Ex-Prime Minister Issues Warning on Trump: 'Creepy'

Malcolm Turnbull, a former Australian prime minister, issued a warning about Donald Trump's approach to global affairs as the former president seeks to return to the White House in November.

Trump is favored to win the Republican Party's presidential nomination after securing victories in early-voting states Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, setting up a likely rematch against President Joe Biden.

The prospects of a second Trump term have sparked questions about how he may handle conflicts that have arisen in the last few years, including the war between Russia and Ukraine. This month marked the two-year anniversary of Russian President Vladimir Putin announcing the "special military operation" in Ukraine, which drew swift backlash from the West.

Turnbull, who formerly led Australia's right-leaning Liberal Party, raised concerns about how Trump may deal with Putin in a new interview on the Australian ABC News, warning that the former president is "attracted to dictators and tyrants" and "rattled every single cage, every single alliance" during his four years in office.

"The Republican Party under Donald Trump, and particularly the right wing of the Republican Party, are very sympathetic to Vladimir Putin," Turnbull said. "I mean I've been with Trump and Putin. Trump is in awe of Putin. When you see Trump with Putin as I have on a few occasions, he's like the 12-year-old boy who goes to high school and meets the football team. My hero."

He said Trump's behavior around Putin was "really creepy" and "struck everybody" at the time.

"The creepiness was palpable," he said.

Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt responded to Turnbull's remarks in a statement to Newsweek, pointing to recent remarks from Putin that he would prefer to see Biden, not Trump, win in November.

"When President Trump was in the Oval Office, Russia and all of America's adversaries were deterred, because they feared how the United States would respond," Leavitt said. "The only people in America who don't see this clear contrast between Biden's ineffective weakness versus Trump's effective peace through strength approach are the left-wing stenographers in the mainstream media who write false narratives about Donald Trump for a living."

Critics of the former president frequently criticized him for his praise of U.S. adversaries such as Putin, whom he said was "very smart" for his pre-invasion moves. They have also voiced concerns about some Trump-aligned Republicans opposing further aid to and criticizing Ukraine amid the war. They have argued that the money should be spent domestically, rather than to support other countries.

Turnbull, who has had a rocky relationship with Trump, also posed what the future of the U.S. may look like if Trump returns to office.

"The scary thing is that for countries like Australia and many European countries, are we going to find ourselves not dealing just with two autocracies in Russia and China, but what is Trump's America going to look like?" he said. "This is a guy leading a party that is no longer committed to democracy as we understand it."

Trump has voiced some criticism toward Putin since the invasion of Ukraine.

"When you look, this doesn't seem to be the same Putin I was dealing with," Trump said in 2022. "But I will tell you, he wouldn't have changed if I were dealing with him."

But he has also sought to blame the Biden administration for the war, saying the U.S. was "almost forcing him" to invade and called Putin's strategy "genius."