Knight in The New Yorker. The former U.K.
Independence Party leader and Brexit campaigner
went into 2016 as a political outsider,
routinely mocked. Then Britain voted to leave
the EU. Farage was promptly invited to join
Donald Trump on his campaign trail, as an
example of someone who’d overturned the status
quo. And when Trump won the U.S. election, Farage became
the first foreign politician to visit the president-elect—the two of
them pictured grinning like schoolboys in front of Trump’s goldembossed
front door. “We were both roaring with laughter,” says
Farage. “We were two people who had been through quite an
ordeal. But suddenly, you know, we’d won.” Their friendship, he
says, was forged in the furnace of liberal hatred. “Trump and I
have probably been the most reviled people by the liberal media
in the world.” Farage was tickled by Trump’s tweet suggesting
that he should become Britain’s ambassador to the U.S.—not least
because it was a total breach of diplomatic protocol. “My entire
political career, I have been told all the way through, ‘No, no,
no. That is not how you do it. You’re breaking all the rules.’ It
is pretty clear from that tweet that is how Trump is going to do
things. There are no norms. They’ve gone. I love it.”