President Donald Trump told Malcolm Turnbull that the Australian prime minister was "worse" for refugees than he is, according to a leaked transcript of a heated January phone call between the two leaders in which Trump repeatedly called Australia's offshore immigration detention facilities "prisons."

The Washington Post on Thursday published a leaked transcript of the first phone calls between President Trump and the leaders of Australia and Mexico. The same newspaper in February broke the news of the anger with which Trump spoke to the leader of Australia, a close US ally.



"That is a good idea. We should do that too," Trump told Turnbull after the prime minister explained how Australia holds people who arrive in the country via boat without the required visas in detention facilities in Nauru and on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island. "You are worse than I am."

Turnbull spent the vast majority of the phone call trying to convince Trump to honor a deal struck under President Barack Obama, under which the US agreed to resettle up to 1,250 refugees in exchange for Australia taking refugees from Central America. On Feb. 1, after their phone call, Trump tweeted that the deal was "dumb," but Vice President Mike Pence said definitively in April that the new administration would honor the agreement.

During the phone call, Trump repeatedly appeared to be unfamiliar with the specifics of the deal; he inquired whether it was negotiated by Obama, mistakenly said it would require him to accept 2,000 refugees ("I have also heard like 5,000 as well," Trump said at one point), and at one point asked, "What is the thing with boats? Why do you discriminate against boats?"

"This is going to kill me," Trump said of the deal. "I am the world’s greatest person that does not want to let people into the country. And now I am agreeing to take 2,000 people and I agree I can vet them, but that puts me in a bad position. It makes me look so bad and I have only been here a week."

"With great respect, that is not right – It is not 2,000," Turnbull responded.