President Donald Trump slammed Australian Ambassador to the United States Kevin Rudd, who once called Trump “a village idiot,” during Monday’s bilateral meeting with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of the left-wing Labor Party.
A reporter asked Trump if he had concerns about the Albanese administration’s positions on climate change, Gaza, or Rudd’s comments about him.
“I don’t know anything about him… maybe he’ll like to apologize. I really don’t know. Did an ambassador say something bad about me? Don’t tell me,” Trump said, drawing laughs before asking where the ambassador is.
Albanese pointed out Rudd across the table, and Rudd began to say, “Before I took this position, Mr. President” to which the president interjected, “I don’t like you either.”
“And I probably never will,” he added.
In a 2021 video that surfaced after Trump won the presidency in November 2024, Rudd, who had served as Australia’s prime minister more than a decade ago, said, “the United States in the last four years has been run by a village idiot,” and said America was “increasingly incompetent in its national statecraft under Trump.”
Australian news and talk TV program the Project noted in its report on the video that Rudd began deleting anti-Trump social media posts days earlier.
He called Trump “the most destructive president in history” in June 2020, in one example according to the Project. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation also notes that Rudd deleted another post bashing Trump as a “traitor to the West.”
At the top of the meeting, Trump and Albanese signed a minerals and rare earths deal.
“The U.S. and Australian governments intend to invest more than $3 billion together in critical mineral projects in the next six months, with recoverable resources in the projects estimated to be worth $53 billion,” the White House noted in a fact sheet.
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