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Have you noticed that Nigel Farage doesn’t talk about Donald Trump anymore?

05 Jul 2025 6 minute read
US President Donald Trump (L). Photo Niall Carson/PA Wire Reform UK leader Nigel Farage Photo Ben Birchall/PA Wire

Martin Farr

Each is the main political subject in their country, and one is the main political subject in the world. Each rode the populist wave in 2016, campaigning for the other. In 2024 the tandem surfers remounted on to an even greater breaker.

Yet, though nothing has happened to suggest that bromance is dead, neither Donald Trump nor Nigel Farage publicly now speak of the other.

Trump’s presidential campaign shared personnel with Leave.eu, the unofficial Brexit campaign. Farage was on the stump with Trump, and his “bad boys of Brexit” made their pilgrimage to Trump Tower after its owner’s own triumph in the US election. Each exulted in the other’s success, and what it portended.

Trump duly proposed giving the UK ambassadorship to the United States to Farage. Instead, Farage became not merely MP for Clacton, but leader of the first insurgent party to potentially reset Britain’s electoral calculus since Labour broke through in 1922.

Then, Labour’s challenge was to replace the Liberals as the alternative party of government. It took two years. Reform UK could replace the Conservatives in four.

Thwarted

Trump, meanwhile, has achieved what in Britain has either been thwarted (Militant and the Labour party in the 1980s) or has at most had temporary, aberrant, success (Momentum and the Labour party in the 2010s): the takeover of a party from within. Farage has been doing so – hitherto – from without.

At one of those historic forks in a road where change is a matter of chance, after Brexit finally took place, Farage considered his own personal leave – to go and break America.

The path had been trodden by Trump-friendly high-profile provocateurs before him: Steve Hilton, from David Cameron’s Downing Street, via cable news, now standing to be governor of California; Piers Morgan, off to CNN to replace the doyen of cable news Larry King, only to crash, but then to burn on, online. Liz Truss, never knowingly understated, has found her safe space – the rightwing speaking circuit.

But Farage remained stateside. He knew his domestic platform was primed more fully to exploit the voter distrust that his nationalist crusade had done so much to provoke.

The Trump effect

Genuine peacetime transatlantic affiliations are rare, usually confined to the leaders of established parties: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. One consequence of the 2016 political shift is that the US Republicans and the British Conservatives, the latter still at least partially tethered to traditional politics, have become distanced.

During the first Trump administration, and even in the build up to the second, it was Farage who was seen as the UK’s bridge to the president. But today, at the peak of their influence, for Farage association can only be by inference, friendship with the US president is not – put mildly – of political advantage. For UK voters, Trump is the 19th most popular foreign politician, in between the King of Denmark and Benjamin Netanyahu.

There is, moreover, the “Trump effect”. Measuring this is crude – circumstances differ – but the trend is that elections may be won by openly criticising, rather than associating with, Trump. This was the case for Mark Carney in Canada, Anthony Albanese in Australia, and Nicușor Dan in Romania.

Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney in 10 Downing Street. Image: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire

Trump’s second state visit to the UK will certainly be less awkward for Farage than it will be Starmer, the man who willed it. Farage will likely not – and has no reason to – be seen welcoming so divisive a figure.

Starmer has no choice but to, and to do so ostentatiously. It is typical of Starmer’s perfect storm of an administration that he will, in the process, do nothing to appeal to the sliver of British voters partial to Trump while further shredding his reputation with Labour voters. Farage would be well served in taking one of his tactical European sojourns for the duration. Starmer may be tempted too.

Outmanoeuvring the establishment

Reflecting the historic cultural differences of their countries, Trump’s prescription is less state, Farage’s is more. The Farage of 2025 that is. He had been robustly Thatcherite, but has lately embraced socialist interventionism, albeit through a most Thatcherite analysis: “the gap in the market was enormous”.

Reform UK now appears to stand for what Labour – in the mind of many of its voters – ought to. Eyeing the opportunity of smokestack grievances, Farage called for state control of steel production even as Trump was considering quite how high a tariff to put on it. Nationalisation and economic nationalism: associated restoratives for national malaise.

Aggressively heteronormative, Trump and Farage dabble in the natalism burgeoning in both countries – as much a cultural as an economic imperative. Each has mastered – and much more than their adversaries – social media. Each has come to recognise the demerits in publicly appeasing Putin.

And Reform’s rise in a hitherto Farage-resistant Scotland can only endear him further to a president whose Hebridean mother was thought of (in desperation) as potentially his Rosebud by British officials preparing for his first administration.

Given their rhetorical selectivity, Trump and Farage’s rolling pitches are almost unanswerable for convention-confined political opponents and reporters. These two anti-elite elitists continue to confound.

Unprecedentedly, for a former president, Trump ran against the incumbent; Farage will continue to exploit anti-incumbency, despite his party now being in office. Most elementally, the pair are bound for life by their very public near-death experiences. Theirs is, by any conceivable measure, an uncommon association.

Farage’s fleetness of foot would be apparent even without comparison with the leaden steps of the leaders of the legacy parties. His is a genius of opportunism. That’s why he knows not to remind us of his confrere across the water.

Martin Farr is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British History, Newcastle University

This article was first published on The Conversation

The Conversation


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Amir
Amir
1 day ago

Dangerous liaisons and more deadly when they go into stealth mode.

TheWoodForTheTrees
TheWoodForTheTrees
1 day ago

What was going on when Musk declared Farage unfit to lead Reform in the UK? Maybe Trump has dropped Farage because of whatever that was? Of course Trump is no longer two timing Farage with Musk now, so it may all be temporary anyway. Like everything with Trump it depends who spoke to him 5 minutes ago.

Steve D.
Steve D.
1 day ago

Farage will stay quiet but I doubt very much the other parties will do so. Scrutiny of Farage and his party has not yet fully began – there will be no hiding from answers when it does.

Badger
Badger
1 day ago

Have they actually been seen together since Trump’s re-election? Perhaps the Don has had enough of Nige.

Badger
Badger
1 day ago
Reply to  Badger

Or is it awkward for Nige that, having promised the proles that global free trade and more billionaires were the answer to their problems, Trump is now going in the exact opposite direction.

Fanny Hill
Fanny Hill
1 day ago

He may not talk about Trump anymore but there no doubt Farage is intent on inflicting the same undemocratic travesties on the UK as Trump has done to the USA.
He’ll line the pockets of the rich whilst at the same time dismantling the NHS.

Jeff
Jeff
1 day ago
Reply to  Fanny Hill

Recent story from Texas where a bloke wanted to get his son up to date on measles and other usual kiddie jabs with the measles outbreak there. $2.5k+.

NHS sold off cos farage, this is what we will face.

And as health is devolved here, he will yank stuff in Wales if he gets the chance (the reform candidates in Wales will dance to Nige tune). Anyone get the covid jab? Bye bye if reform get in, probably. Free prescriptions and hospital parking?

Story from Texas.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/01/texas-measles-vaccine-cost/

Anonymous
Anonymous
1 hour ago
Reply to  Fanny Hill

Just in what way is Farage intent on inflicting undemocratic travesties  on the UK???

Fi yn unig
Fi yn unig
1 day ago

Here’s how hate will eat itself. I had not noticed the non references suggested but cuddly Nige will only talk up someone or something that will smooth his passage to No: 10 and big Dons’ hooliganism is showing the electorate here what they would rather avoid as he makes himself globally unpopular and a threat to domestic peace and harmony (not that we’ve had much of that since 2016). Trump and Musk have hated each other out of buddiness and Nige doesn’t talk about his ‘hero’ Nazi saluting ‘friend’ anymore as he told us all that Nige doesn’t have what… Read more »

TheWoodForTheTrees
TheWoodForTheTrees
1 day ago
Reply to  Fi yn unig

That’s a lovely analysis. I really hope you’re right.

Fi yn unig
Fi yn unig
1 day ago

Thank you and yes, I hope so too but hate is a very large plate of excrement and it takes a long time to get through it. All we can do is encourage them to keep eating each other until the plate is clear by helping them in voting against them all of course. Then any survivors can go and sort it out around the back of the bike sheds and leave the rest of us alone.

Jeff
Jeff
1 day ago

farage knows that trump is going down like a cup of hot sick on the UK.

But his recent rail against same sex marriage, his links to far right anti abortion types in the US need to be checked out by the press. And the press need to press him on trumps concentration camps and trump disappearing thousand’s of people legally in the US. farage will be influenced a great deal by trump even if he ignores trump.

LynE
LynE
1 day ago

New Statesman journalists noted in a recent podcast the swift return of Zia Yusuf after his resignation and took it as a sign that Farage is changing tactics now power is in sight – trying to turn off the solipsistic competitiveness and professionalise. Previously any quarrel would have been final. One of them, Tom McTague or Andrew Marr, I think, also noted that when Farage was asked a question that initially sparked a standard kneejerk, for the first time ever he swiftly turned it off and attempted to be more judicious and statesmanlike. Not mentioning Trump (or Putin) any more… Read more »

Mawkernewek
Mawkernewek
1 day ago

“Farage would be well served in taking one of his tactical European sojourns for the duration. Starmer may be tempted too.”

I’m not sure a PM could get away with that, to disappear abroad to avoid a state visit that they themselves have arranged. He’d be better off actually finding an excuse to cancel the state visit.

Rheinallt morgan
Rheinallt morgan
1 day ago

Farage garners far more interest here than Plaid.

Anonymous
Anonymous
7 minutes ago

So true!

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