Malcolm Turnbull memoir: Barack Obama called Donald Trump ‘an unelectable lunatic’

Malcolm Turnbull claims Barack Obama told him in 2016 that Donald Trump was a ‘lunatic’ who would never be elected president.

Malcolm Turnbull and Barack Obama in Peru in 2016.

Malcolm Turnbull claims Barack Obama told him in 2016 that Donald Trump was a “lunatic” who would never be elected president.

The former prime minister, in a chronicle of his troubled relationship with the US President, divulges that Mr Trump described the asylum-seekers on Nauru as 2000 of the “world’s worst terrorists” after being forced to honour the deal for the US to take them.

He describes Mr Trump as “capricious”, a bully and a deliberately unpredictable leader who rules by projecting anxiety around the world.

Mr Turnbull describes in intimate detail in his book the conversations he had with the US President during his time as leader, including the infamous phone call over the Nauru refugee deal that Mr Trump described as less enjoyable than talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Mr Turnbull says Mr Trump’s flattery of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un had resulted in the most powerful nation on the planet being “outmanoeuvred” by a “tyrant leader of a bankrupt slave state”.

He also details a secret meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg in 2017 when he was invited to join Mr Trump in the “SCIF”, which he thought was a reference to a sailing boat.

It turned out to be a steel communications container that was so secure that Chinese and Russians were supposedly incapable of listening in. It was in the Secure Communications Information Facility that Mr Trump told French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel that Mr Turnbull was the world’s best lawyer for keeping Kerry Packer out of jail.