Why Trumps Phone Call with Australias Prime Minister Will Haunt Him in Court

[Sunlei]

There is a moment in Donald Trump’s phone call, a week after his Inauguration, with the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull—the transcript of which was obtained by the Washington Post—when Trump seems to think he understands his counterpart. It comes, tellingly, at a point when he also decides that the Prime Minister has been lying to the public. The two men had been discussing a deal, concluded under the Obama Administration, for the United States to take in up to two thousand refugees whom Australia had detained on the islands of Nauru and Manus. They were not being held there because they were “bad people,” Turnbull says, but because Australia has a policy of not letting in refugees who arrive by boat: “If they had arrived by airplane and with a tourist visa then they would be here.”

That line did not impress the majority of judges who have heard challenges to Trump’s executive order blocking, in its latest iteration, refugees and people from six Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States; indeed, a number of decisions staying the order cited it as an example of the order’s “bad faith”—a standard that would give the courts, which usually defer to the executive on immigration matters, a rationale for reviewing Trump’s action. And his projection of a parallel form of bad faith onto Turnbull was accompanied by remarks that may provide fodder for opponents of the executive order when it appears before the Supreme Court, this fall.

The transcript indicates that Trump interrupted him at the point to say, “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.” It is not clear what Trump meant by “that.” Perhaps it was just the idea of keeping as many people as possible out of the country, whether they were what he referred to as “bad hombres,” in a call the same week to the President of Mexico, or Nobel Prize winners. (Australia's off-shore detention practices are untenable, have been subject to criticism on humanitarian grounds, and in many ways flout the country’s own commitments to refugees—hardly something, one would think, to be envied.) Trump portrays all of the refugees as potential terrorists—“Are they going to be the Boston Bombers in five years?” But Turnbull, presented with the President’s incomprehension a few minutes later, gamely tries again:


TURNBULL: No, let me explain why. The problem with the boats it [sic] that you are basically outsourcing your immigration program to people smugglers and also you get thousands of people drowning at sea.

Turnbull keeps making Trump angrier and angrier; Trump says that it was his most “unpleasant” call of the day—much worse than talking to Putin. It likely didn’t help Trump’s mood that Turnbull called Australia a “generous, multicultural” nation, or that he said that Obama “drove a hard bargain”—Australia also agreed to take refugees from Central America. The reference to Obama set Trump off on a petty rant about how pretty much every deal concluded before he entered the White House was “stupid,” and how this one in particular was “horrible” and, indeed, “disgusting.” And, coming right after his executive order, “It makes me look so bad.” Also, “I will be seen as a weak and ineffective leader.” A leader of whom, toward what? When Turnbull appeals to him as a fellow “transactional” businessman—asking him to act like a statesman might have seemed out of the question at that point—and says that sticking to the deal shows that he stands by commitments, Trump replies that, instead, it “shows me to be a dope.”


http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-trumps-phone-call-with-australias-prime-minister-will-haunt-him-in-court

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Somewhere he says he doesn't want to let anyone in. "I am the world's

greatest person that does not want to let people into the country."

[Sunlei]

2. almost funny, if so many haven't outright died already because of trumps dangerous character.

Republican party let him slaughter people and tear apart families to further their own agendas.

[Gothmog]

3. This is so very very sad

[Sunlei]

4. Australia released the transcripts of USA presidents call & trump thinks 'leak'.

I don't think trump even realizes or understands what he does as president IS public record.

In America and Australia.