“How is it playing out in Australia?” [with comment by Paul]

Writing from down under, Steve Kates responds to the question “How is it playing out in Australia?” Not surprisingly, Professor Kates provides a perspective that is nowhere to be found in the news up here: “For [Australian Prime Minister] Malcolm [Turnbull] apparently to have tried to push Trump, by telling him that as a fellow businessman that a deal is a deal, must rank as politically incompetent as anything I have ever seen. That Trump now thinks of Malcolm as a flea-weight no-account fool only means he has the same assessment of the PM as the rest of us.” Professor Kates has pulled the top comments from an inaccessible article in The Australian to elaborate.

Professor Kates notes in an email message to us that the comments on his post at Catallaxy Files are all of a piece and adds: “I just think it might be interesting and valuable if the underlying sentiment in Australia was more widely understood, especially in America.” Indeed, and the same may well be true of the underlying sentiment in the United States as well.

PAUL ADDS: It seems that if anyone was “badgering” during this phone call, it was the Australian PM as he tried to get Trump to say he would comply with Obama’s deal.

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