‘Scares the s**t out of me’: PM’s Trump comment resurfaces

Old footage of Anthony Albanese has resurfaced where he made a startling comment about Donald Trump. That comment could hurt Australia’s alliance with the US, should Trump win the election, James Morrow writes.

Footage of Anthony Albanese saying Donald Trump “scares the s**t out of me” has raised fresh concerns about Labor’s ability to maintain the US alliance in the event of a Republican win this Tuesday.

“We have an alliance with the US, we’ve got to deal with him, but that doesn’t mean that you’re uncritical about it,” Mr Albanese told a Q&A at Splendor in the Grass in July 2017, six months into Trump’s first administration.

“He (Trump) scares the s**t out of me … and I think it’s of some concern the leader of the free world thinks that you can conduct politics through 140 characters on Twitter overnight.”

Mr Albanese’s remarks, made when he was shadow transport and infrastructure minister, come amid reports that Labor is deeply uneasy with the prospect of a Trump victory and is working hard to shore up ties with the Republican leader’s team.

In 2017, when he was the shadow transport and infrastructure minister, Anthony Albanese said then-president Donald Trump "scared the s**t" out of him. Picture: YouTube/Splendor in the Grass

This week it was reported that foreign minister Penny Wong and defence minister Richard Marles held a meeting with Trump’s foreign policy guru Mike Pompeo, who is expected to again take a senior role in any second Trump administration.

At the same time, Australian ambassador to Washington Kevin Rudd has raised eyebrows after taking the week of the election off to promote his new book warning of the dangers of China’s dictatorship.

Mr Rudd’s very public comments about the Republican candidate have led for calls for him to be replaced in the event of a Trump victory.

“We’ll have enough on our plate with AUKUS and a Trump administration, but now we’ve got an ambassador who once called Trump ‘nuts’ and a ‘traitor to the West’, and a PM who says that Trump ‘scares the s**t out of him’,”one Liberal insider told this masthead.

“No wonder Penny Wong is scrambling to mend fences”.

Anthony Albanese’s comments are coming back to haunt him ahead of the US election. Picture: Getty Images via AFP

The controversy comes as the presidential contest tightens, with polls giving a slight edge to Trump but also showing an increasing number of swing states to be toss-ups.

Both candidates are spending the remaining hours of the campaign rallying supporters in key states including Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile a last minute controversy has stirred over whether or not television network NBC broke broadcasting laws calling for candidates to be given equal time with its snap invitation to Democrat Kamala Harris to participate in a Saturday Night Live sketch many considered blatant propaganda.

“This is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule,” Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote on X Saturday night.

“The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct — a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election.”