Finally given the chance, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway might have been expected to rebut reports that her boss, President Trump, had bragged to world leaders about his crowd size, brushed off the Australian prime minister and used the words “bad hombres” while chastising the Mexican president.
Officials in two hemispheres had been working damage control after reports about the president’s uncomfortable phone calls with world leaders circulated. U.S. senators assured Australia that the countries’ alliance is intact, and Mexican officials denied reports that Trump had threatened them with war.
But Conway didn’t deny anything. Appearing on Fox News’s “Media Buzz” that aired Sunday, she acknowledged that the leaks looked bad — just not for Trump.
“I can’t imagine it came from the Australian or Mexican side,” Conway said, “because the calls as reported were very unflattering to those two leaders.”
Conway didn’t say exactly which reports she was referring to. Trump’s diplomatic phone calls with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto have generated a lot of speculation — with competing claims about what exactly the president told U.S. allies.
According to The Washington Post, Trump told Turnbull that he had already spoken to four other world leaders last weekend, and “this was the worst call by far.”
Trump was reportedly upset about former president Barack Obama’s agreement to accept hundreds of refugees from Australia, including some from countries listed in Trump's executive order banning entry to the United States for millions of foreigners.
“This is the worst deal ever,” Trump told Turnbull, according to a leaked transcript of the call. (He once called NAFTA the worst deal ever, on Twitter.)
The president then abruptly ended the call, more than half an hour ahead of schedule, despite Turnbull’s efforts to turn to other subjects.
As reports of the call leaked out last week, members of Congress rushed to mollify Australia, while Turnbull insisted in an interview that the president did not hang up on him.
The president, by all accounts, was animated during another phone call with the leader of Mexico — another U.S. ally.
“Did President Trump threaten to invade Mexico?” reads a Post headline attempting to sort out reports that Trump had suggested using the U.S. military to address the country’s drug and crime problems — or sending American troops to stop “the bad hombres down there,” as the Associated Press quoted him as saying.
“Trump definitely didn’t threaten war,” a Mexican official told The Post. “The call was constructive and friendly.” And the White House told the Associated Press that Trump's comments were “lighthearted.”
Analysts studied the leaked calls for most of a week — with some seeing signs of a historic break in diplomatic tradition, if not U.S. alliances.
Conway got her chance to weigh in during Sunday's interview, though Fox’s Kurtz was more interested in who had done the leaking.
She ran down the list of suspects.
Not Mexico or Australia, of course. Not flattering to them.
“It certainly isn’t Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his close advisers,” Conway said.
And definitely not the White House itself. “We’re duty-bound,” Conway said — even if she thought they got the better end of the leaks than their allies.
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