If British Labour ministers and officials find dealing with President Donald Trump 2.0 a formidable challenge, their Australian Labor cousins may find the task of working with a president with an elephantine memory for slights even more daunting. As ministers – including Foreign Secretary David Lammy – are rediscovering to their chagrin, you can delete embarrassing social media posts, but they never disappear. That’s something that may cost former Australian prime minister, and now Australia’s ambassador to the United States, Kevin Rudd, his diplomatic career.
Rudd has been posted to Washington for the best part of two years as current Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese’s envoy to the Biden administration. While some in Australia have suggested the endlessly attention-seeking Rudd was appointed to keep him out of Australia and away from meddling in domestic politics, he’s generally recognised as a diligent, even hyperactive, ambassador, working assiduously to cultivate relationships with the administration and both sides of the US congress.
Rudd risks a similar career fate as Darroch’s, but with no consolation prize such as a peerage
Most recently, and with his government’s blessing, the Mandarin-speaking sinologist has taken time out to promote his new book on Xi Jinping and his Chinese Communist party regime, which has been well-received in American foreign policy circles. Indeed, Rudd’s expertise as a China expert with excellent connections in the Middle Kingdom – and a former prime minister’s bulging contact book – makes him an invaluable source of advice to his host government as well as his own.
Unfortunately for Rudd, however, he has long been a prolific user of Twitter/X, and his posted character assessments of Donald Trump were brutally frank. Through Trump’s first term, Rudd, then a private citizen working with an American think tank, was not shy in coming forward about Trump, his character, and his politics.
Rudd freely labelled Trump ‘a traitor to the West’ and ‘a problem for the world’. His most vicious tweet, however, came in June 2020 when he wrote:
Trump is the most destructive president in history. He drags America and democracy through the mud. He thrives on fomenting, not healing, division. He abuses Christianity, church and bible to justify violence. All aided and abetted by [Rupert] Murdoch’s FoxNews network in America which feeds this.
When interviewing candidate Trump for GB News earlier this year, Nigel Farage put examples of such Rudd tweets to the now President-elect. Trump was contemptuous. ‘He won’t be there long if that’s the case’, Trump told Farage. ‘I don’t know much about him, I heard he was a little bit nasty’.
But, in an insult guaranteed to wound Rudd’s huge self-regard to the quick, Trump added, ‘I hear he’s not the brightest bulb. If he’s at all hostile, he won’t be there long.’
Ambassador Rudd issued a statement that he made the tweets as a then think tanker and political commentator, and that he was now deleting them ‘out of respect for the office of President of the United States, and following the election of President Trump’.
Rudd has always had the political hide of a rhinoceros. While Australia’s conservative opposition hasn’t called for Rudd’s resignation, his sudden Uriah Heep turn surprised nobody and even opposition leader Peter Dutton could see the amusing side. ‘He’ll be buying red ties and Maga hats to ingratiate himself with the Trump campaign’ he quipped.
But that won’t be easy. The co-chair of the Republican National Committee and Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, last week echoed what the President-elect said of Rudd in March, telling Sky News Australia that ‘I do think it would be nice to have a person who appreciates all Donald Trump has gone through to want to serve our country at this moment…maybe we would want to choose someone else’.
That choice is neither hers, nor her father-in-law’s, but that of the Australian prime minister – who himself has been outed for a 2016 tweet saying Trump ‘scared the shit out of him’, although it didn’t stop Albanese being one of the first world leaders to talk to the President-elect.
But Rudd will be acutely aware of the unhappy experience of former British ambassador to Washington Sir Kim Darroch, whose less than flattering cabled assessments to London of the then president and his administration were leaked in 2019. Trump denounced Darroch, who in various cables had used words like ‘inept’, insecure’ and ‘incompetent’, but never used such an explosive epithet like ‘traitor’, as Rudd did publicly.
An insulted Trump tweeted, in retaliation, that Darroch was a ‘pompous fool’ and that he would ‘no longer deal with him’. Darroch’s position instantly was untenable, and Theresa May – who Trump also criticised – found herself in an invidious position. Not long after, Darroch left Washington but was rewarded with a peerage by May in her resignation honours.
Rudd risks a similar career fate as Darroch’s, but with no consolation prize such as a peerage. As former prime minister, Rudd should have known better than to tweet his personal opinions when he did. But to leave them on the record until now, while representing his country as its ambassador, was a huge lapse of diplomatic tact and political judgment that can only offend an incoming president whose skin is notoriously thin.
It won’t be easy for Rudd to get out this self-inflicted diplomatic embarrassment. But, if he manages to pull it off, David Lammy and other members of the Starmer cabinet whose Trump social media skeletons have emerged from the closet should look and learn.
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