Steve Bannon and the ‘Plan’ for a Neverending ‘Age Of Trump’
by Nicole Lafond, Hunter Walker, Allegra Kirkland, Khaya Himmelman and Emine Yücel
10.25.25 | 7:10 am
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Steve Bannon, the MAGA broadcaster and once-and-future adviser to President Donald Trump, just gave an interview to The Economist where he openly discussed a potential “plan” for a third term.
“Well, he’s going to get a third term. So, Trump ‘28,” Bannon said. “Trump is going to be president in ‘28 and people just ought to get accommodated with that.”
This isn’t the first time Bannon has mused about Trump serving for 12 years — or more. Other high-level Trump allies have also hinted at the possibility and, as we’ve already told you in this very newsletter, the official campaign store even has “TRUMP 2028” merch ready to go.
Many observers have dismissed all of this out of hand given that the 22nd Amendment seemingly serves as a hard line enforcing the two term limit. There are, however, actual legal experts who think there could be loopholes to this including a technique essentially pioneered by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, where the president joins a ticket as the vice president with the tacit understanding their running mate would move aside or serve as a mere figurehead. Another potential avenue experts have raised involves challenging whether the 22nd Amendment means solely two terms or actually only two consecutive terms.
Most experts argue these various end runs violate the clear intent of the constitutional amendment. However, if we’ve learned anything about Trump and the Supreme Court that he has increasingly made over, it’s that they are willing to push legal boundaries to serve his interests.
In this interview, Bannon didn’t say which route Trump’s allies are focused on, but he insisted that there is a “plan” in place.
“There’s many different alternatives. At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan and President Trump will be the president in ‘28,” Bannon said.
Bannon also cast the effort to erode one of the core traditional curbs on presidential power in positively Biblical terms.
“President Trump will be the president of the United States and the country needs him to be president of the United States,” he said. “We have to finish what we started and the way we finish it — through Trump … He’s a vehicle of divine providence. He’s an instrument. He’s very imperfect. He’s not churchy, not particularly religious. but he’s an instrument of divine will.”
Bannon also offered a distinctly dictatorial vision for the “endpoint” of what he termed the “Age of Trump.” He said it would include Trump allies taking “control” of both “the institutions” and the “political process” en route to establishing “an entrepreneurial capitalism paradise.”
“We have to seize the institutions, seize them and then purge them,” Bannon said. “It’s not the DOGE crap, this is serious people like Russ Vought and others that have spent years thinking this whole plan through.”
Despite all of this talk of defying term limits, taking total power, and enacting dramatic purges, Bannon insisted the whole thing somehow isn’t blatant authoritarianism.
“President Trump is nothing but a series of negotiations,” Bannon said, adding, “He’s having tradeoffs all the time.”
The refusal to fully call this what it is and the obvious questionably legal nature of all this might make it tempting to dismiss. However, Trump allies continue to send loud and clear signals that this is something they are considering. And, hasn’t the president broken so many other aspects of our traditional government? Why doubt he would try to destroy term limits when Trump has literally demolished the White House?
In the end, Bannon said one thing we can probably all agree on: Trump’s authoritarian ambitions are clear, the only question is whether the population will let him achieve them.
“The only way President Trump wins in 2028 and continues to stay in office is by the will of the American people,” Bannon said.
— Hunter Walker
Yesterday the Trump administration said it would not use any of the approximately $6 billion the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) holds in reserve to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The government shutdown means that states have run out of funds to distribute to the more than 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP to put food on the table.
Roll Call’s Olivia M. Bridges notes that this position contradicts the shutdown plan the USDA released in late September. Then, it said: “Congressional intent is evident that SNAP’s operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds that can be used for State Administrative Expenses to ensure that the State can also continue operations during a Federal Government shutdown. These multi-year contingency funds are also available to fund participant benefits in the event that a lapse occurs in the middle of the fiscal year.”
Yesterday’s USDA memo also says that any states that tap their own resources to provide food benefits will not be reimbursed.
Today, in yet another violation of the Hatch Act that prohibits the use of government resources for partisan ends, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service website reads: “Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.”
It appears the administration is using those Americans who depend on food assistance as pawns to put more pressure on Democrats to cave to Trump’s will. Today, Annie Karni of the New York Times reported that Trump has joked, “I’m the speaker and the president,” and Trump ally Steven Bannon calls Congress “the state Duma,” a reference to Russia’s rubber-stamp assembly.
With Republicans refusing to negotiate with Democrats in the normal way, with House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) keeping the House out of session, and with Trump leaving for Asia for a week, Republicans are clearly making the calculation that Democrats who refused to give up their demand for the extension of the premium tax credit to stop dramatic hikes in the cost of healthcare premiums will cave when America falls into a hunger crisis.
What are we doing here, folks?
The nation’s nutrition program was once the symbol of government brokering between different interests to benefit everyone. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933, one of the first crises he had to meet was the collapse of agricultural prices, which had been falling since the end of World War I and fell off a cliff after the stock market crash of October 1929. Farmers reacted to falling prices by increasing production, driving prices even lower.
In summer 1933, the government tried to raise prices by creating artificial scarcity. They paid farmers to plow their crops under and bought and slaughtered six million piglets, turning the carcasses into salt pork, lard, industrial grease, and fertilizer. The outcry over the slaughter of the pigs was immediate, and the escape of some intrepid animals into the streets of Omaha, Nebraska, and Chicago, Illinois, increased the protest at both the slaughter and the waste of food when Americans were going hungry.
So in fall 1933 the administration set up the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, designed to raise commodity prices by buying surplus production and distributing that surplus through local charities. In a story about the history of nutrition assistance programs, journalist Matthew Algeo noted that in January 1934, the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation bought 234,600 hogs. This time, their meat went to hungry Americans.
But that fall, when officials from the FSRC announced they were planning to open a “goods exchange” or “commissary” outside Nashville, Tennessee, to distribute food directly to those who needed it, grocers protested that the government was infringing on private business and directly competing with them.
The next year, the agency became the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation and began to distribute surplus food to schools to be used in school lunch programs. Needy students would not otherwise be able to afford food, so providing it for them did not compete with grocers. In 1937, Congress placed that agency within the Department of Agriculture.
To get food into the hands of Americans more generally, officials at the Department of Agriculture came up with the idea of “food stamps.” As Algeo explains, eligible recipients bought orange-colored stamps that could be redeemed for any food except alcohol, drugs, or food consumed on the premises. With the orange stamps, a buyer received blue stamps worth half the value of the orange stamps purchased. The blue stamps could be redeemed only for foods the government said were surplus: butter, flour, beans, and citrus fruits, for example.
Any grocery store could redeem the stamps, and grocers could then exchange all the stamps—orange and blue—for face value at any bank. The Treasury would pay back the banks.
It was a complicated system, but when the government launched it in May 1939 in Rochester, New York, it was a roaring success. By early December, Algeo notes, the government had sold more than a million dollars’ worth of orange stamps. That meant another half-million dollars’ worth of the blue stamps had been distributed, thus pumping a half a million dollars directly into the 1,200 grocery stores in Rochester, and from there into the local economy.
The program spread quickly. In the four years it existed, nearly 20 million Americans received benefits from it at a cost to the government of $262 million. With the economic boom caused by World War II, the government ended the program in 1943.
In 1959, Congress authorized the secretary of agriculture to restart a food stamp program, but it was not until 1961, after seeing the poverty in West Virginia during his campaign, that President John F. Kennedy announced a new program. Since then, the program has gone through several iterations, most notably when the Food Stamp Act of 1977 eliminated the requirement that beneficiaries purchase stamps, a requirement that had kept many of the nation’s neediest families from participating.
In 1990 the USDA began to replace stamps with Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards, and in 2008, Congress renamed the program the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In July 2025 the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut about $186 billion from SNAP programs, and then in September 2025 the USDA announced it would no longer produce reports on food insecurity in the U.S., calling them “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies” that “do nothing more than fear monger.”
While a great deal has changed in nutrition support programs in the past sixty years, what has not changed is the importance of food assistance programs to retailers, and thus to local economies. In 2020, Ed Bolen and Elizabeth Wolkomir of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that about 8% of the food U.S. families buy is funded by SNAP. In fiscal year 2019, that amounted to about $56 billion. Beneficiaries spent SNAP dollars at about 248,000 retailers. While about 80% of that money went to superstores or supermarkets—in 2025, Walmart alone captured about 25% of that money—the rest of it went to small businesses. Bolen and Wolkomir note that about 80% of stores that accept SNAP are small enterprises. SNAP benefits are an important part of revenue for those smaller businesses, especially in poorer areas, where they generate significant additional economic activity.
Not only will the loss of SNAP create more hunger in the richest country on earth, it will also rip a hole in local economies just as people’s health insurance premiums skyrocket.
And yet, at the same time the Department of Agriculture says it cannot spend its $6 billion in reserves to address the $8 billion needed for SNAP in November, the administration easily found $20 billion to prop up right-wing Trump ally Javier Milei in Argentina.
What are we doing here?
Economist Paul Krugman probably didn’t have the Erie Canal in mind today when he wrote about the rise of renewable energy, but he could have. The themes are similar.
In his newsletter, Krugman noted that renewables have grown explosively in the past decade, spurred by what he calls a virtuous circle of falling costs and increasing production. That circle is the result of subsidies that made renewable energy a going concern in the face of fossil fuels. Today, he points out, reports like that of Vice President Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy policy task force warning that renewable energy would play a trivial role in the nation’s energy future would be funny if the Trump administration weren’t echoing them.
In fact, as Krugman notes, solar and wind are unstoppable. They produced 15% of the world’s electricity in 2024 and account for 63% of the growth in electricity production since 2019. Green energy will continue to grow even if U.S. policy tries to wrench us back to burning coal, “with important geopolitical implications,” Krugman writes. “China is racing ahead.”
Krugman notes that it was originally Alexander Hamilton who called for government investment in new technologies to enable the economy of the infant United States of America to grow and compete with other nations. But Hamilton was not the only one thinking along those lines.
In the early years of the American republic, trade was carried on largely by water, which was much easier to navigate than the nation’s few rough roads. In 1783, even before the end of the Revolutionary War, George Washington was contemplating how to open “the vast inland navigation of these United States” to trade. In 1785, after the war had ended, Washington became the head of a company created to develop a canal along the Potomac River that would link the eastern seaboard with the Ohio Valley, bypassing the waterfalls and currents that made navigation treacherous. But under the Articles of Confederation then in place, the country’s states were sovereign, and there was no system for managing the waterways that traversed them.
In 1785, representatives from Maryland and Virginia agreed on a plan for navigation on the Potomac and other local waterways, as well as for commerce regulations and debt collection. Virginia delegates then invited representatives from all the states to another meeting on commercial issues to take place in Annapolis, Maryland, on September 11, 1786. That second meeting called for a constitutional convention to discuss possible improvements to the Articles of Confederation.
Delegates met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1787. They produced the United States Constitution.
With a new, stronger government in place, lawmakers and business leaders turned back to the idea of investing in infrastructure to facilitate economic development. Lawmakers in New York worried that settlers in the western part of the state would move their produce north to Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River into Canada, breaking the region off from the United States. The vast lands around the Great Lakes would naturally follow.
New York legislators asked Congress to appropriate money to build a canal across the state from the Hudson River to Lake Erie (avoiding Lake Ontario to keep traders away from Montreal). But while Congress did pass creating a fund to construct roads and canals across the nation, President James Madison vetoed it, despite his previous support for internal improvements. His opposition helped to spur support within New York for the state to fund the project on its own.
And so in 1817, after legislators under Governor De Witt Clinton funded the project, workers broke ground on what would become the Erie Canal.
To build the canal, untrained engineers figured out how to cut through forest, swamps, and wilderness to carve a 363-mile path through the heart of New York state. Workers dug a 40-foot-wide, 4-foot-deep canal and built 83 locks to move barges and vessels through a rise of 568 feet from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. The project became the nation’s first engineering school, and those trained in it went on to other development projects.
Detractors warned that in Clinton’s “big ditch would be buried the treasure of the State, to be watered by the tears of posterity.” But after it was completed in 1825, the project paid for itself within a few years. Before the canal, shipping a ton of goods from Buffalo to New York City cost more than 19 cents a mile; once a trader could send goods by the canal, the price dropped to less than 3 cents a mile. By 1860 the cost had dropped to less than a penny.
The canal speeded up human travel, too: what had been a two-week trip from Albany to Buffalo in a crowded stagecoach became a five-day boat journey in relative comfort. As trade and travel increased, new towns sprang up along the canal: Syracuse, Rochester, Lockport.
The Erie Canal cemented the ties of the Great Lakes region to the United States. As goods moved east toward New York City and the Atlantic Ocean, people moved west along the canal and then across the Great Lakes. They spread the customs of New England and New York into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, bringing explosive growth that would, by the 1850s, clash with southerners moving north.
But in fall 1825, that cataclysm was a generation away, and New Yorkers marked the completion of the canal with celebrations, cannon fire, and a ceremony with Governor Clinton pouring a keg of water from Lake Erie into the Atlantic.
The festivities began on October 26, 1825, exactly 200 years before economist Krugman wrote about the importance of government support for renewable energy, demonstrating that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Nigel Farage has always been a master of political innuendo. As a schoolboy in South London in the early 1980s, when neofascists and racists rioted across Britain, Mr. Farage’s favorite prank was to scrawl “NF” on the classroom chalkboards. The joke was that these were his initials and those of the National Front, the leading neofascist group at the time. The splendor of Mr. Farage’s school, Dulwich College, added to the transgression. Designed by the son of the architect that built the Palace of Westminster, the school — all haughty buildings and pristine grounds — surely seemed a world away from far-right thuggery. Yet Mr. Farage has always been curious about the potential for combustion, comic and otherwise, when those two worlds collide.
Today, the far right is once again on the march in Britain and Mr. Farage’s initials are once again all over the place. Now his playground is Westminster itself, where he finally won a seat last year. Since then, Mr. Farage has led his insurgent party, Reform U.K., to the top of opinion polls and become an inescapable influence. His face is everywhere: newspaper front pages, television bulletins and social media feeds. The ruling Labour Party, buttressed by an enormous parliamentary majority and yet anxious about its fragile popularity, cannot stop talking about him. Its leaders repeatedly explain why Mr. Farage should not be taken seriously — a fixation suggesting exactly the opposite. More and more, Mr. Farage is treated as leader of the opposition and even as prime minister in waiting.
Mr. Farage’s success is both a symptom and a cause of the newly febrile mood in Britain. The turmoil of the past decade, with its succession of six prime ministers, had already stripped the country of its reputation for stable and competent government. Lately, things have felt wilder and more menacing. Last summer, anti-immigration riots broke out across the country, recalling the heyday of the National Front, and there have since been recurrent demonstrations outside hotels where people seeking asylum are housed. In September, over 100,000 far-right protesters gathered in London for “a free speech festival” organized by Tommy Robinson, a far-right extremist who has served multiple prison sentences.
The simmering rage has many sources, old and new. Ever since the 2008 financial crisis upended Britain’s economy, a rotating cast of political leaders has pledged to raise wages and reduce immigration. And yet wages have remained static and immigration has continued to rise. The 2016 referendum to leave the European Union — in which Mr. Farage played a starring role — galvanized nationalists and then, when it failed to deliver its promise of a patriotic wonderland, stoked their frustrations. Labour’s assumption of power last year only inflamed nationalist paranoia. While Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s critics on the left see a meek leader wedded to the status quo, the mere sight of a Labour politician in Downing Street is enough to provoke panic on the far right.
Mr. Farage leads this angry mob, mostly by way of insinuation. He channels its apocalyptic undercurrents while maintaining a careful distance. He doesn’t attend protests or affiliate publicly with any of their organizers. He is quick to condemn acts of violence. But he does not hide his sympathy for the extreme anti-migrant sentiment that underwrites them. He has voiced concerns about “a growing Muslim vote in Britain” and “the safety of women and children.” And he repeatedly warns that, if he isn’t listened to, more violence is bound to come. “Remember, I am the moderate, reasonable, democratic, experienced, grown-up face of the fight back,” he said in July. “If I lose, just you wait.”
Mr. Farage’s growing appeal is about more than anger. Like his friend President Trump, whom he draws on for inspiration, Mr. Farage entertains his supporters. Through the pomp and ceremony of his rallies, the half-serious transgressions of his comic routines and a creative embrace of social media, Mr. Farage suggests that politics doesn’t have to be boring, that the public doesn’t have to swallow its frustration. With a conniving grin, and usually a pint of lager in his hand, Mr. Farage issues an invitation. Yes, the political establishment is rotten and the country is going to the dogs. But pull up a chair — and let’s plot some mischief.
Mr. Farage is a veteran of British politics, a fringe fixture for three decades. But until recently, the idea that he could ever be prime minister was, frankly, inconceivable. Before the 2024 election, Mr. Farage’s numerous failed attempts at winning a seat in Parliament — seven across 30 years — were a running joke. His place in the history books seemed fixed: a noisy outsider who wielded remarkable influence by pestering those in power. He might be a persistent thorn in the establishment’s side, but never a man on the inside.
Mr. Farage first entered politics in the early 1990s, after a hedonistic decade in the City of London as a trader. (“The booze culture was mega,” he later recalled.) He was a founding member of the U.K. Independence Party, a single-issue party committed to taking Britain out of the European Union. For the next 20 years, the party was dismissed as ridiculous and shambolic — most famously by David Cameron, the Conservative leader at the time, as “a bunch of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.” But Mr. Farage patiently built his movement, survived countless controversies — usually concerning racist, sexist or homophobic statements from fellow UKIP politicians — and, at last, won his main demand: an in/out referendum on E.U. membership.
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Mr. Farage’s new party, over which he holds total sway, has required no such patience. Started in 2018 to exploit political gridlock after the referendum, initially as the Brexit Party, it soon won the European elections, pressured the Conservatives into appointing a more Brexit-friendly prime minister and helped to secure Britain’s formal exit from the bloc in early 2020. Renamed Reform in 2021, it secured five seats and 14 percent of the vote in the 2024 election, comprehensively won local elections earlier this year and now leads the national opinion polls. Although forecasts come with the heavy caveat that an election is several years away, one recent poll suggested Reform could win 373 lawmakers at the next vote — a comfortable majority.
Given this newfound ascendancy, it’s interesting that — absent the anti-E.U. rhetoric — Mr. Farage’s pitch to voters is mostly the same as it ever was. Immigration, he intones, poses a grave threat to the country, and the two main parties, Labour and Conservative, are indistinguishably contemptible. The first message has always had wide purchase, amplified by Britain’s right-wing media. The second message now reaches an ever larger and more receptive audience. The two main parties have never been so unpopular. Support for the Conservatives has collapsed and Labour’s dour and directionless year in power, defined by a centrism of the blandest variety, has led Mr. Starmer’s approval ratings to reach record lows in record time.
If Mr. Farage’s message has remained consistent, the manner in which he delivers it has transformed. Here, Mr. Trump’s influence is unmissable. Mr. Farage is more of a showman than he once was. Where he used to take the stage with little ceremony, now he tours the country with elaborately choreographed rallies, featuring booming music and pyrotechnics. “Unlike everybody else, I like to plunge in the crowds,” he has said. He has taken to referring to his opponents by nicknames: Mr. Starmer is “Two-tier Keir,” referencing a far-right conspiracy theory that the prime minister disproportionately criminalizes nationalist protesters; Robert Jenrick, a senior Conservative politician widely tipped to be its next leader, is “Robert Generic,” comically deflating his efforts to mold himself into a Faragist.
On X and TikTok, where he has 2.2 million and 1.3 million followers each, Mr. Farage cultivates a closer relationship with his supporters, sharing quick-fire responses to news events and occasionally embracing the more feral aspects of social media. He recently shared an A.I.-generated video of himself rapping in a white fur coat. “You thought it was Farage — nah mate, Nigel Garage,” his avatar sings. “Prime minister of the pub, of the pint, of the people. Bo selecta.” Union Jacks beam from his eyes. Mr. Farage also invites his supporters to join “Reform FC,” one of the party’s most prominent initiatives: a fictional soccer team that sells Reform-colored jerseys with Mr. Farage’s name on the back, emulating a MAGAesque fandom. “What a season we’re having,” he says in one recent video.
Much of Reform’s policy agenda has a distinctly Trumpian hue. Although Mr. Farage is well-versed in stirring up fears about immigration and crime, the calls for “large-scale raids” and “mass deportations” — along with the suggestions that “our worst violent criminals” could be sent to places like El Salvador — are obvious imports. Reform’s unembarrassed appropriation of “DOGE” makes explicit its debt to America’s new brand of conservatism. Reform has also discussed restricting access to abortion, which is barely a political issue in Britain, and positioned itself as the party of cryptocurrency deregulation, with Mr. Farage announcing his intentions to make London a “crypto powerhouse.” He even promotes a meme coin that carries his name.
Reform’s interest in cryptocurrencies reflects another of its most notable traits: its deep ties to the financial sector. Richard Tice, its deputy leader, is a former property investor; Zia Yusuf, its head of policy and former head of DOGE, previously worked at Goldman Sachs; and Arron Banks, a longtime ally of Mr. Farage, made his fortune in insurance and wants a “big beautiful Reform bill.” Though they join in the immigrant-bashing, they probably find Mr. Farage’s economic promises more exciting. Despite occasional feints left, his instincts are libertarian and bear a striking resemblance to those of the Conservatives’ shortest-lived prime minister, Liz Truss. Her program of tax cuts and financial deregulation — which Mr. Farage lauded at the time — was so disastrous that she was forced to resign almost immediately.
Yet Mr. Farage’s economic proposals receive scant attention amid his repeated prophecies of civil war. While reassuring his friends in finance that even bigger bonuses are to come, he foments a dangerous sense of persecution among his base of supporters. He insists that anti-immigration protesters are singled out for punishment by the state because of their patriotism, when by far the highest number of political arrests in the past year have applied to those demonstrating in support of Palestine. He declares that the political establishment — “the uniparty,” as he calls it — showers people seeking asylum with luxury at the expense of struggling British citizens, whom it disdains. He warns, again and again, of a “growing anger” out on the streets, while apparently doing everything he can to grow it.
In December 2003, several senior E.U. officials received letter bombs from anonymous protesters, narrowly avoiding injury. The next month, Mr. Farage issued a controversial statement essentially saying that the bloc had it coming. “We have spent 10 years warning that the route the European Union has chosen for itself, to swallow up nation states without giving the people of Europe the final say, was destined to end in civil unrest and violence,” he said. “It would appear that that prediction is now coming true.”
Twenty years on, the people of Britain have had their say. Britain is outside the European Union. But Mr. Farage is still warning that unless he is listened to, more violence is coming. “Without action, without somehow the contract between the government and the people being renewed, without some trust coming back, then I fear deeply that that anger will grow,” he declared in August. “In fact, I think there is now, as a result of this, a genuine threat to public order.”
Mr. Farage’s concerns are hard to take seriously when he finds so many ways to profit from them. Besides leading his insurgent party, he boasts an impressive array of side hustles. He is a news anchor for GB News, an increasingly influential television channel inspired by Fox News that has accelerated the Americanization of British conservatism. He is the face of Direct Bullion, a precious metal dealer, which he suggests investing in because “if you get a big capital gain, you don’t have to pay any tax on it.” He will say almost anything on Cameo, the short-video app, for $95. And he also has a line of spirits, Farage Gin, although it seems that this venture is winding down after little consumer interest.
His unseriousness is a strength rather than a weakness, allowing him to draw from the darkest reaches of British politics without being overshadowed by them. A recent interview was illustrative. In September, a journalist asked Mr. Farage whether he thought it was true that Haitian immigrants in America were “eating cats and dogs.” The Reform leader replied with a hypothetical. “If I said to you that swans were being eaten in royal parks in this country,” Mr. Farage said, “by people who come from cultures that have a different …,” he trailed off. The journalist asked if he was referring to tabloid stories about “Eastern Europeans” doing exactly that. “So I believe,” Mr. Farage said, before bursting out laughing and throwing his hands in the air. “But, you know, I’m not saying that, I’m just putting it back as an argument!”
This peekaboo prejudice — now you see it, now you don’t — is reminiscent of another master of political mischief and innuendo, Boris Johnson. Mr. Johnson and Mr. Farage share several qualities: blokey personas that elide their elite backgrounds, senses of humor that evade accountability, a narcissistic pleasure in transgression and destruction. But they belong to different parts of the political spectrum. While Mr. Johnson’s buffoonish populism allowed him to lean further right than his colleagues, he remained a Conservative. Mr. Farage, starting from the radical right, leans toward something altogether more dangerous and extreme.
The popularity of his program should not be overstated. His ascendancy is premised, above all, on the collapse of faith in both major parties and the concealment of his economic agenda by his anti-immigration policies. But Mr. Farage’s quest for power is clearly gaining velocity. It took his first party, UKIP, 20 years to upend one pillar of British politics: its membership in the European Union. His second party, Reform, has upended two more in a quarter of the time: the two-party system, which has held pretty much for 100 years, and the dominance of the Conservative Party, which has been one of the two main parties for the entire history of Britain’s democracy. It is now possible to imagine Mr. Farage as part of a frightening far-right sweep across Europe, claiming France and Germany, in the near future.
What will emerge from the wreckage? Mr. Trump’s presidency may offer some clues as to what an “NF” premiership could stand for: mass deportations, attacks on democratic institutions, reckless tax cuts and privatizations, total disregard for environmental policies, emboldened racism and nativism, a political atmosphere that seethes with recriminations and resentment. But perhaps the most terrifying aspect of Mr. Farage in power is peculiar to Britain. Unlike Mr. Trump, he would have no formal constitution — no rigorous system of checks and balances — to stand in his way. He does not even have a political party to constrain him. Unlike a Labour or Conservative leader, Mr. Farage is his party.
By razing Britain to its bare foundations — dynamiting its main parties, its ties to Europe, its public infrastructure, its financial regulations — Mr. Farage may hope to have the last laugh. Perhaps, underneath the rubble, he will even find what he’s looking for. Or maybe destruction is the point. Because for all his apocalyptic warnings, Mr. Farage has never looked happier.
