Nigel Farage loves Donald Trump. The 60-year-old’s day job is as the parliamentary representative for the English seaside town of Clacton, and as the leader of Reform, the latest of his populist right-wing parties. But Farage is often focused on America, and his heavily advertised friendship with the 47th president. He was in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration (and chafing that he didn’t get a prime spot in the Capitol Rotunda). He was also onstage last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, joking to his American audience that “you gave us ‘woke,’ and we gave you Prince Harry.”

As the leader of a party with fewer than half a dozen members of Parliament, Farage knows that his American profile gives him a grandeur he would not otherwise possess. In December, he posed with Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago under a portrait of a young Trump in cricket whites. Days after Trump survived an assassination attempt in July, Farage flew to the United States on a mission funded by a wealthy Reform donor. On his parliamentary financial-disclosure form, Farage recorded the purpose of his trip as being “to support a friend who was almost killed and to represent Clacton on the world stage.” Lucky Clacton.

But now Farage’s embrace of Trump has become a liability. The 47th president is broadly unpopular in Britain, where Farage hopes to improve the 14.3 percent vote share he received in last year’s election. (He likely needs to at least double that proportion if he wants to be prime minister one day.) Even worse for him, Trump’s MAGA movement is seen as overtly racist and pro-Russia, two huge turnoffs for the majority of British voters. Even Britain’s right-wing newspapers were outraged by Trump’s shabby treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, while Reform’s existing voters are already outliers in their sharply anti-immigration views. Heading further to the right is not a winning strategy in Britain.

Or elsewhere, really. “The populist right around the world has a MAGA problem,” Sunder Katwala, the director of the think tank British Future, told me. “There is a backfire effect in countries that aren’t America.”

[Anne Applebaum: The rise of the brutal American]

Key figures in Trumpworld, such as Musk and Steve Bannon, continually urge European populists to take more extreme positions on race, immigration, and cultural issues. Hard-liners usually point to the success of the German far-right party AfD (known in English as Alternative for Germany), which placed second in the country’s recent elections, its best showing ever. Musk had enthusiastically endorsed the AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel, and he celebrated the result with a personal phone call to her.

In truth, the AfD did not achieve the electoral breakthrough its leaders hoped for. Although conditions were perfect for a populist surge—Germany’s economy is stagnant, and a car attack by an Afghan refugee 10 days before the vote helped keep immigration at the forefront of the national conversation—the AfD struggled to gain a foothold outside the former East Germany. Other parties still refuse to include it in coalition talks. By dabbling in German politics, Trumpworld’s second-most-powerful figure hurt his own business interests while being at best irrelevant to the AfD’s performance. The party “got nothing out of Musk’s backing,” Katwala told me. “It transformed Tesla’s reputation in Germany, but did nothing for the AfD.”

Ultimately, Trump’s fundamental positions have limited appeal to most European electorates. His abandonment of Ukraine is so unpopular in Europe that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen—two natural MAGA sympathizers—have carefully distanced themselves from it.

As MAGA becomes ever more extreme, allies such as Farage must decide how far to go along with it—in the knowledge that, if they do not oblige, their domestic rivals will. The Reform leader has just fallen out with one of his five MPs, in a drama precipitated by (who else?) Musk, which played out on (where else?) X. Back in January, Trump’s “first buddy” declared his support for the agitator Tommy Robinson, whom Musk credited with publicizing the so-called grooming gangs of men, mostly British citizens of Pakistani descent, who raped and trafficked girls in towns across England. But Farage recognizes Robinson for what he is: a rabble-rouser with numerous criminal convictions. When the Reform leader repeated his long-standing refusal to admit Robinson to his party, Musk declared that Farage “doesn’t have what it takes.”

[Read: Elon has appointed himself king of the world]

Musk’s preferred alternative to lead Reform was Rupert Lowe, a 67-year-old who used to be chairman of a soccer club. Lowe’s day job is representing another English seaside town, Great Yarmouth, in Parliament. But his passion is posting on X. His disclosure forms show that he now makes about $4,000 a month from pumping out spicy takes on Musk’s social network, and all the attention appears to have gone to Lowe’s head. He recently told the Daily Mail that Farage saw himself as a “Messiah” and that Reform risked being a “protest party” unless its leader surrounded himself with good people. By enormous coincidence, soon after the interview was published, Lowe was suspended from Reform for alleged HR violations.

Cast out from Farage’s party, Lowe has since become even more extreme—a known side effect of spending too much time on social media. He wants the families of grooming-gang offenders deported from Britain, not just men convicted of crimes—and perhaps even “entire communities” of British Pakistanis, who he says have ignored the problem. (The white police officers and social workers who might face the same accusation do not appear to bother him.) Lowe claims that his party leader tried to stop him from expressing these views, an assertion that I instinctively believe; Farage, sometimes known as the father of Brexit, has succeeded in disrupting British politics because he knows when a dog whistle is preferable to a whistle. He has repeatedly forced out people from his various parties when their inflammatory rhetoric tipped into overt extremism. In 2018, he left the U.K. Independence Party after it appointed Robinson as an adviser.

Farage has a winning formula, Katwala believes: be guided by the British press. “If the Mail and The Telegraph think the candidate has a racism problem, ditch them,” he said, referring to two right-leaning papers. “If it’s just The Guardian”—which leans left—“you’re fine.” In the U.S., however, any such boundaries have collapsed. The breadth of permitted opinion, Katwala said, “goes all the way out to the Proud Boys”—the far-right group whose leader was jailed for his part in the Capitol insurrection, and then pardoned by Trump.

Voters outside the United States have one more objection to the MAGA movement: Trump and his allies talk about other countries in a profoundly alienating way. “America First”? Fine, but not “America Thinks Your Tin-Pot Country Is a Joke.” The toxic combination of Trump’s pro-Russia leanings, Vice President J. D. Vance’s arrogance and condescension, and Musk’s sad case of advanced poster’s disease have tanked America’s reputation among its traditional allies.

The exultant right-wing influencers who cheer on MAGA’s sassy clapback anti-diplomacy should remember that insulting another country’s politicians is like insulting someone else’s family. I can be rude about my sister, but you can’t. The Trump administration has revived almost every negative stereotype that Europeans have about Americans: too loud, too brash, too big. Vance, who lectures U.S. allies about how to run their affairs, reminds us of every rich guy from suburban Pittsburgh who visits the Amalfi Coast in the summer, drives up the pedestrianized streets, and then complains that the pasta is too chewy and there’s no AC in his 15th-century villa.

As a result, even formerly bloodless technocrats have found new vigor when being picked on by the Trump administration. So far, the net effect of MAGA foreign policy has been to get exactly zero concessions from Moscow, while simultaneously reviving the fortunes of Canada’s Liberal Party and helping the mainstream center-right win in Greenland. The new prime minister of Canada, the former central banker Mark Carney, was able to appeal to voters’ patriotism when rebutting Trump’s demand to annex his country, and his punitive tariffs. “Americans should make no mistake—in trade, as in hockey, Canada will win,” Carney said, after taking over the Liberal leadership from Justin Trudeau. The Liberals have been able to stop their opponent Pierre Poilievre’s momentum by painting him as a MAGA lackey. “A person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him,” Carney said.  

Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democrats, has been similarly energized. During a televised debate ahead of the recent German elections, he attacked the AfD for drawing support from the MAGA movement, painting his rivals as unpatriotic. “The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow,” he added.

Ben Ansell, a University of Oxford politics professor, believes that MAGA’s sympathy for Moscow has given Europe’s mainstream politicians a potent attack line. “We may finally be witnessing the moment of hubris for the past decade’s unstoppable rise of populism,” he wrote in a recent Substack post. When mainstream politicians attack conservative populists, the latter can easily shrug off any criticism as the revenge of elites. “Populists who actually side with an existing foreign enemy, though? Well, that clarifies matters. Now every decision the populist takes can be tied to the foreign enemy.” In recent weeks, Farage’s approval ratings have noticeably fallen.

[Read: How not to hand populists a weapon]

“If you’re being directly attacked by Trump and you have your own elections, it’s hard to imagine being very successful in those elections by saying: Yes, please,” Ansell told me. Farage is plainly struggling to balance his desire to be close to MAGA with his domestic ambitions.

Populist parties define themselves as being against the status quo and the mainstream, but many of their members (and voters) hold eclectic and divergent views on economics and other issues. “These parties are more fragile than people have thought, and now you have this little lever that mainstream parties can use to split them apart—their closeness to much hated figures,” Ansell told me. European voters have long been wary of Moscow’s intentions. What’s new is a sense that the people now running the United States have lined up with Russia—and against Europe. “Vladimir Putin has been around for a quarter of a century,” Ansell said. “It’s Musk and Trump.”

Populists outside America might love the reflected glow of MAGA’s power and success, but being linked to the Trump administration means tethering themselves, in the eyes of their home audiences, to an unpopular president, his unpopular celebrity adviser, his unpopular stance on Ukraine, and his unpopular bullying tactics. That is populists’ MAGA problem—and the mainstream’s opportunity to fight back.

Updated at 1:55 p.m. ET on January 16, 2025

Imagine that a foreign-born billionaire buys Facebook, asks its engineers to boost his own posts, and then introduces a payment system that rewards users for pandering to his whims and prejudices.

Also imagine that the billionaire happens across a news report on the death toll in Iraq following the allied invasion back in 2003, and links that carnage to the intelligence failures that were used to justify the war. Bristling with righteous outrage, our fictional billionaire then suggests that the state and the media have covered up this whole incendiary topic.

This was how Elon Musk sounded to many Britons after he belatedly discovered the organized child-sexual-abuse networks known as “grooming gangs.” Here was a real scandal: Networks of adult men, primarily British citizens of Pakistani descent, had trafficked and raped young girls in towns across England, over many years, aided by failures of local governments and the police. But the scandal wasn’t new, nor had reporters ignored it en masse. “You don’t hate the legacy media enough,” Musk insisted at one point during his multiday spree of posts on X, his social-media platform. Never mind that a legacy media outlet—Rupert Murdoch’s London Times—first broke the story of the child-sex-abuse ring in Rotherham, 14 years ago.

[Ali Breland: Elon Musk has appointed himself king of the world]

Musk’s horrified reaction to the scandal, which appears to have been prompted by a viral post on New Year’s Eve, is entirely justified. However, it comes quite late, and demonstrates his usual self-centeredness: His thinking seems to be that if he didn’t hear about the scandal during the 2010s, then surely no one else did, either. His ownership of X, and his alliance with Donald Trump, gives him the power to force any issue he likes into the political conversation. Lately he has used that power to intervene in European politics, berating British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, boosting the German far-right Alternative für Deutschland, and attacking the European Union for its efforts to regulate his businesses. Starmer’s opponents on the right, including the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, have been quick to echo Musk’s interest in the grooming gangs—even though Badenoch’s party was in power as the story originally unfolded.

The Times reporting kicked off dozens of prosecutions, multiple public inquiries, and even a primetime British Broadcasting Corporation drama. The story was well known enough that one of the police whistleblowers appeared on a celebrity reality-television show in 2018. The news even reached America: In 2014, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed that “what happened in Rotherham was rooted both in left-wing multiculturalism and in much more old-fashioned prejudices about race and sex and class.” The ethnicity of the perpetrators mattered, he argued, but so did the status of the victims—working-class girls whom the police saw as “‘tarts’ who deserved roughly what they got.”

Musk’s newfound revulsion at the details of the abuse is entirely justified—read the sentencing reports if you have the stomach for it. “Girls were raped callously, viciously, and violently,” the judge told nine men convicted of grooming offenses in the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale in 2012, adding, “Some of you acted as you did to satiate your lust, some to make money out of them. All of you treated them as though they were worthless and beyond all respect.”

The sexual abuse of children occurs in all human societies, but the forms it takes are culturally dependent. Like school shootings in the United States, grooming gangs are a particular type of crime that emerged from the laws and social conditions of a specific time and place. The gangs are not representative of the whole picture of what researchers call “group-based child sexual exploitation”—a phenomenon that in Britain appears to be dominated by men who are white, as you would expect from the makeup of the population. (England and Wales are more than 80 percent white, census data show; “Asian ethnic groups” are about 9 percent of the population.) Most grooming-gang defendants in the cases that have attracted media attention, however, were men of Pakistani descent. Many were connected to the nighttime economy, such as by running minicab firms and delivering takeout. They primarily targeted vulnerable girls—runaways or those who lived in foster homes. We know all this because of extensive reporting, testimony by victims and whistleblowers, and the bravery of politicians such as Ann Cryer and Sarah Champion, two Labour Party members of Parliament who were shunned by their own side for speaking out.

[Ali Breland: Elon Musk’s X endgame]

It is entirely reasonable to ask why they were shunned. In the 2000s and early 2010s, the racial dynamics of the grooming gangs made English towns extremely reluctant to face what was happening. Local South Asian communities were afraid to report the perpetrators in their midst. Police did not record complaints or investigate the issue actively; by some accounts, race riots in Oldham in 2001 made police emphasize “community cohesion” over what should have been their primary concern—dismantling organized-rape gangs regardless of the demographics of the perpetrators. White members of municipal councils fell into a pattern of assuming that problems among British Pakistanis were best left to their fellow councilors from that community. “Rotherham isn’t a very PC place, I think that is why the council overcompensated too much,” one local officer told an investigator in 2015. “It doesn’t want to be accused of being racist.”

Living through this story, experiencing the slow accretion of details and convictions and inquiries in real time, clearly felt very different from learning about it all at once. One of the main complaints to have surfaced since Musk reheated this story is that much of the original coverage was piecemeal and overly restrained: Had gangs of white men been trafficking immigrant women, it might have prompted a reckoning comparable to America’s protests over the 2020 murder of George Floyd. What qualifies as a “reckoning” is arguable—but I agree that the left would have raised hell about such a story, as the right has done with this one.

In response, some commentators, on both the left and right, have called for a “national conversation” about the gangs. What that conversation would sound like, however, is the tricky part. Would it include calls for the mass deportation of migrants, as many on Europe’s emergent right want? Is the answer militant secularization of Britain? Or a renewed insistence that the United Kingdom is a Christian country? Should Britain enact a “Muslim ban” or reject asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries? When liberals are still queasy about engaging with this topic, it’s because they sense that these shadow arguments lie just out of sight.

Although Musk is powerful enough to draw new attention to the Rotherham scandal, polling suggests that most Britons see his interventions as opportunistic. The X owner has a deep animus toward Starmer, the Labour prime minister, whom Musk sees as an enemy of free speech in general and of his platform in particular. Many of Musk’s posts called for implausible scenarios such as the King dissolving Parliament or the country holding fresh elections, adding to the sense that Musk had not deeply researched the topic before picking up his phone to post.

Nonetheless, the Conservative opposition, led by Badenoch, pandered to him, demanding a fresh national inquiry to “join the dots.” That reverses the Tory position of a year ago—back when the party was in power and had the ability to commission whatever inquiries it deemed necessary. (In 2019, the future Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that investigating historic sex abuses was money “spaffed up a wall.”)

Badenoch’s decision to echo the Musk line also minimized the work that the Conservatives did do in government to tackle rape gangs. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak created a “grooming gangs task force” that has helped police make more than 550 arrests. The Tories also accepted that some sentences given to gang members had been too lenient, and proposed to create a new aggravating factor in sex offenses involving grooming. That will likely be included in the Crime and Policing Bill this spring, alongside a mandatory-reporting measure requiring social workers and others to notify police when they suspect children are being abused. Despite all that progress, Badenoch understands that calling for a new investigation is one of the few ways for an opposition leader to attract attention. (Today, Labour caved and promised a “rapid audit” and more funding for local inquiries.) Just as the activist left sometimes refuses to believe that civil-rights victories have been achieved—remaining instead in a state of politically lucrative perma-war—so the right will not claim victory in having already forced Britain to take these gangs seriously. Conservatives want the fight, not the win.

[Read: He’s no Elon Musk]

Intriguingly, Britain’s other right-wing party, Reform, has been less harmoniously in tune with Musk in the past couple of weeks than the Tories have. Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, has joined Badenoch in calling for a new nationwide inquiry into the gangs. But he has refused to fulfill a peculiar demand from Musk: to normalize the pseudonymous agitator Tommy Robinson, whom the far right credits for making the grooming scandal public. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is not a folk hero. A founder of the xenophobic English Defence League, he risked collapsing one of the grooming trials by filming the defendants outside it. He is also a convicted mortgage fraudster and is currently in jail for contempt of court in a different case.

Robinson badly needs mainstream support to shake off his thuggish reputation, and Musk has taken up his cause. “Free Tommy Robinson!” Musk declared on X. He also faulted Farage—who has sought to keep racist “bad apples” out of Reform—for distancing himself from Robinson. Farage “doesn’t have what it takes,” Musk complained. Once again, the billionaire seemed out of touch with the British political scene: Farage, a key champion of Brexit, is the most successful leader that the British populist right has ever had. Reform won more than 4 million votes in last year’s election and looks set to make big gains in local contests in May.

To many Britons’ relief, Musk seems to be moving on to other subjects, including the California wildfires. His intervention has presented liberals with a difficult terrain to navigate. Yes, his interest was opportunistic. Yes, he spread conspiracy theories as well as the true scandalous details. But at least part of his instinctive reaction was correct: This was and is a scandal that shames Britain, as the Times asserted in 2012. It just isn’t a hidden one, thanks to the many victims and whistleblowers who have brought it into the open , beginning more than a decade ago. They deserve the tribute of having their bravery acknowledged.

Like any good entrepreneur who found early success in one market, Elon Musk is now starting to expand to others. Yesterday, Musk—the entrepreneur turned Donald Trump megadonor—hosted a livestream on X with Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.

“Only the AfD can save Germany, end of story,” Musk said during the 70-minute conversation, endorsing the party ahead of the country’s elections next month. This is not the first time Musk has publicly thrown his support behind the AfD. At the end of last month, he wrote an op-ed in a German newspaper endorsing the aggressively nativist party, whose members and staff have well-documented ties to neo-Nazis and other extremist groups. (The party, for its part, has expelled some politicians and staff over suspected links to such groups, though others still remain).

Musk has spent recent days hyper-focused on replicating the influence campaign he has waged on U.S. politics. In addition to backing the AfD, he has injected himself into British politics, accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, of enabling child sex abuse by failing to address grooming gangs as a previous head of England and Wales’s Crown Prosecution Services, and calling for his ouster. (Starmer has defended his record, noting that he reopened the cases and was the first to prosecute the perpetrators.) Musk posted a poll on Monday asking X users whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” Musk has also started posting in support of Tommy Robinson, an Islamaphobic far-right political activist in the U.K. who is currently in prison for repeatedly breaching court orders related to a libel case he lost; Robinson falsely claimed in Facebook videos that a Syrian refugee had “violently attack[ed] young English girls in his school.”

After Nigel Farage, who leads the U.K.’s far-right Reform Party, said that he disagreed with Musk about Robinson, Musk posted: “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.” As Musk has waged this pressure campaign, he has incessantly posted in support of the far right in Europe and their current causes célèbres. On Wednesday, he suggested that there were “Sharia Law courts” in the United Kingdom, that “UK politicians are selling your daughters for votes,” and that “Irish citizens get longer sentences than illegal immigrants. That’s messed up.”

Despite Musk’s ability to become a major political figure in the United States, it’s not clear whether his pressure campaign in Europe will work. Musk’s efforts to influence European politics are hampered by campaign regulations that curb the role of money in politics. In addition to his online campaign during the U.S. presidential election, he donated more than $250 million to help Trump, in part funding ads that ran in swing states. But in Germany, radio and TV ads can air only within a month of the election. In the U.K., national campaign spending in the 365 days prior to an election is capped at about $40 million per party. The perspective of an avaricious billionaire may not mean the same thing in Europe that it does in the U.S.: A YouGov poll in November showed that just 18 percent of people in the U.K. view Musk favorably, down from 23 percent in 2022, after he initiated his purchase of Twitter. In the U.S., by contrast, more than a third of Americans have a favorable view of Musk.

Some European leaders, perhaps sensing that their constituents share a dim view of Musk, have pushed back. Starmer has accused him of spreading “lies and misformation.” Even officials in European countries who haven’t been targeted are speaking out. French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently welcomed Musk to the reopening of Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral, accused him of “supporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections.”

But even if Musk falls short of his goals of propelling AfD to power in Germany and ousting Starmer as prime minister, he’ll likely still have made some gains for the European far right. A YouGov poll from earlier this month showed the AfD polling at 21 percent, behind only the mainstream center-right party. The party has gained two points since the beginning of last month, suggesting that Musk’s campaign is at least not stifling the party. Even though the AfD is a formal party with considerable support, it’s still considered taboo in much of Germany. Every other party has agreed not to work with the AfD, effectively ostracizing it. Musk’s endorsement of the AfD “is a problem,” Miro Dittrich, a co-CEO of CeMAS, a Berlin-based nonprofit that tracks the far right, told me. “It’s seen as legitimizing them.” During the conversation with Weidel, Musk tried to sanitize and downplay the Afd’s far-right tendencies and neo-Nazi ties by accusing the media of misportraying the party, and giving Weidel space to do the same: Adolf Hiter “wasn’t a conservative; he wasn’t a libertarian,” she told Musk. “He was a communist, socialist guy, so full stop, no more comment on that, and we are exactly the opposite.” (Hitler, of course, was an anti-communist, anti-Semitic dictator.)

Musk doesn’t need to make endorsements or post aggressively to exert his influence over Europe. Even before he attached himself to the Trump campaign, Musk gained significant leverage over governments through Starlink, his satellite-internet service. In 2022, Musk reportedly made the decision to not provide Starlink service to Ukraine while it was launching an attack on Russian forces in Crimea, after speaking with the Russian ambassador to the United States. In September, he used the company to partially circumvent a temporary ban on X in Brazil, by refusing to block the website for Starlink customers in the country.

Unless something truly intractable stands between Musk and a goal, he will relentlessly go for it, no matter how trivial or ill-advised it may be, often no matter the cost to those around him. That pattern is probably how Musk’s political ambitions will play out. Unless he gets bored, governments across the world will be forced to at least listen to his whims—especially as European leaders contend with the possibility of retaliation from the president of the United States. Perhaps a fallout between Trump and Musk is coming. Trump has reportedly started complaining about how much Musk is hanging out in Mar-a-Lago, where he pays $2,000 a night to stay at a villa to regularly dine with Trump. Still, even without the president-elect, he has the wealth and connections to exert his will on politics worldwide. Musk is here for as long as he wants to be.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has voiced support for jailed far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

Musk posted on X calling for jailed right-wing UK activist Robinson to be released.

Elon Musk has called for the release of jailed UK far-right activist and anti-Islam campaigner ‘Tommy Robinson’.

US technology billionaire says Tommy Robinson, who is serving in 18-month prison sentence, 'should be freed'.