Nat Barr fires up at Anthony Albanese with an important Donald Trump question - and highlights a major problem with Kevin Rudd
The Prime Minister was quizzed on Tuesday morning about Rudd's role in trying to secure a carve out from punishing US tariffs after a prominent Republican pollster said that Trump did not like him.
Rudd has, infamously, branded Trump a 'village idiot', a 'traitor to the West' and 'the most destructive president in history' in past comments.
Sunrise host Nat Barr asked Albanese whether he was placing his loyalty to Rudd 'above our alliance with the US'.
But Albanese just laughed, adding: 'Well, JD Vance had some pretty strong comments, it's gotta be said, and he's now the Vice President of the United States of America.'
Before the 2016 US election, Vance called Trump an 'idiot', 'America's Hitler' and said he was 'morally reprehensible'.
In leaked emails he also branded Trump 'a disaster' and 'a bad man'.
But when he was announced as his running mate in July 2024, Vance claimed he had been 'wrong about Donald Trump'.
Albanese insisted that he had held 'very warm discussions' with Trump, despite failing to meet him face-to-face.
'The relationship with the United States is an important one,' he told Sunrise.
'It says something about the importance that we place in it that we have a former prime minister in Kevin Rudd as our Ambassador.'
The Sunrise host then suggested that Rudd could be replaced by someone such as Gina Rinehart.
'Is it time now the Australian Government starts looking left of centre here and perhaps using those relationships, leveraging things like Greg Norman, Gina Rinehart or whoever it may be, to try and have Australia at the centre of those discussions?'
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