For those who haven’t been following the conversation on the right about Australia, Donald Trump’s recent entry into the chat might have been a little baffling.
On Friday, the former president put out a statement that included only this tweet, from the conservative columnist Scott Morefield: “I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that if Donald Trump hadn’t won in 2016 and appointed three SCOTUS justices, the U.S. would literally be Australia right now.”
Coming just after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority blocked President Biden’s vaccine mandate for large businesses, the first half of Morefield’s tweet speaks for itself. But the second half, the context-free swipe at Australia, requires some explaining.
Over the past few months, Australia — Western-allied, democratic Australia — has become a byword among conservatives for an over-the-top approach to combating the coronavirus pandemic. The government there has used aggressive vaccine mandates, quarantines, border restrictions and lockdowns to keep Covid-19 deaths below 3,000 people in a country of 25 million, with some trade-offs in personal freedoms.
But the commentary on the American right has made Australia out to be some kind of authoritarian state:
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On Sept. 30, Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, devoted 12 minutes of his show to Australia, documenting its supposed slide into authoritarianism. “One moment the English-speaking world is mocking China for being dystopian and autocratic,” he warned. “The next moment they’re aping China and hunting people down who are two blocks from their homes and smoking a cigarette.”
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Two months later, Carlson referred to a quarantine facility in Darwin, Australia, as a “Covid concentration camp.”
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In October, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, got into an exchange with the leader of Australia’s Northern Territory after tweeting, “I’ve always said Australia is the Texas of the Pacific. The Covid tyranny of their current government is disgraceful & sad. Individual liberty matters. I stand with the people of #Australia.”
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In November, Joe Rogan, mistaking satire for a real ad, posted on his Instagram account: “Not only has Australia had the worst reaction to the pandemic with dystopian, police-state measures that are truly inconceivable to the rest of the civilized world, but they also have the absolute dumbest propaganda.”
These concerns prompted Van Badham, an Australian journalist, to fire back in a guest opinion essay for The New York Times entitled: “No, Australia Is Not Actually an Evil Dictatorship.”
The comparisons died down for a while, but the recent standoff between Novak Djokovic and Australian tennis authorities over the Serbian star’s refusal to vaccinate has brought the topic raging back. Trump and DeSantis are also shadowboxing over their respective records on Covid, ahead of a possible clash in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, so the fact that both have mentioned Australia is…
Read More: Why Trump and DeSantis Are Talking About Australia