The outgoing leader of the nationalist, hard-right U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) who is widely credited with leading the Brexit movement thinks Donald Trump could follow the same path as Ronald Reagan. “It is worth remembering that virtually everyone thought that Ronald Reagan was unfit to be the US President before he made a huge success of his two terms,” Farage wrote in an op-ed for the Daily Mail days after he spoke at a Trump rally in Mississippi.
In the piece, Farage notes how he was surprised Trump ended up being his “warm-up” act at the rally. The UKIP leader made a point of saying that he didn’t explicitly endorse Trump “because I had condemned President Obama for telling us what to do in our referendum.” But he did say that “if I was a US citizen I would not vote for Hillary Clinton even if she paid me.” Even though “Trump is very new to politics and has made a lot of mistakes” Farage said that he’s “far less worried” about a Trump presidency after meeting and talking with the candidate. “If he becomes US President he will be able sensibly to make the big decisions.”
The British politician also said he saw a lot of similarities between his supporters and those who greeted him enthusiastically at the Wednesday event. “Most of the crowd I met after the rally had never voted in their lives,” Farage wrote. “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.”
Clinton harshly criticized Farage a day after his appearance at the Trump rally, calling him “one of Britain’s most prominent right-wing leaders … who stoked anti-immigrant sentiments to win the referendum to have Britain leave the European Union.” She went on to detail some of the Farage’s most infamous positions: “Farage has called for a bar on the children of legal immigrants from public schools and health services, has said women are, and I quote, ‘worth less than men’ and supports scrapping laws that prevent employers from discriminating based on race.”
