A junior employee in the Australian prime minister’s office has been suspended over an “inappropriate” anti-Donald Trump social media post from the week before the US presidential election.
On Friday 2GB Radio revealed that an executive assistant of Drew Clarke, the prime minister’s chief of staff, had posted a photo of a T-shirt promoting the Tuck Frump anti-Trump website on her Facebook page.
The website says it was “created to give people a megaphone to voice their disgust with the racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-environmental and bullying stupidity of Donald Trump”.
The post was made on 4 November, four days before the presidential election in which Trump scored an upset victory against Hillary Clinton despite winning 2.8m fewer votes.
A spokeswoman from the prime minister’s office told Guardian Australia: “The employee accepts that these posts were inappropriate and has deleted them from her account.
“The chief of staff has suspended her immediately while the matter is investigated further.”
Revealing the controversy on Friday afternoon, 2GB radio host Ben Fordham gave a lengthy description of one item for sale on the site, “a voodoo Donald doll”, which a video depicts having molten metal poured over it, squished by a concrete block and burned by a flame-thrower.
Fordham said the photo was the cover of the staffer’s Facebook page until January, but the original post remained until Friday, when he asked the prime minister’s office about it.
Although the post dates from before the US election, the prime minister’s office is likely to be especially sensitive about offending Trump in the wake of the high-profile spat about the US-Australia refugee resettlement deal.
Trump caused concerns about the future of the agreement when he blasted it on Twitter as a “dumb deal”.
Do you believe it? The Obama Administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017
The Trump administration may still honour the deal, negotiated by the Obama administration, to take 1,250 refugees from Australia’s offshore detention centres.
On Friday in the wake of the disagreement, Turnbull was asked if Trump was a “brash character”. He replied: “I’ll leave others to comment on him but he’s clearly a very big personality.”
