Malcolm Turnbull urges world leaders to follow his example: stand up to Donald Trump

Malcolm Turnbull has blasted Donald Trump in an essay for the prestigious Foreign Affairs magazine, urging world leaders to stand up to Donald Trump should he be re-elected in November.

Donald Trump and then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull hold a joint press conference in the East room at the White House in Washington DC in 2018. Picture: Nathan Edwards

Malcolm Turnbull has blasted Donald Trump as a ‘volatile, narcissistic gaslighter’, urging world leaders to follow his own example and stand up to Mr Trump should he return to the White House next year.

Mr Turnbull, whose term as prime minister overlapped with Mr Trump’s presidency until 2018, wrote in the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs that “character, courage and candour may be the most important aid [foreign leaders] can render to the United States in a second age of Trump”.

“There has never been such an effective and relentless gaslighter,” Mr Turnbull wrote, referring to the former Republican president, who remains the favourite to win against Joe Biden in November despite his conviction for election interference in New York last week.

“A powerful narcissistic self-belief has given him the strength to defy not just his many enemies but even reality itself,” Mr Turnbull wrote in an article published on 31st May entitled How the World Can Deal With Trump – Advice for Leaders Facing the Potential Return of ‘America First’.

Mr Turnbull recounted his famous phone call with a newly elected Mr Trump in early 2017, where the prime minister sought to obtain assurances the new Trump administration would honour a deal to struck the former president Barack Obama to take some of Australia’s undocumented arrivals.

“On the call, I told Trump that Australia expected the United States to stick to its word. Trump was furious, raging that the deal was a terrible one, that it would kill him politically, that Obama had been a fool to do it,” Mr Turnbull wrote.

“It was daunting to be yelled at by the president of the United States, but I stood my ground. By the end of the call, Trump had, with great reluctance, agreed to go along with it”.

A few months later the two leaders met in person and were on good terms, joking with each other about the conversation and the deal, Mr Turnbull recounted.

“[Trump] may not like strength and directness from other leaders, but after his rage subsides, he respects them for it,” Mr Turnbull wrote.

Donald Trump and his wife Melania host then Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and his wife Lucy in Washington DC in 2018. Picture: Nathan Edwards

Mr Turnbull also said he persuaded Mr Trump to back down from a promise to impose tariffs on Australian steel imports, which would have contravened the Australia-US free trade deal struck by the Howard government with former president George W Bush.

“I wrote a pithy letter to Trump summarising our arguments, which Matt Pottinger, one of his key national security advisers, helpfully read to him. He listened and he changed his mind,” Mr Turnbull wrote.

The former prime minster predicated a second Trump administration would be more “volatile and alarming” than the first.

“He will return to office perhaps no wiser but certainly more experienced and more convinced than ever of his own exceptional genius…. his instinct to crush critics and stack the executive branch with yes men will likely get even stronger.”

In his essay Mr Turnbull also suggested Chinese President Xi Jinping and other world leaders had been wrong in their expectation that Mr Trump would govern more conventionally as president than his 2016 campaign rhetoric had suggested.

“President Xi told me at the APEC summit that he was relaxed about the new US president. Xi thought Trump’s campaign rhetoric would have no bearing on how he would govern, and most significantly, the Chinese president believed the US system would not allow Trump to act in a way that undermined the American national interest”.