Caucus told Rudd at a breakfast gathering at Blair House on Tuesday morning.
Australia’s Ambassador to the United States Kevin Rudd and Industry Minister Tim Ayres at Blair House. Photo: Latika M Bourke
Rudd wasn’t Trump’s only target.
The US President turned his aim on two Australian journalists, telling The Sydney Morning Herald’s Washington correspondent Michael Koziol that he was a ‘nasty guy’ and me that my question on Ukraine was ill-informed.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Mr Trump said when I asked why he didn’t use his position as the most powerful man on earth to enable Ukraine to finish the war tomorrow.
But when it came to his assessment of the Australia-US Alliance and his ability to work with the left-leaning Australian Prime Minister, things could not have gone any better. The visit was an unmitigated success.
Mr Trump praised the alliance, rightly, as one that was steadfast and constant and had never caused the US any doubts.
‘We’ve been long-term, long-time allies. I would say there’s never been anybody better,’ he said.
‘We’ve fought wars together, we never had any doubts. It’s a great honour to have you as my friend.’
The Australian side made much of the fact that Mr Albanese was seated not in the Oval Office but beside Mr Trump in the Cabinet Room for the press conference, attended by the administration’s most senior figures, including US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice-President JD Vance, and the Secretary of the Navy John Phelan.
Before entering the Cabinet Room, Mr Trump welcomed Mr Albanese to the White House, told the media his message to the Australian people was that ‘we love them,’ and gave the Australian leader a tour of the Oval Office and the building works he is carrying out.
Once seated, they got to business, signing a massive critical minerals deal aimed at countering Chinese dominance and supporting Australian mining and processing.
The President strongly backed AUKUS, saying it should be accelerated and even appeared to give Labor a free pass on raising defence spending.
‘I’d always like more but they have to do what they have to do you know, you can only do so much,’ he said.
He went on to praise the recent $12 billion promised investments Labor has made in the Henderson shipyards in WA near HMAS Stirling, from where the AUKUS submarines will dock and base, saying they were complex and costly.
Albanese beamed, grinned and laughed as he was constantly flattered by Trump as ‘highly respected,’ ‘very popular,’ and someone who had done a ‘fantastic job’ as prime minister and a ‘great leader.’
Mr Trump frequently patted Mr Albanese, whom he also called a friend.
‘Thanks for showing us around the improved Oval Office and for what you’re doing around here as well,’ Mr Albanese said.
He said Mr Trump’s Middle East peace deal was an ‘extraordinary achievement.’
The omens for a good trip were positive from the start. Mr Albanese was invited to stay at Blair House, the residence across the road from the White House. It’s offered to visiting world leaders at the White House’s discretion.
‘It’s a great honour to be able to stay there. We are great friends and we are great allies,’ Mr Albanese said.
He released a photo of the flowers that were waiting for him upon his arrival late on Sunday night and the note from the President and First Lady Melania Trump who said they were ‘delighted’ to host the Australian leader.
But the trip was hugely substantial and on all the key issues that mattered to Australia.
First up was securing AUKUS, which the Pentagon began reviewing earlier this year. Mr Trump made his first comments on the deal to sell Australia nuclear-powered submarines and said it was one he would honour, and possibly accelerate. He agreed that the program was a deterrent against China taking over Taiwan, but claimed that they ultimately wouldn’t be needed because of his deal-making skills that he would deploy with President Xi Jinping at the APEC summit in South Korea next month.
‘I think we’ll be just fine with China. China doesn’t want to do that,’ Trump said.
‘We have the best of everything and nobody is going to mess with that ... I think we’ll end up with a very strong trade deal. Both of us will be happy.’
However naive this view, it is ‘full steam ahead’ for AUKUS, Trump confirmed, silencing AUKUS sceptics in his own administration once and for all.
It is a vindication of the view put forward by Michael Green at the United States Studies Centre at Sydney University, who predicted this outcome immediately after Trump’s re-election on the Latika Takes podcast.
‘We are doing that, we have them moving very, very quickly,’ Mr Trump said, when asked if he might expedite the sale of submarines to Australia.
The jewel of the meeting was the $8.5 billion critical minerals deal that is aimed at pouring US investment into Australia’s mining sector to grow Australian jobs and create a secure supply chain of the essential ingredients that go into making advanced weapons and everyday tech goods.
If there were two outstanding issues of concern, one was trade tariffs, which Mr Trump gave no indication he would consider removing.
‘Australia pays among the lowest tariffs,’ he said.
The other was the Quad, which was not raised by either leader or the media.
The status of the annual Quad Leaders’ Summit remains pending. It is India’s turn to host the gathering of the US, Australian and Japanese leaders, but India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in a dispute with Mr Trump over India’s purchases of Russian oil and the US’s subsequent trade tariffs.
But any suggestions before the visit that Mr Albanese, who campaigned heavily on anti-Trumpian themes to win his 94-seat majority, would have a difficult relationship with the US leader as a result, have been well and truly dispelled.
Mr Albanese had few words, as is customary for world leaders who are forced to take part in the President’s marathon press encounters, but his grin said it all. By the end, he was jubilant, joking that he would use Trump’s endorsement on his next campaign literature.
‘They really have a great Prime Minister,’ Mr Trump told the media.
‘I’ll use it in my ads in ‘28,’ Mr Albanese said, the same year he invited Mr Trump to visit Australia.
He might only be half-joking.
This article is a combination of several pieces published this week by The Nightly. My sleep deprivation invites you to read them ALL here.
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You were right on Ukraine - Trump was wrong. Good on you for asking the question. Maybe your next one could be, "Why Mr President are you so easily played and out foxed by Putin?"
You were right on Ukraine - Trump was wrong. Good on you for asking the question. Maybe your next one could be, "Why Mr President are you so easily played and out foxed by Putin?"