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Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate stormed out of a press conference after being quizzed about his alleged dinner with Donald Trump.
The Australian politician had previously claimed to have dined with Trump and his wife, Melania, in February this year while at Mar-a-Lago.
ABC News Australia found that the White House later backtracked on this claim and said Tate didn’t eat with the group.
When quizzed about his claims of dining with the President, Tate said: ‘I’ve already answered yes, and the matter’s private so I’m not going to elaborate much further than that.’
A journalist then asked how much the trip to Florida from Australia cost, to which Tate stormed off and said: ‘Fk off, yeah fk off, I’ve had enough of that.’
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The Trump Organisation previously said: ‘Any suggestion that the president had dinner with Mayor Tate, or that he attended an event that was directly or indirectly connected to or associated with Mayor Tate or his event, is categorically false.’
Tate’s constituency previously made headlines in relation to Trump when plans for a Trump Tower to be built along the coast were scrapped because the brand was ‘too toxic’.
David Young, CEO of Altus Property Group, told CNN: ‘Let’s just say that with the Iran war and everything else, the Trump brand was increasingly unpopular in Australia.’
Plans for the 91-storey tower, which would operate as a hotel, apartment building and retail building, would have been Australia’s tallest tower.
Backlash from Australians was swift, with more than 140,000 signing a petition to block the tower from going forward.
Young said the backlash, while ‘deeply unfair’, showed that the Trump name had become too toxic in Australia.
The Trump Organisation, which was behind the project, slammed the halting of the project.
The Trump Organisation said Young’s comments about world events were a ‘ploy’ to distract from ‘his own failures’.
But Tate said that the Trump Organisation was partly to blame, because they were planning to make more profit than the developer.
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