Former US ambassador Joe Hockey’s insider’s take on White House and Canberra politics
Joe Hockey was ambassador to the US during the volatile Donald Trump presidency and reveals the then president gave him a humiliating dressing-down before a game of golf.
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Joe Hockey thought he was going to play a round of golf with Donald Trump.
But seconds after the doors of the golf club dining room swung open and the President of the United States strode in to applause from the ageing acolytes chowing down at the breakfast buffet, it became clear Trump was going to whack Hockey around for a bit first.
“Oh, we have the Australian ambassador here,” the one-time reality show host bellowed to his audience, dismissing Hockey’s attempt at a greeting. “What have I done to Australia, Joe? Why?”
The crowd leaned in closer, and Trump raged on. And on.
Australia’s Ambassador to the US sat like a kangaroo caught in the headlights as his tormentor in a red MAGA cap proceeded to give him a public shellacking.
It was Easter 2019 and the Mueller report into the Trump campaign’s knowledge of Russian interference in the 2016 US elections had been handed down.
It found the Trump team expected to benefit from Russia’s social media and hacking campaign aimed at derailing Democrat Hillary Clinton’s run for president and that some of Trump’s people – including son Donald Jnr and son-in-law Jared Kushner – had met with Russian officials.
But former FBI director, Robert Mueller, found there was no evidence to bring conspiracy charges against Trump or associates. Trump was claiming it exonerated him.
It did not.
“You know, the whole thing started with Australia,” Trump told his increasingly irate supporters gathered in the tropically themed gaudiness of the Trump International Golf Club at West Palm Beach.
“The whole thing started with Downing in London.”
Hockey had tried previously to correct Trump, telling him Australia’s former High Commissioner to the UK was Alexander Downer, not Downing, but Trump wasn’t interested. What Trump cared about was that after Downer met with one of Trump’s people, George Papadopoulous, who told him of a Russian “dirt file” on Clinton, Downer wrote that in a diplomatic report.
And that report was integral to the Mueller investigation that had threatened to end Trump’s presidency.
Trump’s fury built.
“I exempt you from tariffs,” he said. “I’ve given you a great deal on the military. I even hosted your prime minister (Malcolm Turnbull in 2017). Why would you do that to me? What have I done to Australia?”
This cringe-worthy scene is recounted in Hockey’s book, Diplomatic, a 300-plus page tale co-written with lobbyist and former Canberra journalist, Leo Shanahan, about life as a diplomat in America in the febrile time of the Trump presidency.
“It wasn’t much fun,” says Hockey of those humiliating minutes, during a phone interview from Washington DC, where he now runs a business.
Hockey recalls that he did retort, “That’s not true” at one point but that just riled Trump more. As the tirade went on, Hockey pondered: Would a public slanging match with the US President be a good thing for Australia? No, he reasoned. So, he shut up.
“Normally I’d respond but … my unimaginable diplomatic skills kicked in,” jokes Hockey.
Hockey had never been keen on a diplomatic role, he says. Small talk, cocktail circuits, hanging around airports to greet visiting ministers – “especially the ones I just didn’t like” – did not appeal.
But having been shunted out of his role as Australia’s treasurer after a 2015 Liberal leadership tussle, he’d accepted the offer from the new prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, to be the 25th Ambassador of Australia to the US.
Hockey arrived in Washington in January 2016, the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency. Clinton was expected to win the November election.
But Hockey says his political radar told him an upset was on the cards. He cultivated contacts in the Trump camp.
And so it was: Trump became president and Hockey made sure his people were aware the new ambassador had been alert to Trump’s appeal.
It served Australia well, Hockey says. Mostly.
But Trump was mercurial, and on that day in Florida, with what Trump saw as a win up his sleeve and a score to settle, there was no reasoning with him.
Hockey decided it was diplomatic not to play golf with Trump that day, electing to play in the group behind him.
Even that was risky: Hockey hooked a ball, spearing it towards Trump. It hit the president’s golf cart, attracting glares from Secret Service agents.
“Diplomacy, like golf,” writes Hockey about his first, more successful, game of golf with Trump in 2016, “has its rules and traditions, and you can never predict exactly what will come at you next.
The only thing that was clear (in dealing with Trump and his administration) was that there was no playbook for this game. In that sense, the times suited me.”
A REMINDER OF POLITICAL LIFE
As the RAAF plane landed in Washington in September 2019, and Hockey waited to welcome Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, the dreams he’d lost and the pain of his past political life revisited him.
That upgraded plane, the one Morrison had dubbed Shark One after his rugby league team, had been provided for in the 2014 budget.
The budget that Hockey helmed. The austere, “end of the age of entitlement” budget that led to Hockey’s downfall.
Along with that cigar. Hockey still rejects criticism of him and the then finance minister, Mathias Cormann, contentedly smoking a fat cigar in the days leading up to a tough budget that cut welfare, health and education spending. He declares the let-them-eat-cake optics “trivial”.
He had bigger, internal problems at the time. Hockey writes that there were “various ministers” who weren’t prepared to defend the budget, some even lobbying independent senators against it.
“Within our government, there were too many who were more focused on polls than on policy. The sickness of populism afflicts the weak. That didn’t stop them from engaging in duplicity and deceit.”
Hockey doesn’t name names. “I’m not going to let bitterness eat me away like a cancer,” he says.
“I want to be more Gillard-like than some of the others. (The former Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard) is not consumed by bitterness and yet she may well have a lot of justification for it.”
But he does say that after the 2015 leadership spill that saw Tony Abbott dumped as prime minister and Hockey a dead-treasurer-walking, he was told by the victor, Malcolm Turnbull, that he’d promised Morrison the role of treasurer if he backed Turnbull in the spill.
But didn’t Morrison make his ballot paper visible to some in the party room, and he’d voted for Abbott? Replies Hockey: “But his people voted for Turnbull.”
Was that sneaky? “I’ll leave that,” he says.
So now, here was Morrison, walking down the steps as prime minister after yet another Liberal leadership tussle that saw Turnbull ousted in 2018.
“It seemed ironic,” Hockey writes, “given the pain I went through with that budget, that I was standing here and watching Morrison as prime minister emerge from one of the upgraded planes.”
In fact, I suggest, it must have felt like a kick in the guts.
“You know, I’ve always been determined to try and move forward in life rather than looking in the rearview mirror,” Hockey says.
“There have been some major disappointments in my life and people have let me down, and maybe I’ve let people down, but I’ve got no regrets about what’s happened.”
Perhaps there’s one niggle. He never made it to prime minister, a dream, he says, that had been reinforced by others since he was 14.
He tells of sitting alone in his North Sydney electorate office on October 23, 2015, boxes packed, room bare, holding his pen over his resignation letter.
It took him 10 minutes to sign his political career away.
“My lifetime ambition to lead my country is over,” he writes. “I confess it was heart-wrenching. After a lot of reflection and a few tears, I sign the letter, put the pen down and quietly sigh.”
The closest Hockey got to the top job was in an earlier leadership battle in 2009, when the Coalition, led by Turnbull in Opposition, was “tearing itself apart” over the proposed carbon emissions trading scheme of the then Labor Rudd government.
Hockey says his chance of becoming Liberal leader was thwarted by Turnbull, who, despite losing a no-confidence motion, put his hat back into the ring when a spill was called.
Hockey says Turnbull changed his mind at the last minute after telling Hockey and others he wouldn’t run again.
Abbott had said he wouldn’t run if Hockey ran but also changed his mind after disagreeing with Hockey over the way forward on carbon.
Hockey, buoyed by a Newspoll rating him more popular than Turnbull or Abbott, took his one shot and ran for leader. He was defeated in the first round, with Abbott pipping Turnbull by one vote. Abbott would go on to become PM.
Hockey’s defeat left him “angry. Really angry”.
“I was convinced that I was the best candidate and I had no doubt I would have been a good prime minister,” Hockey writes.
He baulks when asked what Australia would look like with Labor’s Anthony Albanese as prime minister. “I’m not going there,” he says.
But they are friends.
“Oh, I like him, I like him. I’ve always been friends with him and I’ve always found him to be an honourable man.”
Hockey spends a bit of time in the book detailing his friendship with Albanese, who he writes is a “very decent human being”.
But he gives no character reference of Morrison, no personal reflections.
It’s often said that the art of diplomacy is as much about what is not said as what is said. When the book’s absence of any admiration of Morrison is pointed out to the former ambassador, he says: “I’ll let the book speak for itself.”
But, he says, he’s a Liberal, he wants a Liberal government and supports Morrison as prime minister.
He dodges a question about Morrison’s handling of the devastating floods in Queensland and NSW but says he thinks Morrison can win this election.
“It’s a two-horse race, surely we’ve learned the lesson that you can’t write off either horse.”
He said a similar thing to Trump’s campaign co-chair, Dr Sam Clovis, and adviser, Stephen Miller, shortly after taking up his ambassadorship and attending the March 2016 primary debates. “I think you guys can win,” he told them, when few gave the ramshackle campaign a chance.
Hockey writes that on arrival in Washington, the briefings he received from Australian embassy staff were that Trump “would be toast when things got serious”.
His instincts told him differently.
He instructed the staff to get out of Washington and head to the Midwest and beyond.
He went to Florida, North Carolina and Arizona.
All returned, he says, with a different take on what was happening outside the capital cities. So, he invited Clovis and Miller to White Oaks, the Australian ambassador’s residence. He tried to get them to commit to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (they wouldn’t) and an Indo-Pacific strategy (they’d see about that).
But when talk turned to Australia’s tough immigration policies, “Miller’s eyes lit up and he started asking questions”.
Hockey agreed to send the Trump campaign “publicly available information” about the policies.
His head of congressional liaison, Peter Heyward, sent a note detailing the meeting, and that undertaking, to Canberra.
“Well, Canberra went nuts,” writes Hockey.
Emails bounced from department to department, with one deputy secretary writing that “if I wasn’t smart enough to work out that it was bad for Australia to engage with the Trump campaign, perhaps I shouldn’t even be in Washington”.
What’s more, Turnbull and then foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, were “anxious” about the outreach.
Hockey says he was never told not to get close to the Trump camp but the Liberal leaders would have preferred him to remain at arm’s length.
He writes that he took the autonomy of the ambassador’s office seriously.
Is that another way of saying, “This is my gig, back off”? He laughs and agrees.
“I’d been treasurer of Australia, I wasn’t about to get my marching orders from a middle-ranking public servant, or even a high-ranking public servant. I worked with the prime minister, of course, because at the end of the day I was appointed by the prime minister, I was respectful but I was always going to put my country first.”
Hockey writes that despite his “run-ins (to put it mildly)” with Turnbull in the past, he’d moved on and worked well with him when ambassador.
He recalls talking with a shocked Turnbull as the red wave of Trump votes washed through North America in the November 2016 election.
Three months later, he received another call from Turnbull just after the prime minister had spoken with the newly inaugurated president Trump.
“His voice was quivering and he was clearly upset,” Hockey writes.
“The phone call had gone badly.”
In the call, Trump took great umbrage at the refugee-swap agreement Turnbull had brokered with Obama in which the US would resettle up to 1250 refugees from Australia’s offshore detention regime, while Australia would increase its overall refugee intake.
Trump was abrasive, saying the call was the most unpleasant he’d had all day and ending it abruptly.
A few days later, Hockey was at an official dinner at Cafe Milano in Washington when his phone – and that of others in the networking restaurant – started beeping about 10pm.
The Washington Post was running a story about the disastrous phone call. It appeared the paper even had a transcript of the whole conversation.
Hockey returned to White Oaks and hit the phones.
Trump’s people suggested Australia leaked the story. Hockey was indignant.
“Are you so distrustful of your closest ally that you would think we’d want to blow up the relationship for the next four years?” he told them.
And when Turnbull asked him if he’d leaked the phone call, Hockey was angry.
“I don’t even have the transcript,” he retorted. Hockey says the White House leaked like a sieve at the time and most believed it had come from there.
By the morning, the story was everywhere and even Republicans were incensed by Trump’s tone in the conversation and its unprecedented leaking.
Hockey took a call from (the late) Republican senator John McCain who was appalled by the way Trump had dealt with Turnbull, and even released a statement – with input from Hockey – to that effect.
Then Hockey put his months of cosying up to Trump’s team to work.
He phoned the president’s chief-of-staff, Reince Priebus, and secured a meeting with him that afternoon.
He arrived at the White House with his deputy, Caroline Millar, while Priebus had Kushner and Trump’s key strategist, Steve Bannon, in the room.
There was argy-bargy about who leaked the story before Hockey pulled out his trump card.
“I reached out to your campaign and engaged with you before anyone else had the guts to do so,” he said.
“I copped it in Australia for doing so.”
Hockey says the pitch made a mark on Bannon.
In the end, Bannon gave an undertaking to talk with the president about organising a public kiss-and-make-up meeting between the leaders and Hockey left feeling confident the immigration deal would be upheld. It was.
“That was a big win,” Hockey says.
A TRICK MOMENT
The Hotel Fairmont’s security guard, shadowed by two San Francisco police officers, looked dismissively at Hockey’s embassy business card and said: ‘“Sir, you are not the Australian ambassador … I’m going to have to ask you to leave the hotel.’”
All eyes in the crowded post-Super Bowl bar fixed on Hockey.
It was early February 2016 and, having just taken up the ambassadorship, Hockey had headed to the west coast to experience the all-American football spectacle.
“While being frogmarched out by the cops, I started to think about the awful implications,” Hockey writes.
“What if I get arrested? Who can bail out an ambassador? Do I have to call the prime minister? What if it gets in the paper?”
As he was ushered through the crowd, his mind reeling, Hockey pulled out every card he had with him, including that of treasurer of Australia.
A police officer searched Google.
“‘Umm, this guy does look like this Hockey guy,’” he said.
Turns out, Hockey’s party had talked its way into the busy bar by dropping his credentials. A guard had done a quick Google search.
The smiling face of the former Australian ambassador, Kim Beazley, popped up.
Hockey laughs about it now but says he rejected an offer of free drinks from the apologetic guards and left.
“It wasn’t hilarious at the time, I can tell you; I thought that was the end of my life,” he says.
Anecdotes such as these are scattered throughout the book, giving an insight into some of the more left-field events in his time as ambassador.
But the overall theme is that by engaging with the Trump campaign early, Hockey was instrumental in getting Australia access and, importantly, economic and political deals, with the US in an unwieldy time.
“Donald Trump was volatile and unpredictable to many people and I thought we worked out how to decode him,” Hockey says.
A big win was Australia’s exemption from hefty tariffs on steel and aluminium, a result of Hockey’s lobbying of the administration and Turnbull’s work on Trump.
Brazil and Argentina were the only other countries exempted, with Australia learning of its win via one of Trump’s lengthy press conferences in 2018.
“I jumped out of my seat and punched the air, yelling, ‘Woo hoo!’ and spilling my coffee all over my lap,” Hockey writes.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership was the one that got away.
Hockey tells of manoeuvrings behind the scenes to have it pushed through Congress by Obama in the lame duck session between him handing the reins over to Clinton if she won. She opposed the TPP publicly but would “turn a blind eye”.
But Trump won, and the TPP was dead.
He did glean a useful insight during the Obama period, though.
It took six months before Hockey secured a meeting with Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, who told him, “It’s the squeaky door that gets the oil.”
It got him thinking: “How could we get our fair share of attention?”
Hockey admits much of his role was marketing and he needed cut-through.
White Oaks had a grass tennis court, the only one in the capital.
It was rundown but Peter Lowy, of the Westfield empire, said he’d pay for its upgrade. By 2017, it was luring Trump people and members of Congress to the Australian embassy, keen for a hit and a beer.
Hockey instructed staff to refrain from business talk and build relationships. “You’ve got to be yourself,” Hockey says, who would have the ear of another chief-of-staff Mick Mulvaney and chief economic adviser Gary Cohn.
“When people realise you’re not a threat, that you’re not playing duplicitous games, that you are authentic and they like you, then they’ll help you … Your priority is not to be judgmental.”
He says a slogan he coined – 100 Years of Mateship – became “a strong basis for much of the contact with the Trump administration as well as Congress”.
The military-inspired catchphrase was used in embassy branding and at the rapprochement between Turnbull and Trump on board the USS Intrepid in New York in May 2017.
Trump declared, “We have a fantastic relationship, I love Australia,” and Turnbull and Hockey breathed a sigh of relief.
Trump ended up liking Turnbull, says Hockey, in part because the PM was “a wealthy deal-maker”. Like Trump.
He warmed to Morrison after he won an election against the odds. Like Trump.
“He likes winners,” Hockey says. “Donald Trump defines everything as winners and losers and Scott Morrison was a winner.”
And Hockey? Does he admire Trump? The former diplomat falters, searching for words.
“I wouldn’t put it … you know, I don’t know, I’ll let the book speak for itself. Personally, he can be very engaging.”
What Hockey is clear about is that Trump deserved to lose the 2020 election.
His pigheadedness during the Covid outbreak and the Black Lives Matter protests showed a lack of understanding that his nation was crying out for sympathy and empathy.
“His reaction to the January 6 invasion of the Capitol building is unforgivable,” Hockey says. “His denial of the outcome of the election is outrageous.”
He does think Trump would win Republican nomination for the 2024 election, if he sought it. But he thinks it’s unlikely.
He’s more likely to endorse a candidate, not Kushner or his daughter Ivanka, but someone like Florida’s Governor, Ron DeSantis, or former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.
It’s not just Trump’s age that could hold him back – he’d be 78 – or that the Democrats would seek to bar him from running.
It’s the prospect of losing.
Hockey witnessed Trump’s hatred of losing up close.
It was Hockey’s first golf day with Trump in 2016. The game was close. It came down to Hockey and a 12m putt. The ambassador pondered if it was politic to try to win but he gave it his best shot. The ball went in.
A triumphant Hockey wanted to keep the scorecard. Trump wouldn’t let him. Writes Hockey: “It could remind others of his loss.”
Hockey admits he doesn’t like losing, either. But he says, despite his dream of becoming PM dashed, he’s not bitter or out for revenge in writing the book. The fact it is being released two years after he left White Oaks and at the start of Morrison’s bid to continue as prime minister is a reflection of his tight schedule, nothing more, he says. He’s been busy building his 30-employee strong strategic and financial advisory company Bondi Partners, splitting his time between Washington DC and Sydney.
“Was it the best result for the country?” he asks rhetorically about his exit from federal parliament. “Well, we’ll never know … I have no regrets about politics and I have no regrets about diplomacy. You do your best and if it’s not good enough, move on.”
Diplomatic: A Washington Memoir by Joe Hockey with Leo Shanahan, Harper Collins, $35, out Wednesday
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