Donald Trump is taking the United States steaming towards a full authoritarian state, and now like-minded leaders are rising across the world, as far-right political movements spread like a virus. If the United States can turn from claiming to be a bastion of free speech, liberty, and justice for all to a nation of secret police where #YesKings can seem like a reasonable response to protest, then why can’t it happen everywhere else?

Trump has been a significant political figure over the last decade, and far-right movements have been mimicking his style to one degree or another during that time. Argentina elected a right-wing populist president in 2023. Le Pen’s National Rally in France has made huge gains. Giorgia Meloni leads a right-wing conservative coalition, Fratelli d’Italia, in Italy. Other right-wing populists have been elected across Europe, and where they’re not winning elections, they’ve still made huge gains at the polls. Even Germany, who have a strong memory for the horrors of the Nazis, has been fighting against their own new fascist party.

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While some of this global movement might be the result of backlash to shared traits across the countries, Trump’s playbook, from villainizing migrants and LGBTQ+ people to lying about his own personal history, has been picked up globally. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the United Kingdom.

In the U.K., Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson was often named Britain’s answer to Trump. He played himself off as a goofy celebrity who might not always know what he was doing, while orchestrating massive harm to the country behind that façade. He was a major figure in the Brexit movement, built his own Trump-like mythos on lies, and presided over a wealth of scandals before resigning due to a lack of confidence in him from his own party.

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The Tories managed to hold onto power in the U.K. for some time while channeling Trumpian ideals, but with no strong individual leader with a cult of personality behind them, the party crumbled and lost dramatically in the 2024 general election.

That Trumpian experiment in U.K. politics might have failed, but rather than taking the lesson that they needed to move away from this right-wing rhetoric, a wealth of politicians have sought to double down and this time, do it “right.” The new British Trumpian experiment is the Reform Party.

Once barely holding any power at all, the Reform Party is the latest iteration of a right-wing party that has traded under different names and has tried to make headway for years with a “Britain First” approach that tries to hide its racism. What was once UKIP (the U.K. Independence Party) morphed into the Brexit Party and then Reform.

The now-leader of Reform, Nigel Farage, served as leader of UKIP and has stepped in and out of leadership roles over the last three decades, depending on which way the wind blows. A wealthy individual, he has been eager to cast himself as a man of the people, drinking pints in pubs in full farmer-garb. He knows how to work the cult and the disenfranchised into an angry mob. Now he’s leaned so hard into Trump-approved policies that it might not be surprising to learn that the Heritage Foundation is lauding his actions, and he’s trying to get into bed with the Alliance Defending Freedom.

He wants to abolish “Indefinite Leave to Remain,” which is part of the process to achieve citizenship, wants to send asylum seekers to dangerous countries, and rages against illegal immigration and the “small boats” problem. It’s worth noting that the U.K. has very little illegal immigration, with most immigrants being students and those on work visas. The “small boats” problem was created by the lack of forethought behind Brexit, which Farage pushed for.

Reform’s manifesto and claims from the party’s members are also rife with anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric that echoes Trump’s speeches and Project 2025. They want to ban the flying of Pride flags from government buildings, with one member calling it a “f**king degenerate flag.” The manifesto also complains about “woke ideology” and claims that “transgender indoctrination is causing irreversible harm to children.” They also call for a ban on “transgender ideology” from schools (using the same terms as Trump’s Project 2025) and condemn social media platforms that allow information on “baseless transgender ideology and divisive Critical Race theory.” (Presumably JK Rowling will endorse them any day now.)

While pushing Trumpian hate, Farage is trying to distract the country with nationalist activism. Farage has been a major proponent of a flag-waving campaign, pushing people to fly the Union Jack and St. George’s Cross throughout towns. While the supposed motivation is to remind the government that disenfranchised British people still exist, it’s truly just a mask for suggesting that all problems in the country are the fault of immigrants and that white people aren’t getting enough preferential treatment.

I’d say it’s all one step short of saying “they’re eating the dogs,” but Farage has twisted that gem with a claim that immigrants are “eating the swans” (in the U.K., swans are legally protected and property of the monarchy through a historical law).

Farage even has his own Trumpian scandals and avoidance tactics, as he has come under fire for possible tax-dodging schemes, been questioned about whether he really owned the home in his constituency he claimed to, and has threatened to sue anyone who talks about such scandals.

And of course, even if Farage and his Trump mask don’t gain more power with these tactics, they’re still causing a shift in U.K. politics. Keir Starmer, the current prime minister, and the Labour Party he represents, have come under fire repeatedly for trying to “out-Reform Reform” as they attempt to court far right voters rather than support the center-left policies they campaigned on.

The U.K. is just one crucial example of how much damage the Trump virus is doing to the planet. With his success as a model for the far-right around the globe, that damage is going to grow worse and worse. If he succeeds in his authoritarian push, it won’t just be the U.S. and its trade partners that suffer, but the whole world. 

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