Murdoch’s Ruddicide will fail. Here’s why Trump will warm to our Kevin

Question: If you called Donald Trump “noxious”, an “idiot”, a “cynical asshole” and “America’s Hitler”, do you think that would disqualify you from ever working for him?

Answer: No. But it might qualify you for being his vice president. Because J.D. Vance called him all of those things and much more and now is vice president-elect.

Illustration by Joe Benke

Likewise, of the new cabinet members who Trump has so far announced, four, other than Vance, have vilified and insulted him in the past. His pick for secretary of health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, called Trump “a terrible person”, “unhinged”, “a discredit to democracy” and “a sociopath”. Trump returned the compliments. He compared Kennedy to an annoying fly and dismissed him as “a radical left lunatic” and “the dumbest member” of his family.

Trump’s newly nominated secretary of state, senator Marco Rubio, earlier called Trump “a con artist” who liked to pose as a friend of the ordinary worker but “has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy”. Trump responded that Rubio was “a low-life”, had a “disgusting” sweat problem and implied that “little Marco” had a tiny penis.

And so on, in the case of the woman who Trump has just nominated to be his secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, and also Trump’s freshly nominated ambassador to the UN, Elise Stefanik.

Finally, beyond Trump’s chosen cabinet officers, is the man he named as his national security adviser. This is one of the most crucial choices in any White House, at the president’s elbow in every major security crisis. And former Green Beret colonel Mike Waltz earlier had been absolutely savage about the man he’ll now be serving. Waltz derided Trump for “never having served this country a day in his life”. “All Donald Trump has served is himself. Don’t let Donald Trump fool you. Look into his record, and stop Trump now.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has no intention of removing Kevin Rudd from his Washington post.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

So no fewer than six of Trump’s most senior and significant appointments, including his vice president, have absolutely damned him in the past. And in most cases, Trump returned the favour.

Knowing this, is it really valid to argue that Kevin Rudd should be removed from his post as Australia’s ambassador to Washington because he criticised Trump years ago, calling him a “traitor to the West” and a “village idiot”?

Or that Trump, when pressed for a response in a March interview with Nigel Farage at the bidding of Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News Australia, said of Rudd: “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. But if he’s at all hostile, he will not be there long.” Trump appeared confused at the mention of Rudd’s name. He truly didn’t know anything of Rudd.

It’s not that Trump enjoys being insulted and derided. Like all so-called “strongman” types, he’s intensely sensitive to criticism. Like all “strongman” types, he enjoys flattery. But there is one thing he values more than a sycophant. And that’s a convert.

Fans come cheap. But for a critic to become a fan is the sweetest vindication for Trump. As Meredith McGraw, national political correspondent for US news outlet Politico and author of the book Trump in Exile, observed, Trump “found converting onetime critics irresistible”.

As he said when Vance converted: “Like some others, J.D. Vance may have said some not-so-great things about me in the past, but he gets it now.” Trump savours the affirmation of his power to subdue and convert even his harshest critics. Among the many critics he later embraced are North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and the Pope.

Donald Trump savours the affirmation of his power to subdue and convert even his harshest critics, such as J.D. Vance, who once called him “America’s Hitler”.Credit: AP

So what’s driving the campaign to target Rudd? The Murdoch media, in short. Some other commentators have been drawn into it, too, useful idiots for the Murdoch effort. Ostensibly they demand that Rudd go because he was critical of Trump, but in reality, “this is revenge”, as Malcolm Turnbull explained this week. “This is a campaign that News Corp kicked off, and they are running a vendetta,” he told my colleague Matthew Knott.

Revenge for what? Rudd founded a movement called Australians for a Murdoch Royal Commission. Murdoch’s empire was “a cancer on our democracy”, he said. A royal commission would examine the level of concentration in Australian media ownership and the conduct of the Murdoch group in particular.

But the Murdoch media is not monolithic. Its éminence grise is Paul Kelly, the editor-at-large for The Australian. Kelly has the stature to make his own judgment. The campaign to remove Rudd as “a ritual sacrifice before Trump has even said anything” is “part of Trump Appeasement Syndrome”. “This shows a contempt for Australian sovereignty and a craven weakness before Trump,” Kelly wrote this week. “For any Americans wasting their time following this saga, we must look a sad, pathetic little country.”

If Australia seeks to appease Trump, why stop at sacking Rudd? We should make Gina Rinehart the minister for climate change, Bruce Lehrmann the minister for women, Clive Palmer the treasurer, Pauline Hanson the minister for immigration, Mark Latham the prime minister and Barnaby Joyce the governor-general.

Blast the entire length of the Great Barrier Reef in case there’s oil beneath it and hand over all the Royal Botanic Gardens in each state capital to Trump to develop as golf courses. Replace the Australian dollar with a new cryptocurrency called the Trump, offer him Tasmania as a dumping ground for the 10 million immigrants he plans to deport and redirect Australia’s latest military aid package for Ukraine to Russia instead. Don’t wait to be asked; do it now.

Of course, Anthony Albanese has no intention of removing Rudd. And, despite some posturing by members of the Coalition, Peter Dutton isn’t calling for his removal. Indeed, Dutton this week told colleagues that he’s prepared to work with Rudd and, if the Coalition should win next year’s election, he’d leave him in place for the duration of Rudd’s term unless Trump declares him persona non grata. Which is always a condition applying to all diplomats serving in a foreign land.

If it were important to Trump, he had the opportunity to raise it with Albanese in their phone call last week. He did not; Rudd was not mentioned. In fact, Rudd set up the call working with his personal contacts in Trump’s campaign staff. Golfer Greg Norman wasn’t needed to broker the congratulatory call to Trump this time around.

Strikingly, no one is challenging Rudd on the grounds of competence. He’s been supported, on the grounds of performance, by former Liberal leaders Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott as well as Turnbull.

US Congress member Joe Courtney, the chief advocate for AUKUS in Washington, told me that Rudd is “the perfect man for the time” because of his expertise on China. Rudd’s book The Avoidable War was “doing the rounds on Capitol Hill”, he said. Rudd also stood out for his effectiveness in persuading Republicans to support AUKUS, Courtney, a Democrat, said.

Rudd will need to win over Trump when he eventually meets him. This is not something beyond Rudd’s skills, and Trump presumably would welcome a new convert. But most Australian dealings with a US president are conducted not by the ambassador but by the prime minister.

The ambassador’s main interlocutors in any administration are top officials. And overlooked amid the Murdoch media’s ludicrously petty parochial attempt at Ruddicide this week is the fact that Rudd has managed early to establish relationships with some of the incoming Trump appointees who’ll be most important to Australia.

Rudd has known the incoming national security adviser to Trump, Mike Waltz, for some five years. They’ve had many conversations, principally on China strategy, starting when Rudd was president of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York.

Rudd knows Marco Rubio, nominee for secretary of state, and has dealt with him over AUKUS. Rudd and his wife, Therese Rein, have dined several times with the incoming US trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, the high priest of Trump trade policy, a field of impending turmoil for all US trading partners.

Rudd lunched with the man nominated to be Trump’s CIA chief, John Ratcliffe, in his home town of Dallas earlier this year. Again, their conversation centred on China strategy, by far the greatest preoccupation of the US foreign policy and national security establishment, and a topic where Rudd is recognised as one of the West’s leading authorities.

The co-leader of Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy, visited Rudd at the embassy some six weeks ago to talk China policy. The biotech billionaire will be another radical change agent, jointly with Elon Musk.

And just this week, Rudd continued to cultivate the Friends of Australia Congressional caucus by hosting a dinner for about 20 Republican and Democrat congress members and senators in the atrium of the new Australian embassy in Washington.

Who’d be better placed to do the job? The Murdoch hit squad hasn’t come up with anyone. It’s all just a bit of fun to see if they can panic the country into an act of self-harm to serve a corporate vendetta. Would that make Australia great again?

Peter Hartcher is political and international editor.

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