‘Village idiot’: PM in damage control over loose-lipped Kevin Rudd’s attacks on Donald Trump
PM Anthony Albanese has been forced to defend Kevin Rudd as his self-inflicted wounds continue with unearthed footage showing him calling Donald Trump a “village idiot”. See the video.
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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been again forced to defend Kevin Rudd after new footage showed him calling Donald Trump a “village idiot”.
Mr Albanese backed Dr Rudd for the second time in less than a week, with Australia’s top diplomat in Washington battling global headlines about his criticism of Mr Trump.
When asked if Dr Rudd was “the best person to be Australia’s US Ambassador” at a press conference in Tasmania on Tuesday morning, Mr Albanese said: “Yes”.
The Prime Minister then walked away from the TV microphones, denying reporters a chance to press him further on the matter.
Mr Albanese’s one-word defence of Dr Rudd comes after newly unearthed webinar footage shows Australia’s US Ambassador Mr Trump a “village idiot” and “incoherent”.
Sky News host Sharri Markson revealed exclusive footage of Dr Rudd making the comments, which come from the years after Mr Trump’s first term in office and add to a growing list of Mr Rudd’s public criticisms of the US president-elect.
Despite describing Mr Trump as a “political liability”, a “problem for the world” and a “traitor to the west”, the former Labor prime minister was appointed US Ambassador in 2022.
Sky News exclusively reported on the footage, from January 2021, which shows Mr Rudd speaking in a webinar with Dr Shashi Tharoor, an Indian politician and former diplomat, in which he compared China with the United States, calling the country he is special envoy to as “increasingly incompetent”.
“The United States, in the past four years, has been run by a village idiot,” Mr Rudd said.
“People have seen China continuing to be competent in its national statecraft and the United States increasingly incompetent in its national statecraft under Trump.”
In April 2022, Mr Rudd attended a political science webinar at Duke University in the US and described the president-elect as “incoherent” and occasionally “in love with dictators”.
“Donald Trump had a habit of wanting to shred most of the allies in terms of their political standing and cause doubted uncertainty as to whether he’d actually have their back if a crisis emerged,” he said.
“But the underpinnings of (the Trans-Pacific Partnership) was still incoherent because Trump himself was incoherent, and he waxed and waned from being in love with dictators to not knowing what he wanted from dictators.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who appointed Mr Rudd to the Washington post aware of his public views on Mr Trump, has also been personally critical of the incoming President himself.
“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 said in 2017.
“He scares the s*** 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 Trump is aware of Mr Rudd’s opinions of him.
In an interview with UK politician Nigel Farage on GB News, the then presumptive Republican nominee said he had heard Mr Rudd was “nasty” and “not the brightest bulb”.
In an interview with Sky News Australia days before the 2024 election, the president-elect’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, also weighed in on the Rudd situation.
“I do think it would be nice to have a person who appreciates all that Donald Trump has gone through to want to serve our country at this moment.”
She said her father-in-law would be looking to have Australia appoint “somebody else”.
Originally published as ‘Village idiot’: PM in damage control over loose-lipped Kevin Rudd’s attacks on Donald Trump
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