Brexit’s Failures Could Foreshadow Trump’s. Just Not in the Way You Might Think.

 

Brexit’s Failures Could Foreshadow Trump’s. Just Not in the Way You Might Think.

 

Long regarded as two versions of the same populist phenomenon, they’re now clearly two different stories — each with its own cautionary tale.

 

By David Runciman

David Runciman is a professor of politics at Cambridge University and the author of “How Democracy Ends.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/magazine/brexit-trump-populism.html

May 19, 2025

 

On Aug. 18, 2016, Donald Trump tweeted: “They will soon be calling me MR BREXIT!” This was a surprise, as just a couple of months earlier Trump didn’t appear to know what “Brexit” meant. In an interview with Michael Wolff for The Hollywood Reporter in June, he needed a lot of prompting. “And Brexit? Your position?” “Huh?” “Brexit.” “Hmm.” “The Brits leaving the E.U.” “Oh, yeah, I think they should leave.” But with his spidey sense for what the people he was against were against, Trump knew straight away which side he should be on, even if he didn’t know what the fight was about. And he was right: When the British people voted to leave the European Union in summer 2016, it boosted Trump’s presidential prospects. The impossible turned out to be perfectly possible after all.

 

The year 2016 is still remembered with a kind of lingering awe as the year of both Brexit and Trump — or of Brexit then Trump, as though the second somehow followed from the first. For nearly a decade since, Brexit and Trump have been treated as two parts of the same story — a familiar tale of nativism and populism unbound, the revenge of the left-behinds. But with Trump returned to the White House, it has become clear that they aren’t the same story after all. Instead of playing out in parallel, Brexit and Trump have come apart. Trump now threatens to scatter what remains of the Brexit movement to the winds.

 

Brexit was meant to be two things at once: a restoration — of Britain’s independence, its global influence, its lost glories — and a revolution that would cut through the political order with a chain saw. But once a Brexit deal was finally done in 2020, a choice emerged: Would Brexit be used to dismantle the administrative state — “the Blob,” as its detractors like to call it — or would the Blob simply absorb Brexit as if nothing had happened?

 

Britain’s politicians appear to have opted for the latter. The Brexiteers never found a way to meet the popular demand for something other than conventional politics while utilizing conventional politics to channel that demand. As a result, they are now reduced to celebrating what little scraps of the lost revolution they can get. In Britain, for the present at least, the political system is winning.

 

Trump has followed the opposite path. During his first term, the established order managed more or less to constrain him, even prising him out of office following an election he lost but claimed to have won. The second time around, he’s determined to burn through the institutions and conventions that stymied him back then. His problem is that he seems to have no answer to the question of what to do once he has broken established alliances and trade agreements. He has mainly chaos to offer, which pales eventually as a political prospectus.

 

Where Brexit and Trump once seemed to be part of the same story, each now represents a sobering morality tale for the other.

 

The symbolic consummation of the Brexit-Trump romance came with a photograph taken at Trump Tower on Nov. 12, 2016, four days after the election. It showed a beaming Nigel Farage, a right-wing populist and leading figure in the Brexit campaign, standing in front of a golden door alongside the grinning president-elect, who was giving his guest the familiar thumbs-up. Farage had never made a secret of his deep admiration for the way Trump scorned the shibboleths of the political establishment, above all on questions of immigration. He was a star speaker at Trump’s 2016 campaign rallies, where he was introduced by the candidate as “the man behind Brexit,” who “won despite all odds, despite horrible name-calling.”

 

Yet for the people who ran the Vote Leave campaign, that result was achieved despite Farage, not because of him. Daniel Hannan, a Vote Leave founder who has since been elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Hannan of Kingsclere, had refused even to speak to Farage since 2014, when the two fell out over Farage’s yoking of Brexit to fierce anti-immigrant rhetoric. Hannan wanted to argue for something very different: what he called a “global Britain,” open to international trade, innovative and freed from the sclerotic grip of European institutions and laws. On the night the Brexit vote was won, Hannan stood on a desk in the Vote Leave offices and recited the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s “Henry V”: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” He imagined June 23, 2016, as his country’s Independence Day.

 

What he did not imagine was that Brexit would so soon be swallowed up by its American counterpart. In a furious interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, conducted outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster just four days after the referendum, Hannan railed against the idea that the Leave vote was primarily driven by a desire to stop immigration into Britain, notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary. “If I was relying on CNN as my only source of evidence, I would think that this was a nativist vote, a protectionist vote,” he insisted to an equally incensed Amanpour. “It’s the opposite.” He told another journalist: “The story taking shape was that Britain had just voted, as it were, for Donald Trump.” Hannan’s fury was an indication that he knew he was fighting a losing battle.

 

Worse was to come. The best-known face of the Brexit campaign was Boris Johnson, and he appeared to be another politician in the Trump mold. Flaxen-haired, larger than life, prone to outrageous statements (Johnson has called Black people “pickaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”), he was seemingly the anti-politics politician. Johnson cemented his careless public image on TV quiz shows, where he was either laughing at himself or at the entire political system. He was widely assumed on both sides of the Atlantic to be what Trump later called him: “Britain Trump.” But it was not a label Johnson wanted, nor one he ever used himself.

 

Johnson, unlike Trump, and unlike Farage (who until last year had stood unsuccessfully for Parliament seven times), was a career politician. His anti-politics posturing was always just an act. He was also in his own mind an internationalist and an alliance builder. In December 2015, he called Trump “out of his mind” for his wish to ban Muslim immigration to the United States. When, during his tenure as prime minister, Johnson was profiled by The Atlantic in June 2021, the journalist Tom McTague asked him directly, “So you’re not Trump?” and Johnson replied, “Well, self-evidently.” After being reminded that many Americans thought that they were one and the same (Joe Biden had called Johnson “a physical and emotional clone” of Trump), Johnson affected incredulity: “How ignorant can they be?” He described the twinning of himself and Trump as “a category error.”

 

But that was easy to say in the summer of 2021, when Trump was out of office and seemingly in disgrace following the events of Jan. 6. The scandal that undid Johnson a year later — hosting parties at 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s residence, in violation of the strict rules prohibiting pandemic socializing that were introduced by his own government — seemed quaint when set against Trump’s attempted insurrection. But it symbolized a government that had squandered its authority and its opportunity.

 

The years following Britain’s departure from the European Union were spent dealing with the economic consequences of the pandemic rather than the political consequences of Brexit. After Johnson came Liz Truss, who spooked the markets and paid the price, and after Truss came Rishi Sunak, who felt obliged to reassure the markets and paid the price for that. Britain is now governed by Keir Starmer, who was a leading light in the calls for a second Brexit referendum in 2019 to reverse the result of the first one. The British state remains unreformed since Britain left the E.U. Many Britons are poorer today than they were then. Brexit has gone precisely nowhere.

 

That leaves Johnson as one of many Brexiteers who find themselves at sea in Trump’s brave new world. It’s an emblematic story of the last decade: Trump often empowers his enemies (just see what happened in Canada and Australia, where recent national elections heavily favored anti-Trumpers). But he plays havoc with his so-called friends.

 

Since his return to the White House, the terrible dilemma Trump poses for Brexit Britain — can’t live with him, can’t live without him — has only become more painfully acute. Brexit was somehow meant to make Britain great again, not to reduce it to waiting on the whims of the American president. Trump’s project is to restore the United States to its imagined past glories, to forge an America indifferent to the wider world, which makes Britain a hanger-on, hoping for a lucky break along with everyone else. Trump has little time for the ambitions of other countries when he is so wrapped up in self-centered fantasies of his own. This mismatch of pretensions is producing some agonized contortions among the original architects of Brexit, which goes to show how little tied them to Trump in the first place.

 

Daniel Hannan’s vision of a welcoming Brexit has been wobbling wildly in the face of Trump’s erratic demands. It was based in part on the example of the British Commonwealth, with its traditional ideal of monarchical, Anglocentric internationalism. Trump, ever impressed by the trappings of royalty, has suggested that the United States might apply to become a member. But he has also indicated his desire to make Canada the 51st state. As a result, Hannan was for a time urging the British government to throw in its lot with the Canadians, even if that meant making an enemy of the United States. His expansive hopes for Brexit Britain have shrunk horribly under Trump’s withering attention. On March 15 this year, Hannan wrote in The Telegraph: “There are just three nations that Britain can truly trust” — Canada, Australia, New Zealand. “The U.S. is not one of them.”

 

Hannan has been equally appalled by Trump’s tariff campaign, because he believes that Brexit makes sense only as a free-trade project. Johnson, despite being more relaxed about protectionism in the past, has also come out recently against Trump’s tariff wars. For him, the nightmare is now Ukraine. When Johnson was clinging to office in 2022 in the face of growing demands to quit (after it became clear he’d broken his own Covid rules), Putin’s invasion of Ukraine seemed to offer a way back. To Johnson, it was his Churchill moment, a chance to redeem the entire Brexit project: Newly independent Britain could take the lead in standing up to tyranny, set an example to the feckless Europeans and bind the United States into a reborn Atlanticism.

 

Trump has put paid to all that. Since quitting as prime minister, Johnson makes a living writing a column for The Daily Mail, in which he alternates pro-Ukrainian sentiment with pro-Trump boosterism. He knows his only possible way to regain political power — and to reclaim his Churchillian destiny — is to harness some of the forces that got Trump back into the White House. But even he can’t square that circle. On Feb. 28, Johnson wrote that Zelensky’s invitation to the Oval Office was a sure sign that Trump was going to stand up to Putin. The column was pulled by The Daily Mail just hours after it was published when Trump and JD Vance sent Zelensky packing, having lectured him on his ingratitude. Johnson continues to insist that Trump is playing a deep game and that his craven approach to Putin’s demands is not what it seems. It is very unlikely that any fortunes will be restored by making that particular bet.

 

Instead, the coming man of British politics is once again Nigel Farage, at the head of the Reform Party, which stands for a Trumpish package of strict curbs on immigration, a rejection of “net zero” environmental policies and broad-brush economic populism. But now that Farage — who finally won a seat in Parliament at the 2024 general election — thinks he has a shot at becoming prime minister, he also has a serious Trump problem. That photo in Trump Tower is one he needs to bury if he is to continue his march on Downing Street.

 

The British public has an extremely low opinion of Trump: 80 percent view him negatively. Just as unpopular as Trump is Elon Musk. No mainstream British politician can afford to indulge a weakness for Musk’s antics and expect to prosper. Of the men who gave Britain Brexit, only one has willingly embraced the Trump-Musk package: Dominic Cummings, widely credited as the mastermind behind Vote Leave’s success. He devised its campaign strategy — which included keeping Farage at arm’s length — and he came up with its winning slogan: “Take Back Control.”

 

Cummings is often seen as the Machiavellian genius of modern British politics. He is the most open among all the architects of Brexit to the idea that the whole thing might turn out to have been a big mistake. In a recent interview with The Times of London, he agreed that the Remain position is a defensible one and that “reasonable people can argue that we should have stayed in.” Leaving was meant to be a catalyst for radical reform of the British state, paring it down, culling the civil service, firing up the engines of tech innovation. What Cummings found intolerable was going to all the trouble of getting out of the E.U. and then carrying on with business as usual. He went on: “Leave and then just sit there changing nothing is obviously moronic. But that’s where Boris and Sunak ended up taking us.”

 

The Musk revolution in Washington is much more what Cummings had in mind. “It’s basically all great from my perspective,” he said. Cummings writes a Substack that is read by politicians of all stripes in Britain. In it, he vents at vast length about the inefficiencies of the established system and the hopelessness of the selfsame British political elites who are secretly lapping him up. He regularly proposes the idea of a new party — which he calls the Startup Party — to sweep the whole thing away in a wave of Muskian creative destruction.

 

In an attempt to harness once again the kind of populist, anti-establishment streak that might break the stranglehold of the two main parties, Cummings has been reduced to scheming with Farage, a man he loathes. Cummings surely knows that Farage is no Trump.

 

In fact, the figure that comes closest to a “Britain Trump” in 2025 shows how the Brexit story is now eating its own tail. His name is Jeremy Clarkson, and he is a TV quiz show host, a farmer (with a TV show about that), a journalist who writes about cars and a newspaper columnist. He was fired from the BBC for punching a producer. He has never stood for election in his life. But he is edging his way into politics. In November 2024, Clarkson found himself speaking at a rally of farmers infuriated by the Labour government’s inheritance-tax policies. He articulated — as he regularly does in his columns — raw hatred for Keir Starmer and the metropolitan, lawyerly, woke, overeducated (Clarkson never went to college), patronizing disdain for ordinary people that he believes Westminster politics represents. “It was hard,” Tom McTague wrote at the time, “not to hear the distant sounds of the great populist panjandrum across the water.”

 

In February this year, however, Clarkson declared, referring to Brexit, “If I encounter someone who still thinks it was all a brilliant idea, I get so cross my hair catches fire and my teeth start to itch.” Why does he hate it so? Because it has made everything worse, slower, more bureaucratic and more irritating. It means endless form-filling and standing in line just to get into France. And there’s no upside because Britain is even more at the mercy of its conventional political class than ever. “We are told it’s better to be governed by a democratically elected Parliament than some bankers in Brussels, but I’m not sure about that,” Clarkson announced in his column. “I’d certainly prefer the bankers to Starmer.” He added: “I’d prefer anything. The fourth form of my local school. My dogs. Trump, even.”

 

If he were prime minister, Clarkson said, he would crawl on his hands and knees to ask to be let back into the E.U. Here is where the Trump story and the Brexit story have definitively come apart. “Britain Trump” loathes Brexit in 2025 because Brexit has become the new establishment, a symbol of a political elite that dare not say what everyone can see: that nothing is working.

 

For some committed Brexiteers, Trump’s Liberation Day on April 2 offered hopes for redemption. The announcement that Britain would face only 10 percent tariffs on its exports, compared with 20 percent for the E.U., was claimed as evidence of a long-deferred Brexit dividend. Finally, the ideological affinity between MAGA and the Brexit movement had paid off. Britain’s preferential status would enable it to forge ahead, while the rest of Europe remained firmly in Trump’s naughty book.

 

That reward didn’t last long. Within a week, Trump announced a 90-day pause on his “reciprocal” tariffs and a new global rate of 10 percent. Brexit Britain was now lumped together with everyone else. But then on May 8 came euphoria for the Brexiteers: a trade deal between the United States and Britain was unveiled in the Oval Office, which Trump said would not have been possible if Britain were still in the E.U. Within moments, Johnson was announcing that Brexit had finally delivered after all. Hannan got to his feet in the House of Lords to declare that global Britain — which earlier in the week struck another trade deal with India — was back.

 

Yet these rushed whoops of joy were evidence of desperation, not vindication. In a column for The Washington Examiner, Hannan called the deal “a stepping stone,” but it is a long way from anything he might have freely chosen, still stuffed full of tariffs, conditions and caveats. It’s not even a deal, just a bare outline toward one. And it depends on Trump’s not changing his mind. The original Brexiteers have been reduced to celebrating an arrangement they would once have hated and to swallowing the fact that it was negotiated by a Labour government that still hates Brexit. Even the Conservative Party, which brought the country Brexit, can’t stomach it. Its current leader, Kemi Badenoch, on seeing the details of the new arrangement, announced that Britain had been “shafted.”

 

Trump’s rapid retreat from his initial round of “reciprocal” tariffs in the face of a violent market reaction suggests an alternate Brexit parallel. The only British prime minister who has tried to take advantage of so-called Brexit freedoms to push a radical new agenda is Truss. On succeeding Johnson in 2022, Truss moved quickly to institute a tax-cutting, regulation-shredding regime. She lasted just 49 days, by far the shortest tenure of any prime minister in British history. Truss soon blamed sabotage by the deep state. But in truth, she was undone by the markets, which turned against her plans so rapidly that her fellow Conservative M.P.s dumped her in blind panic.

 

Truss now plies her trade on the fringes of MAGA world, where she peddles Trumpish warnings about the collapse of the West. In Britain, she has become nothing more than a bad Brexit punchline. It seems highly improbable that Trump will suffer anything like Truss’s fate. Unlike American presidents, British prime ministers can be readily replaced when their parties have had enough of them: The country is currently on to its sixth occupant of Downing Street since the Brexit referendum. The Republican Party, however spooked it might be by Trump’s antics, remains firmly in his pocket.

 

Nonetheless, the logic of their respective situations is not so different. If you act like a start-up boss who only wants to break things faster than the next guy — or if you employ such a boss as your henchman — you may find there is no political system left to work with. Trump needs to keep shaking things up to show that he gets the frustrations of the voters who backed him. But he can’t keep going forever, unless he wants to preside over a wasteland. It’s when he stops — and when the American voting public finds someone to articulate its fury about what he has destroyed — that he will truly be “MR BREXIT.”