U.S. allies, haunted by past Trump insults, race to delete posts and praise election victor

Donald Trump’s presidential victory means some U.S. allies may have to reckon with prior scathing remarks as their countries prepare to build diplomatic ties with a president-elect whose return they may not have anticipated.

“The most destructive president in history,” Australian Ambassador to the U.S. Kevin Rudd said of Trump in 2020, who “drags America and democracy through the mud.”

“A woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath” and a “profound threat to the international order,” David Lammy, the U.K.’s current foreign secretary, said in 2018.

“A political pyromaniac who must be put before a criminal court,” Jean Asselborn, then-foreign minister for Luxembourg, said of Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

“Trump has ruined it all,” Croatian President Zoran Milanović said, also in 2021. “He incite[s] hate, he is a rabble-rouser and that’s it.”

Following Trump’s election victory, at least two of these U.S. allies, the U.K. and Australia, have had to dial back some of their previous attacks.

Rudd deleted his posts after Trump’s win, “out of respect for the office of President of the United States,” an Australian government statement said, and to “eliminate the possibility of such comments being misconstrued as reflecting his positions as Ambassador and, by extension, the views of the Australian Government.”

For Trump’s part, he responded to Rudd’s comments by calling him “nasty” and saying Rudd “won’t be there long” as Australian ambassador to the United States.

Lammy pivoted from scathing critic to polite well-wisher, showing that diplomacy sometimes means shaking hands with those you once pointed fingers at.

Lammy, who made his comments about Trump being “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath” in Time magazine in 2018 when he was a backbench minister of Parliament, had also protested against the then-government’s “capitulation to this tyrant in a toupee.”

By Wednesday, as Trump claimed his decisive electoral victory, Lammy’s tone as foreign secretary had shifted considerably, as he sent his congratulations and underlined the U.K.’s cherished special friendship with the U.S.