America letter: Brexit to be seen as UK’s ‘Trump moment’

Turnberry golf links in Scotland is known for its wiry rough grass where even the best golfers, who hit off course, struggle to find play again or even their ball.

For the beaten supporters of the UK's continued membership of the European Union, there was perhaps no more fitting a location for businessman Donald Trump, on his visit yesterday to the reopening of his refurbished golf course, to sum up his view why UK voters chose to leave the European Union.

To the Remain voters, the country has been left deep in the rough after striking a ball way off course. Some, both in the UK and the US, woke up this morning to the ground-shifting news of a British exit from the EU searching, like golfers scouring forlornly for a lost ball, for the reasons why the English and Welsh voted as they did.

"People are angry all over the world," said Trump, as the property developer/reality-TV star-turned-US Republican Party standard-bearer visited his refurbished hotel and Scottish golf course yesterday.

To Trump, the vote makes total sense, mirroring the angst and fears simmering among American voters about the economy, immigration and borders. It is the same anger that has driven his own insurgent rise to become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in a populist campaign. He has, like the Leave campaigners in Britain, harnessed the public’s appeal for the outsider campaign promising to shake up a stagnant system by putting their home country first.

“People want to see borders. They don’t necessarily want people pouring into their country that they don’t know who they are and where they come from,” he said.

The parallels between the Brexit vote and Trump’s head-turning and, for Democrats and some Republicans, blood-curdling takeover of the Republican Party are striking. The same anti-establishment, anti-elite forces marshalled by Trump in the US were tapped by the Leave campaign and among an equally divided electorate.

Like Trump here, the misstatement of facts in the Leave campaign did not alarm voters sufficiently to send them running en masse to the Remain camp. In the politics of the gut, it’s not how you think, it’s how you feel.

Trump vows to “Make America Great Again;” the Leave campaign urged voters to “Take Our Country Back”. Each tugged at the growing nationalistic, nativist fervour of voters who feel that restoring economic borders in a globalised trading world might bring back an era of past glories when their countries were safer, stronger, whiter.

Heavy role

Like Trump’s Republican supporters, Brexiteers were mostly aged 45 years and older so nostalgia for a bygone era of greatness has played a heavy role.

In a post-factual world, false campaign claims did not appear to matter. Angry voters want simple solutions to complex problems. They seek out clear targets for their fury to direct their against-the-machine rage at what they see as clear-cut villains responsible their economic and security concerns – for the Leave camp, Europe; for Trump's supporters, Mexicans, Muslims, foreign governments.

Just as Nigel Farage fanned anti-immigrant flames with his "Breaking Point" poster in the final days of the campaign showing queues of brown-faced refugees stretching into the distance - none of whom were trying to enter the UK in the photo – Trump's first TV campaign ad showed dozens of people swarming over a border fence, purportedly the southern US border with Mexico but in fact a frontier in Morocco.

Trump has claimed that the US is paying "the lion's share" of Nato's budget when it is fact contributing a share amounting to about 22 per cent. The Leave campaign grossly exaggerated the UK contribution to the EU at £350 million a week. Farage, disavowing the ad, said following the Brexit vote yesterday morning that it was a "mistake" to say that there would £350 million more a week available for the NHS.

Like Trump, the Leave campaign played on a hatred of the elites. Leave campaigner, Conservative MP Michael Gove said that "the British people are sick of experts", rubbishing the weight of expertise backing the Remain side. "My primary consultant is myself," Trump declared brashly in March, in line with his popular claims not to be beholden to outside corporate interests. The Remain side, in contrast, was backed by large corporations, much like how Hillary Clinton, Trump's Democratic rival in November, has suffered from her association with big banks and businesses.

While the Brexit vote will be perceived as the UK’s “Trump moment”, Americans chilled by the possibility of this wild shot to the rough being replayed in November’s election may find comfort in the bigger role to be played by ethnic minorities in the US.