Echoes and parallels of Trumpian populism: Australian media coverage of the 2025 federal election

Throughout the 2025 Australian election campaign, the Liberal Party and its then leader Peter Dutton flirted with Trump-style rhetoric and Trumpian alignment became a perceived narrative in some Australian media. The current research uses framing analysis to examine how imported echoes and parallels of Trumpian populist aesthetic are identified and portrayed – amplified, challenged or neutralized – in Australian political and media discourse. This study first conducts a thematic analysis of Trump’s Truth Social posts to identify archetypal populist rhetoric. It then analyses how three Australian media outlets with varying ideological alignments and some of the highest online audience reach in Australia – the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian – framed the employment of Trumpian populist features by Australian politicians, particularly Dutton. This article demonstrates that Dutton’s rhetorical echoes and parallels of Trumpian populist style were represented as a miscalculation and opportunism or as a threat or as a tool to stoke division or as the product of incompetence.