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Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, whose goal to get Britain out of the European Union was accomplished this summer with a successful Brexit vote, spoke at a Trump rally held in Jacksonville, Mississippi yesterday.
Farage told rally goers he had come with a message of hope and optimism. "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," Farage told the applauding crowd, "we can overcome the big banks, we can overcome the multinationals."
Farage pointed out that Brexit faced a lot of establishment opposition. "We saw experts from all over the world, we saw the International Monetary Fund, we saw Moody's, we saw S&P, we saw global leaders giving us project fear," he told Trump supporters, who watched their nominee last month present a fearful vision of America, one in which Trump positioned himself as its only savior. "They told us our economy would fall off a cliff, they told us there'd be mass unemployment, they told us investment would leave our country," Farage said, "and David Cameron, then our prime minister, but no longer, told us we might even get World War III."
"We saw the commentariat and we saw the polling industry doing everything they could to demoralize our campaign," Farage continued. Yesterday, Trump's campaign manager floated the idea that the "undercover Trump voter" that isn't showing up in polls would show up at the polls. Trump and his supporters point to unscientific online polls regularly as evidence Trump's support is being under-represented.
The pollsters and pundits were wrong, Farage argued, because Brexit campaigners reached non voters. "We reached those people who'd been let down by modern global corporatism," he explained. "We reached those people who have never voted in their lives but believe 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."
Farage also brought up that David Cameron, the former anti-Brexit Conservative prime minister, invited President Obama to speak to Britons about the vote. "And he talked down to us, he treated us as if we were nothing," Farage insisted, "one of the oldest functioning democracies in the world, and here he was telling us to vote Remain." Farage said he would not do the same. "I could not possibly tell you how you should vote in this election," Farage said to chants of "Trump" from the crowd. "I get it," he told them. "If I was an American citizen I wouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton if you paid me. In fact, I wouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton if she paid me."
Donald Trump himself visited one of his golf courses in Scotland the day after the Brexit vote in June, and said that he had "felt" that the vote would turn out the way it did. He also drew parallels between his campaign and Brexit based on a number of issues, including anti-establishment skepticism and concern over immigration. The British just wanted to take their country back, Trump argued, like his campaign was. Many advocates of Brexit pushed back at the comparison. After Trump tweeted that he would soon be known as "Mr. Brexit," Daniel Hannan, a Conservative member of European Parliament, pushed back against the idea, pointing out as he had before that while Trump's message was a pessimistic one, Brexit's was positive, one that was "upbeat, civil, and open to global trade."
Watch Farage's speech below:
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