Donald Trump Has Spoken Out About His Beef With Australia

It has been an intense 24 hours in the relationship between Australia and the US. First we were freaking out about whether Trump’s immigration ban would affect our plans to offload refugees from Manus Island and Nauru. Then Malcolm Turnbull said he was confident the deal would go ahead. Then we got wind of that phone call and suddenly the White House was putting out contradictory statements and the leader of the free world was subtweeting us and we just didn’t know who we could trust any more.

Do you believe it? The Obama Administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017

But that’s all in the past now. At a function in Washington overnight, President Trump reassured people that he still loved us and that he didn’t mean to get mad at us and really it was our fault for making him angry, but he forgives us anyway because we have a special bond.

“I have a lot of respect for Australia, I love Australia as a country,” said Trump at a National Prayer Breakfast. “When you hear about the tough phone calls I’m having, don’t worry about it. Just don’t worry about it.”

At the same time, Trump slammed the terms of the refugee deal, which was set up in the dying days of the Obama administration.

“Obama said that they were going to take probably well over a thousand illegal immigrants who were in prisons and they were going to bring them and take them into this country,” said Trump. “You know a previous administration does something, you have to respect that, but you can also say: why are we doing this? That is why we are in the jams that we are in.”

According to Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer, the president is “unbelievably disappointed in the previous administration’s deal”. “I cannot underscore how disappointed he was in the deal that was made and how he thought it was just a horrible deal.”

It’s still not entirely clear whether or not the deal will go ahead, or what it will actually look like if it does. Whatever happens though, you just know we’ll come crawling back in the end.

–

h/t ABC