Rudd has to do a Vance and soothe things with Trump

If Kevin Rudd is to perform to the greatest effect, he will need to do a JD Vance and have a change of heart. It’s the diplomatic way.

In a tweet in June 2020, Kevin Rudd described Trump as “the most destructive president in history; he drags America and democracy through the mud”. Picture: AFP

It’s all a matter of tone – or the art of being diplomatic. The diplomatic problem right now is that Dr Kevin Rudd, Australia’s ­ambassador to the United States, has demonstrated a recent ­absence of tone. Along with an ­unwillingness to withdraw, or apologise for, ­undiplomatic ­hyperbole.

The second volume of Rudd’s memoirs, titled The PM Years, was published by Macmillan Australia in October 2018. At the time, Donald J Trump was president of the US, assuming office in January 2017. It contains only one reference to Trump. Namely, a political criticism which was a lead-in to Rudd’s attacks on his Labor Party colleagues – including Wayne Swan, Don Farrell and Stephen Conroy.

There is also a comment about a reference to the “Trump Party” having engaged successfully in “a hostile takeover of the Republican Party”. Agree with the author or not, this was a reasonable critique of the US Republicans.

And then it all changed. On Sky News last Monday, Sharri Markson revealed that, before he took up the position of Australia’s US ambassador in March 2023, Rudd had called Trump a “village idiot”.

The comment was made in a webinar discussion in January 2021 between Rudd and one-time Indian diplomat and current politician Dr Shashi Tharoor. In a ­realistic evaluation of the international interests of the Chinese Communist Party, Rudd stated that what was working in “China’s favour”, in this rivalry with the US, turned on the situation that “in the last four years the US had been run by a village idiot”. He added that the US was “increasingly incompetent in its national statecraft under Trump”.

Former PM Kevin Rudd.

This was the most recent example of Rudd’s attacks on the US’s 45th president.

Addressing the Oxford Union in 2017, he declared “Trump at present represents a political hostility for both sides of Australian politics … he is an objective problem for the world, for the region, for my country”.

The Oxford audience just loved the rhetoric and the fanging. And then there was the tweet of June 1, 2020, when Rudd described Trump as “the most destructive president in history; he drags America and democracy through the mud”.

On February 27, 2022, Rudd posted that “Donald Trump is a traitor to the West”.

As early as October 30, 2017, Rudd had mocked Trump – so much so that the official ABC TV Q+A transcript contains this reference: “Kevin Rudd (babbles theatrically)” before recording Rudd saying with reference to Trump: “The general consensus amongst anyone concerned with a public policy process, domestic or international, thinks he’s nuts.”

Last Thursday, Rudd issued a statement “from the Office of the 26th prime minister of Australia”.

He wrote that, in his previous role as “head of an independent US based think tank” he was a regular commentator on American politics. Now “out of respect for the office of the President of the United States and following the election of President Trump”, Rudd’s office announced that he had “removed these past commentaries from his personal website and social media channels”.

Needless to say, they remain on YouTube and elsewhere.

It remains unclear why Rudd did not remove this material from his website when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced his appointment in Washington DC in December 2022.

Moreover, it’s notable that Australia’s ambassador to the US made no apology for engaging in abuse, rather than considered argument, when expressing his displeasure with Trump.

Speaking on Sky News’s Erin program on November 1, Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump told Erin Molan that there is a “problem – when people say those things and don’t have a change of heart”. Lara Trump holds the influential position of co-chair of the Republican National Committee.

It would appear that US vice-president elect JD Vance took such a road. In a private note to an associate on Facebook in February 2016, Vance wrote: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like (Richard) Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s ­Hitler.”

Note that Vance did not specifically say that Donald Trump was a born-again Adolf Hitler. In an interview with The New York Times published on June 13, Vance said “I allowed ­myself to focus so much on the ­stylistic element of Trump that I completely ignored the way in which he substantively was offering something very different on foreign policy, on trade, on immigration”.

In any event, Trump and Vance became friendly and the rest is history. It is likely that criticism of Rudd by such Republicans as Dan Scavino, a leading Trump adviser, will diminish Rudd’s role as ambassador without some rapprochement from the Australian embassy in Washington DC.

The problem with Rudd’s past comments on Trump turned on the fact that they are just abuse designed to appeal to Trump antagonists and Trump haters. They contained neither wit nor cleverness. And this from a highly intelligent and well-informed man.

Had Rudd engaged in the level of critique that you expect from someone holding the position of president of the influential Asia Society, there would have been no problem.

Rudd was not the only prominent and intelligent Australian politician to fang Trump when they considered that he would not return to the White House. Appearing on Q+A as recently as February 26 this year, former Liberal Party prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said: “When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions, he’s like the 12-year-old boy that goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team. ‘Ah! My hero!’. It is really creepy. It’s really creepy.”

Turnbull did not repeat this line of attack when he appeared on Q+A last Monday. But nor did he take back his shots of not so long ago. But then Turnbull is not one of Australia’s most senior ­diplomats.

No Australian prime minister is likely to recall a high-performing ambassador on account of ­previous indiscretions of the hyperbolic kind. Nor is an American president likely to demand the removal of the ambassador of an ally for past personal abuse. However, if Rudd is to perform to the greatest effect, he will need to do a Vance. It’s the diplomatic way.

Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.