Donald Trump Jr looks increasingly unlikely to visit Australia any time soon and ticketholders have been left in the dark by event organisers who are yet to reschedule the former US president’s eldest son’s repeatedly postponed tour dates.
With the Republican primaries for the 2024 US presidential election still underway, Trump Jr has been an active cog in his father’s political machine.
His schedule as his father’s most active political proxy is set to get only busier when Trump Sr is expected to clinch the nomination in the not-too-distant future, locking in a repeat of 2020’s showdown with Joe Biden. HIs role will be especially crucial to Trump’s reelection campaign as the former president juggles court dates for his several indictment charges.
How this packed calendar will affect his speaking tour to Australia remains unclear as organiser for the “Donald Trump Jr Live” tour, Turning Point Australia, has gone silent on plans to bring him Down Under.
Trump Jr was set to visit in July last year but cancelled at the last minute citing a delay in visa approval until just 24 hours before he was set to get on a plane. A second set of dates were delayed in September because of a “scheduling conflict”, and again in December just days before the event was set to take place.
One ticketholder shared an email they received online in a petition calling for legal action against Trump Jr and Turning Point Australia: “Unfortunately, we find ourselves in the regrettable position of having to inform you that Don Jr’s tour will be postponed until early next year. The new dates for the tour are currently being finalised, and we expect to make an announcement next week regarding the updated schedule for 2024.”
However, since then there has been no new information provided to ticketholders. The ICC Sydney Theatre, which once published a statement from Turning Point Australia promising an update in “coming weeks”, no longer features the tour on its website. Ticketing purchasing platform Ticketek has taken down its web page for the event, and Ticketbud hasn’t updated its old December event.
Turning Point Australia once directed users to different places to buy tickets, but its domain for the event trumplive.com.au now shows a generic landing page that says “we appreciate your patience while we update the site”. The group, fronted by freedom movement figure Joel Jammal, has not posted on social media for two months either.
Multiple ticketholders have taken to X, formerly Twitter, to complain about not receiving refunds. “Hey Turning Point Australia, when you give the money back to the people who payed to see Donald Trump Jr.? How can this people trust you anymore?” posted one user in late December.
When contacted by Crikey, Jammal said the group is still figuring out Trump Jr’s and various venues’ availability. He said ticketing companies were to blame for delays in refunding, that Turning Point Australia doesn’t get the money from ticket sales until after the event, and that it was chasing up the companies for these ticketholders.
“We will be making an announcement in February regarding this,” he said in an email.
Who would have thought you couldn’t trust a member of the Trump family???
But keep the faith…i hear there’s going to be some very exciting, very beautiful news about it all in about…er…two to three weeks. Yeah, two to three weeks.
Just after they release their big, beautiful Infrastructure plan.
Big grown men crying, saying “sir, sir, how do you infrastructure so better than anyone?”.
These are strong men who have never cried before, not even as babies.
How terrifying that any Australian would pay to see him.
Good luck in extracting any dollars from Trump Jnr. Daddy has shown him never to pay out unless a court rules it. And perhaps not even then…
Plus the money is already spent on legal fees. At least the Trumps won’t do a runner like Skase.
As far as I’m concerned all this demonstrates is the veracity of the phrase ‘A fool and his money are easily parted.’
The knuckle-draggers, racists and News Corp readers (interesting Venn Diagram there, folks!) will be lucky if they see their money back anytime soon, if at all.
Oh, no! I was so hoping to see the son of Right-leaning America’s overweight Jesus on stage, possibly wearing his T-shirt saying ‘Guns don’t kill people; Alec Baldwin kills people.’