LATIKA M BOURKE: Thin-skinned Albo playing dangerous game as he channels his inner-Trump for Rudd response

Did Anthony Albanese’s up-close-and-personal — and highly successful — White House encounter with Donald Trump rub off on him in the wrong way?

How else to explain his MAGA-like response to the very valid and unremarkable attempt by an Australian journalist to follow up on whether the US President has really forgiven Kevin Rudd for once calling him a “village idiot” and “most destructive president in history”.

Last week, the Prime Minister had an excellent first leader-to-leader meeting with the US President in the White House.

Things could not have gone better except for the perennial irritant called Kevin Rudd. Mr Rudd, as Mr Trump puts it, once upon a time “said bad” about the US President.

Mr Rudd made these comments before Anthony Albanese appointed the former prime minister as Ambassador to the United States, and when Joe Biden was president.

Mr Rudd scrubbed them from his social media the morning of Mr Trump’s re-election and inexplicably chose that day to release a statement drawing the Trump team to his past comments.

Some sections of Mr Trump’s MAGA support base and proxies have been on the warpath for Mr Rudd ever since.

Twice, it has been raised with Mr Trump, who has repeatedly pretended not to even know of Mr Rudd’s existence. This humiliation peaked last week when Mr Rudd was seated across the White House Cabinet table from Mr Trump.

Mr Trump told Mr Rudd he’d never like him and probably never would.

What came next matters.

The Prime Minister’s team, although not Mr Rudd’s, briefed out that Mr Trump had absolved an apologetic ambassador.

The next day, Mr Albanese put it on the record himself.

“‘All is forgiven’, he said that while you were exiting the room,” the Prime Minister told reporters during a press conference at the Australian Embassy in the United States.

When it comes to Mr Trump, Mr Albanese has in the past proven to be extremely sensitive about his own words being repeated back to him, such as when The Nightly asked the Prime Minister why he’d ever made the wild claim that Mr Trump did not possess a mobile phone.

Mr Albanese said having his own words repeated back to him amounted to verballing him then went on to say that he had only ever been joking. Not quite the same story.

Given that it is also extremely unusual for a Prime Minister to report on the private murmurings of a world leader, his decision to speak for Mr Trump stood out.

Especially as it clashes with Mr Albanese’s oft-repeated position that he does not disclose publicly conversations that he has with world leaders.

“I’ll tell you one thing I wouldn’t do … leak private text messages from other national leaders from our allies and that occurred, of course, with (French President) Emmanuel Macron with Mr Morrison,” Mr Albanese said in 2022.

“I think that will cause world leaders to really pause in their engagement with him. And that was a real concern.”

Mr Albanese restated this position as recently as Monday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia after meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.

“I’m not here to report in on what people say when I have meetings. I’m accountable for what I say,” he said when asked how the Chinese Premier had responded to him raising the Chinese fighter pilots deliberately dropped in front of Australian pilots.

Mr Albanese is right — it is not his job to report what people say to him in meetings, but that of journalists, which is exactly what reporters sought to do when the Prime Minister quoted Mr Trump verbatim.

Queries to clarify whether the notoriously vindictive President had truly exonerated Mr Rudd went unanswered by the White House. So Sydney Morning Herald reporter Michael Koziol went to check with the man himself, taking the opportunity at one of the President’s open press calls later in the week to ask the President if he had indeed forgiven Mr Rudd.

“You told him ‘all is forgiven?’” Mr Koziol asked Mr Trump.

“No, I don’t know anything about him,” Mr Trump said.

“I think he said a long time ago something bad. You know, when they say bad about me, I don’t forget.”

The President had, just before, stated that he was close to choosing his own envoy to represent his administration in Canberra and that his focus was “to make sure we have somebody that he (Albanese) likes.”

It was a not overly subtle hint: please send me someone I can work with in return. And, notice that even after humiliating Mr Rudd in person, the President is still pretending Mr Rudd doesn’t exist.

All up, it’s not quite the same story as the one Mr Albanese claimed, in breach of his own policy of not speaking for other leaders.

It is only because one of the few Australian White House-accredited journalists, who doesn’t depend on a prime ministerial visit for access to the media-friendly President, was able to ask that we have the more complete, and nuanced picture. This was basic fact-checking is journalism 101.

So what did the Prime Minister do when faced with this set of facts? He chose to go full-MAGA, attacking the journalist’s integrity.

“It says more about the journo than it does, who asks the question, more than anything else,” Mr Albanese said, when questioned why his story didn’t quite stack up.

On Weekend Sunrise, he copied another Trumpism, trying to discredit the entire news media.

“There was a lot of what some might call a fake media before I went to the United States about what was important and what wasn’t,” the Prime Minister complained.

“If someone says something like that, a leading question, it’s not surprising.

“That says more about the media than anything else.”

This is classic Trumpism. Don’t like a question or an outcome, attack the journalist’s character or knowledge personally, conflate it with the entire media and seek to evade any accountability or scrutiny for the political decisions made.

Degrading the role of the media might be an easy political quick fix, but one only has to observe the deep distrust in US media and institutions to know that these sorts of comments and attacks can have consequences, including exacerbating polarisation.

Mr Albanese won’t like the comparison, but in copycatting the US President’s tactics, he is showing that he shares Mr Trump’s infamous thin skin.

Mr Albanese’s decision to appoint Mr Rudd was a political one. The former prime minister is widely respected on Capitol Hill and in some of the more predictable and dependable quarters of the Trump Administration.

But it can also be the case that the President himself can disapprove of Australia’s choice of envoy and would like someone else. It is not unreasonable to test these positions with the Prime Minister, while still acknowledging that Mr Rudd does a good job serving our country.

During the election campaign, Mr Albanese and his ministers told Australians repeatedly that Australians didn’t want Trump-style politics imported into Australia.

Standing outside the Boyer Mill in Tasmania on April 14, he told journalists who asked about the Coalition’s election-tactic “diss track” that he was bewildered why the Opposition wanted to borrow from other cultures, i.e. America.

“We are a different country. I’m running as an Australian prime minister on Australian values,” he lectured the press.

“I’ll leave it to others to see why they consistently just borrow cultures and ideas and policies from other places as well.”

If he was right then, and his 94 seats might suggest he was, perhaps he should ask himself why he ever said those words in the first place and stop channelling an inner-Trump who does his best to undermine democracy by invalidating basic questions from the fourth estate.