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As he attempts to build relations with the Trump administration, Kevin Rudd has been accused of privately mocking the president-elect’s inner circle at parties held at the ambassador’s official residence. By Jason Koutsoukis.
‘Steaming pile of shit’: Rudd prepares to work with Trump
Among the Democrats who started visiting Kevin Rudd at White Oaks was the deputy secretary of state, Kurt Campbell. There were others, too – regulars at the bull sessions the Australian ambassador had started hosting at his official residence in Washington. Rudd loves an audience, and at these gatherings with senior members of the Biden administration, he couldn’t help himself.
“Rudd has done an outstanding job reaching across the aisle to foster strong connections with Republicans across the United States,” one Australian official told The Saturday Paper. “But in private gatherings with senior Democrats such as Kurt Campbell, he has been caustic in his assessment of Trump’s people, offering candid assessments of how stupid they are. And word of those sessions is leaking back to them. There is absolutely no way the Trump people are going to either forget or forgive that kind of behaviour.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kutSX8iyMhA&ab_channel=TheSaturdayPaper
When Anthony Albanese was first considering appointing Rudd as ambassador to Washington, several Labor MPs who had worked with the former prime minister expressed concern that he might cause problems for the government later.
“And now we have exactly this situation,” one Labor source says. “Kevin created this massive, steaming pile of shit, and now he’s making Albo eat it. It always ends up being about Kevin.”
This is at the heart of Rudd’s problems as he prepares to engage with Donald Trump’s White House. Since taking up his post in March last year, he has crisscrossed the United States, deploying his formidable networking prowess to forge connections with key people in Donald Trump’s orbit. Yet in private he can’t stop himself from saying what he thinks about the halfwits and nutters that surround the president-elect.
This year, Rudd has met with Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state; South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Trump’s nominee for homeland security; Vivek Ramaswamy, who Trump has named as co-head alongside Elon Musk of the yet-to-be-created Department of Government Efficiency; Florida congressman Michael Waltz, the former Green Beret who will serve as Trump’s national security adviser; as well as prominent members of the first Trump administration, such as former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former vice president Mike Pence, former senior counsellor Kellyanne Conway and former national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien.
Rudd has also nurtured strong connections with other key Republicans, including Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy, Montana senator Steve Daines, Alaska senator Dan Sullivan, and Texas congressman Mike McCaul, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
A spokeswoman for Idaho senator Jim Risch, who will take over as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, told The Saturday Paper Risch had also got to know Rudd well.
“The United States and Australia remain strong allies,” the spokeswoman said, “and as such, Senator Risch has a good and productive relationship with Ambassador Rudd.”
Rudd has also maintained strong ties with former political opponents in Australia. These include his two predecessors as ambassador, Joe Hockey and Arthur Sinodinos, who have both established political consultancies in Washington, and former prime minister Scott Morrison, who has joined US lobbying firm American Global Strategies as non-executive vice chairman.
Rudd launched Morrison’s memoir at the Australian embassy in Washington earlier this year, and the two are understood to have worked closely in advancing Australia’s interests on issues such as AUKUS.
None of that seemed to matter on Wednesday, however, when Trump confidant Dan Scavino, who the president-elect has named as his deputy chief of staff, posted an image of an hourglass above Rudd’s November 7 statement congratulating Trump on his election victory, implying that Rudd’s time as ambassador was running out.
The main source of tension between Rudd and Trump’s circle, of course, are social media posts Rudd made before he was named ambassador to the US, and which he finally deleted on November 7, a move that was reported on page 4 of The New York Times.
“The most destructive president in history,” Rudd wrote on Twitter, now X, in 2020. “He drags America and democracy through the mud.”
In an interview in 2021, Rudd described Trump as “a village idiot” and “not a leading intellectual force”.
According to Peter Jennings, director of Strategic Analysis Australia and former executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Rudd now has no choice but to consider his position.
“Can he make amends with Trump? I don’t think that’s going to be likely,” Jennings told The Saturday Paper. “At this stage, we’re getting too many signals from Trump’s people that that’s not likely to happen, which is going to leave an air of unhappiness in the room when future engagements between Rudd and the Trump White House happen.
“If it’s not possible for a constructive relationship to be developed, not just between Rudd and Trump, but Rudd and the White House and Rudd and the administration, then that’s really going to do damage to Australia’s national interests.”
Another concern being raised by Liberal Party operatives in Canberra is why Rudd waited until November 7 to delete the social media posts critical of Trump.
“You have to wonder why he didn’t take those tweets down when they first came to prominence,” one senior Liberal adviser told The Saturday Paper. “That he didn’t says, firstly, that he didn’t think Trump would win and would have used them to buttress his credentials with the Dems and, secondly, that he didn’t really have good advice on what the Republicans were seeing polling wise. So Rudd was very out of the loop despite his efforts to ingratiate himself.”
Perhaps the most powerful force unsettling the ground beneath Rudd is his intense hatred of Rupert Murdoch, owner of Trump’s favourite broadcaster, Fox News, and Sky News in Australia.
Appearing before a Senate inquiry into media diversity in Australia in 2021, Rudd called for a royal commission to be established to ensure the strength, vitality and diversity of the Australian media. He argued this was necessary to underpin the long-term health of Australia’s democracy.
“Numerous experts – ranging from former US Director of National Intelligence Lt Gen James Clapper (retired) and former Fox News contributor Lt Col Ralph Peters (retired), to former long-serving Murdoch executives such as Preston Padden and James Murdoch, have backed a royal commission or echoed my submission’s concerns about the dangers for democracy,” Rudd told the inquiry in November 2021.
Rudd’s bitterness towards Murdoch and his global media empire harks back to his time as prime minister, with Rudd blaming News Corp for undermining his government and his leadership. On this point, Rudd has a common ally in former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who also blames Murdoch for destabilising him.
“This is revenge,” Turnbull said on Thursday, referring to News Corp’s coverage of whether Rudd should continue as Australia’s ambassador to the US. “This is a campaign that News Corp kicked off and they are running a vendetta.”
Strongly backing Rudd to remain in the post, Turnbull added that his own experience dealing with Trump during his first term as president showed why it would be folly to give in to calls to recall Rudd. “I didn’t have success with Trump as prime minister because I kissed his arse,” Turnbull says. “You have to be tough.”
Still, Australian diplomatic sources believe Rudd’s past criticisms of Trump are a ticking time bomb in the hands of producers at Fox News, who won’t miss the opportunity to remind Trump of what Rudd has said about him in the past when they know a thin-skinned Trump will be watching.
“Trump and his team, focused as they are on enforcing personal loyalty in this second term, cannot be seen to let this slide,” said one senior Australian diplomatic source. “It will make Trump look weak to the world.”
Asked at the Australian Institute of International Affairs national conference on Monday whether Rudd should continue as ambassador, Professor Peter J. Dean, director of foreign policy and defence at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, answered with an emphatic “No.”
“My view is that it’s up to the Australian government who is our ambassador to the USA and that Kevin Rudd has done an outstanding job in the role,” Dean explained later to The Saturday Paper. “I also believe that the focus should be on the bilateral relationship and the key issues, not individual personalities.”
A source of comfort to Rudd will be the strong backing he has received from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and other senior members of Albanese’s front bench, as well as from former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott.
Even Opposition Leader Peter Dutton offered qualified praise this week, saying he had met with Rudd recently in Washington.
“As you would expect, he’s got an incredible work ethic,” said Dutton. “I had a very good relationship with [former Labor leader] Kim Beazley when he was the ambassador in Washington as well. So, I think people of both political types have gone to that position, they bring gravitas to the office, and I hope that there can be good work done in our country’s name.”
Former Australian ambassador to the US Dennis Richardson, who also served as secretary of the Department of Defence and secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, told The Conversation this week that the present controversy around Rudd “is not an issue that arose out of any normal process. This is an issue that’s been pursued by one news outlet.”
Richardson points to the interview Trump did this year with far-right UK politician Nigel Farage, where Farage put to Trump some of Rudd’s past criticisms. Richardson noted that Sky News Australia had asked Farage to put the quotes to Trump and that Trump’s response suggested he didn’t know who Rudd was.
“I don’t know much about him. I heard he was a little bit nasty. I hear he’s not the brightest bulb. But I don’t know much about him,” Trump said in the interview in March. “But if he’s at all hostile, he will not be there long.”
Richardson said some presenters and commentators on Sky News had created a “self-licking ice-cream” in relation to Rudd, adding that the Albanese government should do “precisely nothing” in response to the pressure mounting on Rudd, except to express its confidence in the ambassador.
“Dennis has made the point that this wouldn’t be in the top 200 issues that Trump would be worried about. That may be true,” Peter Jennings says. “But I’ll tell you what. It’s the No. 1 issue in terms of the Australia–US bilateral relationship, unfortunately.
“There are many other more important issues that we should be starting to talk about with the incoming Trump team, such as the slow failure of AUKUS, the failure of AUKUS Pillar II, the risk of war in the Indo-Pacific,” Jennings added.
“There’s lots of things that really should be top of mind for an Australian PM to have a conversation with Trump about, but instead what are we talking about? We’re talking about whether Kevin Rudd’s fairly extensive backlist of rude comments about Trump are now going to stop him from being ambassador, and that’s not good. I think this could have been better handled. It hasn’t been and now we’ve got to live with the consequences of, you know, whatever happens from here on.”
As for who could replace Rudd, Jennings nominated Scott Morrison, or, if that was too much for Albanese to swallow, the director-general of the Office of National Intelligence, Andrew Shearer.
Despite working as national security adviser to two Liberal prime ministers, Jennings said he believed Shearer had won Albanese’s trust in his current role, and that he had excellent links to senior Republicans in Washington.
“The one thing that would probably terminate Rudd’s position almost overnight is if we get another comment from Trump along the lines of his comments to Farage, which he so easily could, and Rudd won’t have a leg to stand on at that point,” Jennings says. “In which case I think someone like Andrew Shearer would make an excellent choice to replace him.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 16, 2024 as "‘Steaming pile of shit’: Rudd prepares to work with Trump".
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