The Swelling Ranks of Trump’s Australian Admirers

We have now entered the latest stage of the judicial stitch-up of Donald Trump on bookkeeping misdemeanors which have, through the magic of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), morphed into criminal felonies attracting possible jail time and the certainty of ceaseless reiterations of the tag ‘convicted felon’. All this has been designed to derail his re-election in a race the polls say he is currently nailing in key battleground states.

While Donald Trump has consolidated his front-runner status in the US, how is he perceived Downunder?  With our obtuse media’s demonising of the once and quite possibly future president from the moment he declared his 2016 candidacy, Australians have been blitzed with coverage that has had all the depth and analytical sophistication of a three-panel cartoon strip. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that a majority of Australians continue to hold Trump in low esteem.

But that is only part of the story. According to the only Australian poll which has tracked local perceptions of Trump, conducted by the Lowy Institute, “almost one in three Australians want Donald Trump to win November’s US presidential elections (sic), a significant increase from when the businessman and former reality television star first ran for office”. Meanwhile, under the Biden administration, “warm” feelings towards the US have fallen to their lowest levels in 20 years.

“Trump is easily the most popular Republican candidate among Australians for at least the past 16 years”, a Sydney Morning Herald report on the poll admits, as 29 per cent of Australians now support Trump’s candidacy vis-a-vis Biden — a comparative approval rating which continues the Orange Devil’s upward trajectory in Australia, from 23 per cent approval in  2020 and a lowly 11 per cent in 2016. Party splits are to be expected and the Lowy poll confirms that predictable divide, with 46 per cent of Coalition voters backing Trump, compared with just 14 per cent of Labor/Greens voters.

Though still trailing Biden in the eyes of a majority of Australians (which Peter Smith rightly laments in Quadrant Online here), the more positive story is that Trump has nearly trebled his support in Australia. With rabid Trump-hatred endemic in 2016, it was a politically brave man (and an even braver woman) who openly favoured his candidacy.

Speaking personally, the more I have seen of Trump over the ensuing period, and the more exposed to the wild-eyed jettisoning of reason and civility by anti-Trump ‘progressives’, the more I have swung to his side, particularly for what he symbolises – a democratic populist uprising of the common man (including much of the American working class, despite their union top brass) against the corporate and political elite, the neocons, the foreign policy establishment, the ‘Deep State’ bureaucracy, the international acronym cabals, the lying media, the activist judiciary and the fully-woke commissars of culture. In a supreme irony, many of these are the very same elites the Left once claimed to despise.

While a growing cohort of Australians have jumped on the pro-Trump wagon, the ‘progressive’ Left has congealed like curdled cream around its hatred for the man.  Not for the progressives any doubt that Operation Get Trump has been entirely legitimate, justified by the greater good of ridding the planet of the Orange Pestilence.

Let us take a quick look look at the formal Left’s giddy reaction to the 34-count guilty verdict in Trump’s so-called ‘hush money’ trial, which turned an alleged bookkeeping error  into a felony by alleging the listing of moneys paid to a lawyer as “legal expenses” was key to a conspiracy to subvert electoral laws. That DA Alvin Bragg has absolutely no jurisdiction over election laws, which are a federal matter, was not once addressed, let alone explained, in the course of the four-week trial. Of no account for the ‘progressive’ anti-Trump gloater is the fact that New York City is second only to Washington DC in its 90 per cent Democrat-voting ways, resulting in what was effectively a rigged jury. Throw in the unashamedly biased rulings of Judge Juan Merchan, a Biden donor and judicial hack straight from the Democratic clubhouse, and this trial was justice mocked.

The World Socialist website, the propaganda umbrella of the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International (which houses Socialist Alternative, the largest and noisiest of Australia’s Trotskyite cults) is illustrative, parroting Biden’s talking points (or should that be mumble points with occasional shouting) that the verdict shows “no one is above the law”. The bolshies only cavil is that the ‘hush money’ verdict is a ‘fraud’ because Trump has so far escaped judgement on his more “serious, fundamental crimes against the American people—above all, his attempt to overthrow the Constitution and the results of the 2020 election in a fascistic coup”. How rich is that! The party that urges revolution condemns an alleged coup against the same democracy it despises.

Similarly, Socialist Worker, the organ of Socialist Alternative’s sister organisation in the UK, laments that “every modern US president has taken part in war crimes, corruption, interventions against democracy, sanctioning of torture, environmental destruction and more” but only Trump has been hauled before the courts. For the Trots, Trump is 2024’s  Al Capone, who was brought down only for tax evasion rather than being made to pay the full price for the breadth of his many other crimes.

Our Trots also seem a bit put out when speculating on the possible sentence to be handed down on July 11, ruing the possibility that Trump might get probation rather than incarceration. “In any event,” World Socialist laments, “Trump is certain to appeal a conviction, delaying any potential penalty until after the election.”

Need it be said that Their ABC has also indulged its Trump Derangement Syndrome to the fullest extent?

Fortunately, as the Lowy poll attests, a growing body of Australians are seeing through the misreporting, outright lies and anti-Trump narrative our media and other elites have been churning out since 2016. The poll shows that many of us aren’t quite so stupid as the legacy media imagines. Stupid also would be Australia’s ‘conservative’ opposition if it fails to take a populist leaf or two out of the Trump playbook.