AARON PATRICK: Why Malcolm Turnbull wouldn’t be fazed by Donald Trump’s blistering put-down

Malcolm Turnbull has always enjoyed arguments and attention, and being the target of a blistering put-down by President Donald Trump is unlikely to make him unhappy.

In what would have otherwise been just-another inconsequential media interview by the former prime minister, Mr Turnbull spent eleven minutes on Bloomberg Television — one of the least-watched TV channels in Australia — engaged in the type of Trump criticism that can be read any day in the New York Times and, increasingly, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Towards the end of Monday’s live interview on The China Show, Mr Turnbull engaged a character comparison with Xi Jinping, the leader of China, and the US president. As even the most amateur of Trump watchers knows, there may be no greater way to offend the author of “The Art Of The Deal” than insulting his negotiation skills.

“My prediction will be is President Xi will aim to be the exact opposite of Trump,” Mr Turnbull said. “Where Trump is chaotic, he will be consistent. Where Trump is rude and abusive, he’ll be respectful. Where Trump is erratic, he will be consistent.”

The US president isn’t known to watch Bloomberg’s broadcasts from Sydney, being more of a Fox News evening guy. But within an hour Bloomberg had published the comments in an article, and 30 minutes later Mr Turnbull posted the article to his X account under the headline “Trump’s Chaos Is a Gift to Xi Jinping, Former Australian PM Says”. It was four minutes to midnight in Washington.

Praise for Australia

Mr Turnbull has almost a million followers on X — he’s more popular on the internet than he was in parliament — and it is unclear if Trump is among them. But the president saw or read what Mr Turnbull said, and responded on his social media site, Truth Social, with what could honestly be described as a mild rebuke by the current presidential standards. There was only one grammatical error and gratuitous praise for his military ally too.

“Malcolm Turnbull, the former prime minister of Australia who was always leading that wonderful country from “behind”, never understood what was going on in China, nor did he have the capacity to do so,” Mr Trump wrote.

“I always thought he was a weak and ineffective leader and, obviously, Australian’s agreed with me.”

That they did, mostly, although Mr Turnbull was not defeated at a general or Liberal Party election, choosing to resign rather than be deposed in 2018 after three years prime minister.

As for his views on China, Mr Turnbull entered office seeking to improve relations after chilliness under predecessor Tony Abbott, a Cold War-type hawk. In power, Mr Turnbull’s views hardened towards the Middle Kingdom. He introduced laws designed to diminish the influence of the Chinese Communist Party among the Australian Chinese diaspora and banned a big Chinese phone company, Huawei, from government.

On Monday, as the internet feasted on another boundary crossing by the president, Mr Turnbull found an X account with 960 follows to defend himself. “Utter tosh!” read a post someone calling themselves Fisk in Exile, which Mr Turnbull then shared. “We really don’t need Trump’s rewriting of history.”

Mr Turnbull has said worse about the president. When he appeared an ABC talk show called Q&A last February, he criticised Mr Trump’s friendly relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin. “The creepiness was palpable,” Mr Turnbull said.

That insult was not noticed in the White House, and did not generate the attention the once-admired political leader used to be able to command every day.