Brexit campaign leader Nigel Farage wrote an op-ed for the Daily Mail over the weekend recounting his trip to the United States to campaign with Donald Trump, saying the rally he attended “was more like a rock concert than a political meeting” and asserting Trump will “be the new Ronald Reagan.”
Farage joined Trump at an event in Jackson, Mississippi, last week, further fueling comparisons between the populist brand of politics that drove the Brexit result and have sparked Trump’s political rise — an analogy Trump himself highlighted when he tweeted, “They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!”
“Trump was MY warm-up man… but I gave him a bounce — and he’ll be the new Ronald Reagan,” Farage titled his essay describing his experience with Trump.
Farage raved that the Mississippi rally had the atmosphere of “more like a rock concert than a political meeting.”
Farage wrote about his initial misgivings about the Republican presidential nominee, saying his campaign “has been highly controversial,” and that “some of his comments have not looked good and left him open to accusations of extremis.”
Farage said he was “surprised, even slightly overwhelmed by the warmth of (Trump’s) welcome and his huge support for Brexit,” and observed that he was “a better and more confident speaker” at the Mississippi event than he’d been at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, which Farage had attended.
“It is worth remembering that virtually everyone thought that Ronald Reagan was unfit to be the U.S. president before he made a huge success of his two terms,” the British politician noted.
Farage, who in addition to leading the Brexit charge once headed the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party, also remarked on the similarities between the interests of Trump voters and Brexit supporters. “Most of the crowd I met after the rally had never voted in their lives. They are the same people who made Brexit happen. They see Washington as distant and aloof, just as many Leave voters saw rule from Brussels.”
Farage, however, maintained that his admiration of Trump did not amount to an endorsement, pointing out he had criticized President Barack Obama for taking a side in the Brexit vote.
“I did not endorse Trump because I had condemned President Obama for telling us what to do in our referendum,” he wrote. ‘But I did say that if I was a U.S. citizen, I would not vote for Hillary Clinton even if she paid me.”