Donald Trump’s midterm meltdown is bad news for Nigel Farage, too - The Independent

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Not only has Farage backed a loser, he has shown that he lacks judgement.

It is one thing to admire Donald Trump and to feel an ideological affinity with him. It is quite another to allow your love for the Maga King to cloud your judgement and to go on TV predicting that the Republicans would spring a “big surprise” in the midterm elections.

As it happened, the surprise was the emphatic force of America’s negative verdict on two years of Trump’s second term, with results at the most optimistic end of the Democrats’ hopes.

This morning, Nigel Farage has enough egg on his face to provide a full English breakfast for all his staff.

Trump’s disastrous results are doubly damaging for Farage. Not only has he reminded potential Reform voters that he is a big fan of an unpopular president – one who is much, much more unpopular here than he is in Texas, South Carolina, Kansas and Iowa – but he has shown poor judgement, too.

“I don’t go with that consensus that Trump is going to get absolutely smashed,” Farage said on GB News last night. He tried to pretend that this wasn’t just the wishful thinking of a schoolboy crush by trying to sound knowledgeable about the improved state of the Republicans’ Get Out The Vote campaign.

He also said: “Elon Musk hasn’t chucked in $450m of his own money just for fun.”

How humiliating – to have to cite Musk in support of his view, when one of the few things for which Farage deserves credit in the past two years is standing up to the owner of X, who backs Rupert Lowe, the Reform defector taking lumps out of Reform’s right flank with his “mass deportation” message.

Farage had the wit to acknowledge that the Iran war and the cost of diesel and “gas” were “not good” for Trump, and yet said: “We’re in for a big surprise tonight.”

This is damaging because it makes him look like a fool. And not just him, but his army of keyboard warriors, who have flooded social media in recent days to insist that the American opinion polls had got it wrong – many pointing out, as Farage did, that the pollsters have got Trump wrong before.

These amateur psephologists are a little quieter today. The really hard core insist that the Democrats stole the elections, and are busy generating conspiracy theories by working backwards from that assumption.

But even the conspiracy-theorist-in-chief has given up. Trump himself has said that he was “absolutely willing to accept” the results, and that the Democrats did a “good job”.

You might think that Farage’s error of judgement won’t harm him – that his supporters will just shrug and change the subject. But my view is that looking like a deluded fanboy will drive away a slice of undecided voters.

I was struck years ago by an account of a brilliant American blogger who had been a hardcore conservative but who had become a liberal. She said that her mind was not changed by engaging in arguments with people on social media, but by observing other people’s arguments and realising that she had doubts about the case made by those on “her” side.

So although Farage’s committed fans will defend him and continue to insist that British pollsters are underestimating Reform’s support, there will be others, more numerous, silently reading and thinking and wondering if Farage does have what it takes to be an effective prime minister.

Farage’s confident assertion that American pollsters had got it wrong is likely to persuade the silent host of sceptical watchers that British pollsters have got it right, and that the Conservatives really have pushed Reform into third place. They are likely to think that Farage doesn’t really know what he is talking about.

Not only has Farage backed a loser, he has shown that he lacks judgement. Support for Reform has been declining erratically for a whole year now – Farage’s foolishness over Trump is not going to turn things round.

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