Before Scott Morrison got on the stage alongside Donald Trump at an Ohio paper mill owned by an Australian, assurances were issued that there was a plan in place just in case it went utterly pear-shaped.

No-one on the Australian side wanted the Prime Minister to become an unwitting prop in a presidential election-style rally.

So the idea was to somehow discreetly extract the PM from the stage should it become untidily Republican.

Whoever dreamt up that barmy plan must have started sweating like a condemned man when the painful mall muzak blaring from the big speakers inside Anthony Pratt's Wapakoneta factory went momentarily quiet before bolting 10 decibels louder into the Rolling Stones' classic, Play With Fire.

Uh-oh … was that the Trump campaign playlist?

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have long asked Trump to cease and desist playing their iconic 1960s lament at his events. But Trump does it anyway.

Tina Turner shimmied up next, with a song penned by an Australian. Mike Chapman's Simply The Best had the crowd swinging and a prime ministerial minder's eyes "wild and wide".

Then Aerosmith's Dream On, the minder now imagining a career far beyond a maverick president and an errant prime minister.

Scott Morrison and Donald Trump held an official press conference aside from their Oval Office photo opportunity. ( AP: Patrick Semansky )

It really is the ruin of many a poor boy, he might have thought, as the Animals cranked up with House of the Rising Sun.

As the time ticked down to the leaders' entrance, the Rolling Stones started playing games with the minder's sanity.

"Time Is On My Side", they sang. No, it wasn't.

And when Lee Greenwood roared into Proud To Be An American, it was showtime. The two leaders came through some sort of blue tunnel, as if they were about to pound each other in a portly gentlemen's cage fight.

What bloody idiot thought they'd be able to drag ScoMo from the Trump show spotlight, the minder must've wondered, murderous intent bubbling.

Once it started, the PM was hostage to events.

What had been planned as an Oval Office photo opportunity became an impromptu 30-minute Trumpathon. ( AP: Evan Vucci )

The two-minute meeting that turned into 30 minutes

If brief exposure to the Trump phenomenon teaches anything, it's that once you're in his orbit, you become captive to his gravity.

The Oval Office "spray" two days before was a case in point.

These so-called picfac events usually last a couple of minutes, or enough time for the snappers to get a few frames that haven't got one or both leaders blinking.

But this "spray" went for half an hour: a painful Trumpathon for the sound recordists who were balancing nine-foot boom mikes between journos and cameramen, themselves straining to hear proceedings, crammed together behind the comfy sofas.

Watching Trump up close in those circumstances gives you a better appreciation of how he has the Washington ecosystem by its vitals.

Because he's Donald, he gets away with all manner of nutty notions.

As the American press corps chased him down over Washington Post revelations that he'd pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig dirt on Democrat presidential hopeful Joe Biden ("fake news", Trump declared), we were taken on a dizzying zig-zag of juicy yarns.

At one point during his Oval Office "spray", he declared, "I defeated the caliphate, ISIS".

Donald Trump and Scott Morrison held a joint event at the opening of Pratt Industries' box factory in Ohio. ( AP: John Minchillo )

Trump started musing on how best to ensure European countries take responsibility for captured radicalised nationals. He named France and Germany.

"We're asking them to take back these prisoners of war. So far they've refused and at some point, I'm going to have to say, 'I'm sorry, but you either take them back, or we're going to let them go at your border'," Trump said.

The alternative was to have "thousands and thousands" of captured fighters held at Guantanamo Bay, and "we won't do it".

"So, they have to make their decision, otherwise we're releasing them at the border," he said.

Would Trump really let a bunch of dangerous dudes go at the French and German borders?

Was he making it up on the spot? Who knows.

PM left to question if he'd attend another campaign rally

Scott Morrison did a tremendous job disguising whatever astonishment might have been flashing between neurons.

Trump said he could order nuclear strikes on Iran at a minute's notice. But would he? Let's hope not.

But that's part of his schtick — fibs and fabrications mixing with the fantastical and factual, to make him mightily unpredictable but always in control.

"We'll see what happens," he regularly says, a go-to sentence with potent blandness.

He's Australia's chief security ally, he's Morrison's new bestie.

But would the Prime Minister's minders allow their man to open another pulp mill alongside him?

Here's thinking not.