Turnbull humiliated for thinking he could outsmart Donald Trump, Andrew Bolt writeshttp://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/andrew-bolt/turnbull-humiliated-for-thinking-he-could-outsmart-donald-trump-andrew-bolt-writes/news-story/f7e3cce2ccbf0a6a3260a4cd85874571?platform=hootsuiteMALCOLM Turnbull thought he could outsmart Donald Trump and trap him into taking 1250 of our boat people.
Huge mistake, and now he’s been humiliated.
There is no surprise that an angry Trump attacked Turnbull in their call at the weekend and hung up halfway through, after just 25 minutes.
What did Turnbull expect?
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This political disaster was always on the cards from the moment Turnbull announced, on November 13 last year, that he’d signed a deal with then US president Barack Obama to take our boat people detained on Nauru and Manus Island.
That was very dumb because just five days earlier Trump had been unexpectedly elected the next president, having campaigned hard against exactly this kind of thing.
Trump had made it perfectly clear that he was against taking in alleged refugees from jihadist countries without at least “extreme vetting”. Turnbull knew this. In fact, he’d planned to announce his Obama arrangement early this year, but after Trump’s win rushed it forward in an apparent attempt to present Trump with a fait accompli — a done-deal the new President would not dare undo.
This was always a high-risk gamble. Turnbull, asked last November whether he’d first checked with Trump, brushed the question aside: “We deal with one administration at the time. There is only one president of the United States at a time.”
Bad call, and now Trump has called his bluff.
Yes, Trump did tell Turnbull on Sunday that while he hated the Obama deal, his “intention” was to honour it, but once details of their conversation were leaked to the hostile Washington Post, he was under pressure to dump it instead.
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