At a big rally in Mississippi on Wednesday night, Donald Trump appeared alongside Nigel Farage, the former head of the U.K. Independence Party, who helped lead the successful Leave campaign in the recent referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Union.
What was the point of Trump sharing a stage with a British politician whom most Americans have never heard of? Trump surely can’t think that his appearance with Farage will win over many undecided voters. But, with the polls and the commentariat against him, the Republican candidate evidently sees Farage as an inspiration and a talisman.
Last week, on Twitter, Trump said, “They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!" On Wednesday night, he introduced Farage to the crowd as someone who had “brilliantly” led the campaign to take Britain out of the European Union. “I was very supportive of their right to do it and to take control of their own future, like we're going to be voting for on November 8th," Trump said. Officially, the Leave campaign was led by Michael Gove, a Conservative politician. But Farage and his party undoubtedly played an important role, and it’s not surprising that Trump relates to him—the two of them have had success using many of the same tactics.
Just as Trump has done in this country, Farage and his party appealed to deep-rooted racism and xenophobia, and made limiting immigration a central issue. Particularly in working-class districts of Britain, UKIP’s message that immigrants were to blame for many of the country’s ills, and that the E.U. was synonymous with mass immigration, proved to have widespread appeal.
Although the overwhelming number of E.U. migrants who enter the U.K. come from countries like France and Poland, Farage and his colleagues ruthlessly exploited fears of Islamist terrorists slipping in from Syria and other trouble spots. Not long before the Brexit vote, UKIP released a campaign poster that showed long lines of non-white refugees and migrants lining up at a border crossing, and it featured the words “BREAKING POINT: The EU has failed us all.” The picture on the poster was taken on the border between Croatia and Slovenia in 2015. Critics pointed out that it resembled Nazi-propaganda images, and Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London, who was another leader of the Leave campaign, distanced himself from it. But Farage was unrepentant. As Trump has done on numerous occasions this election year, he refused to back down.
Another reason Farage may appeal to Trump: he is a well-to-do individual who professes to be a man of the people. A former commodities trader who attended an ancient private school, Dulwich College, Farage was, for a long time, rarely seen in public without a pint of beer in his hand. (Though that’s actually one way he differs from Trump, who is an abstainer.) And, like Trump, he has coupled his anti-immigrant diatribes with a broader critique of bankers, corporate leaders, politicians, journalists, and other members of what he calls an out-of-touch metropolitan élite.
Blessed with a quick tongue and a rhinoceros’s thick skin, Farage can be an insidiously effective speaker. “I come from the United Kingdom with a message of hope and a message of optimism,” he said in his remarks on Wednesday. “It’s a message that says if the little people, if the real people, if the ordinary, decent people are prepared to stand up and fight for what they believe in, we can overcome the big banks, we can overcome the multinationals.”
Farage reminded the crowd that, in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, in June, the pundits and the pollsters had predicted victory for the Remain side. “On the day of the vote itself, that morning they put us ten points behind,” he said. “They were all wrong. . . . We reached those people who have been let down by modern global corporatism. We reached those people who have never voted in their lives but believed, by going out and voting for Brexit, they could take back control of their country, take back control of their borders, and get back their pride and self-respect.”
As the crowd applauded, and Trump looked on, beaming, Farage took a shot at President Obama, who had visited London in April and warned that a Leave vote could imperil Britain’s ability to make future trade deals with the United States. “And he talked down to us. He treated us as if we were nothing,” Farage said, twisting the President’s words almost beyond recognition. Then he delivered his coup de grâce. "Having criticized and condemned his”—Obama’s—“behavior, I could not possibly tell you how you should vote in this election,” he said. “But I will say this: if I was an American citizen, I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton if you paid me.” To loud cheers, Farage went on, “In fact, I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton if she paid me.”
Having lived through the shock of the Brexit vote, some Britons watching the U.S. election believe it could go the same way, with Trump pulling off a surprise, and the pollsters and pundits being humiliated. At this point, largely because of what is happening in battleground states like Colorado, Florida, and Pennsylvania, I don’t personally think that is a serious possibility. But Farage’s visit served as a timely reminder that populist nativism and nationalism aren’t confined to this country, or even to this country and the U.K. Something bigger than Donald Trump and Nigel Farage is going on. They are merely trying to whip it up and cash in on it.
