New York: President Donald Trump has defended his "tough" approach to speaking with foreign leaders in his first public remarks since details of his tense phone conversation with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull were revealed, even as criticism mounted over the president's treatment of a stalwart US ally.
One senior Republican colleague, senator John McCain, even took the step of calling the Australian ambassador to reaffirm the alliance on Thursday.
Speaking at the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, Mr Trump strayed from his prepared remarks several times and addressed the intense media coverage of his phone call with Mr Turnbull - which turned sour during a discussion over an Obama-era agreement to take 1250 refugees from Australia's offshore detention camps - as well as an equally controversial conversation with the Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
"When you hear about the tough phone calls I'm having, don't worry about it," Mr Trump said. "Just don't worry about it. They'e tough. We have to be tough."
"It's time we're going to be a little tough folks. We're taken advantage of by every nation in the world virtually. It's not going to happen anymore. It's not going to happen anymore."
The call with Mr Turnbull and a subsequent tweet from the president condemning the "dumb deal" on refugees was greeted with more confusion and condemnation in the US on Thursday.
Senator McCain, a former Republican presidential candidate who has clashed with Mr Trump on issues of foreign policy before, described the president's treatment of Australia as "harmful."
"It was an unnecessary and frankly harmful open dispute over an issue which is not nearly as important as United States-Australian cooperation and working together, including training of our marines in Australia and other areas of military cooperation and intelligence," he said during a doorstop interview in Washington DC.
Mr McCain later put out a statement saying he had personally called Australia's ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, to express support for the alliance.
"I asked Ambassador Hockey to convey to the people of Australia that their American brothers and sisters value our historic alliance, honour the sacrifice of the Australians who have served and are serving by our side, and remain committed to the safer, freer, and better world that Australia does far more than its fair share to protect and promote," he said in a statement.
Republican senator Lindsay Graham, who has also been a frequent critic of Mr Trump, played down the impact of the call on the alliance though, saying "the relationship is strong" during an interview on MSNBC.
On the president's tweet about Australia he conceded "I with he would sleep more and tweet less... there's probably better ways to handle this."
Mr Trump's comments on Thursday comments came shortly after Kellyanne Conway, a counsellor to the president, denied the leak of the phone call had come from within the White House.
"It's very unfortunate," she said of the report during an interview on Fox News. "Obviously we're not commenting on that way... we're the ones not leaking..."
But she later added "anyone who is just discovered that President Donald J. Trump is a resolute decisive man who doesn't mince his words and who is putting America and her allies first and her people and her interest first, is waking up I think out of the cave."
Mr Trump also used his address at the prayer breakfast to attack his successor as the host of The Apprentice, actor and former Republican governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, urging the gathered religious leaders to pray for Schwarzenegger's ratings.
Schwarzenegger fired back on Twitter soon after, offering to swap jobs with the president - allowing Mr Trump to go back to television and "allowing people to sleep comfortably again."