Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has strongly defended his ambassador to the US after Donald Trump said he did not like the diplomat during a meeting at the White House.
On Monday, Trump was asked about Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister turned ambassador to the US, who wrote several now-deleted tweets critical of the US president years before his Washington posting.
Rudd owned up to the tweets, prompting the US leader to say “I don’t like you either” and causing the room to erupt in laughter.
The high-stakes meeting with Trump was Albanese’s first, and the prime minister later dismissed the comments as “banter” amid calls to sack Rudd.
Australia’s opposition leader Sussan Ley said Trump’s comments meant Rudd’s position was “untenable” and that he should be dismissed as ambassador.
Rudd – who led Australia between 2007 and 2010, and briefly again in 2013 – was appointed as ambassador in 2023 for a four-year posting.
In 2020, he wrote that Trump was the “most destructive president in history” and a “traitor to the West”. Another post described Trump as a “village idiot”.
Minutes after his comments in the Cabinet Room, Trump reportedly told the ambassador that “all is forgiven”.
Albanese later publicly praised Rudd’s work as ambassador at a Friends of Australia breakfast attended by US politicians.
“If there’s a harder working ambassador on The Hill, then please let me know, because Kevin works his guts out and he seems to know everyone,” he told Republican and Democratic members of Congress at the event.
A prominent Republican, Michael McCaul, agreed with Albanese, joking that he was glad Rudd was still “gainfully employed”.
McCaul also said that “Kevin was there every step of the way” during talks on Aukus, a multi-billion dollar submarine deal between Australia, the UK and the US.
Albanese said the success of his two-day trip to the US – which included the signing of an $8.5bn (A$13bn; £6.3bn) rare earths deal – was due to Rudd’s efforts.
“I thank you today, very much publicly – for the success of this visit is down to your hard work,” he said, addressing Rudd at an event for the 140th anniversary of mining giant BHP.
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