In a US election season filled with the bizarre and unexpected, a particularly striking event was the appearance of Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, before a cheering Donald Trump crowd in Jackson, Mississippi.
No US presidential candidate since 1945 has been more dismissive of foreign alliances than Donald Trump. None has insisted so strongly that America must go it alone in a world of feckless friends and existential terror threats. But here, in a city that had been an epicentre of the Ku Klux Klan movement in the 1960s, Donald Trump looked on benignly as Nigel Farage relished in the parallels between Trump’s candidacy and his own Brexit campaign, all in language appropriated from the ‘Yes we can’ rhetoric of Barack Obama, a man they both profess to despise.
