MAGA isn’t splitting. It’s turning on Britain.

How to really understand the Trump/Starmer rift.

Often in journalism - especially when you’re “on a send” - you arrive intending to tell one story, only to find it isn’t there. The trick is to recognise when a different- a better- story presents itself. I went to Dallas to report on MAGA. I came back thinking about Britain.

I went to CPAC, the most important event in the American conservative calendar, expecting to report on a movement split by Iran. I didn’t find that. Year after year, liberals excitedly imagine the Holy Grail: the schism of the MAGA movement. Iran is but the latest chimera. Each time, MAGA zig-zags on. Neither Trump’s foot soldiers nor the GOP’s political elites are exactly happy. There is genuine unease. But that unease, at CPAC, is more often than not voiced by delegates draped in the flag of the Shah. Trump’s hold remains absolute: the political pied piper plays and he is followed. He will always be followed.

Luckily, there was a different story to tell. This wasn’t a rupture from within MAGA but a rupture MAGA wants to make.

One of the distinctive things about the politics of the Trump restoration has been the development of a shared online radical-right ecosystem. Consequently, for the first time in generations, there is a significant cohort of American politics made up of people as interested in us as we are in them. When I visited Mar-a-Lago for a political event just before the November 2024 election, I was stunned at the near encyclopaedic knowledge of minor British political happenings sported by the old dears of Palm Beach. The cause célèbre that week was a half-baked story about Labour Party staffers crossing the Atlantic to volunteer for the Harris campaign. As I was interviewing an octogenarian Floridian lady (ruby lips, formaldehyde helmet hair a single stray spark from inferno) she leant in and hissed: “it doesn’t bode well does it?”

She was right. Things have worsened considerably since then. The UK/US relationship was once an article of faith on the American right. Now they are looking at us through a mirror darkly: and they do not like what they think they see. Britain has become not just an object of interest, or even pity, but of fear. A morality tale. And like most of our oldest morality tales, the source material is based on myths.

At CPAC, I was told by ordinary attendees, by speakers, by political figures, by a man carrying a poster about Muslims and dogs, that Britain is gone. Fallen. Lost. That we have been taken over. That Sharia law governs our streets. That we have surrendered our civilisation through cowardice and a catastrophic failure of will. That Britons are rounded up and imprisoned by an illegitimate government for offering an opinion. That we have a prime minister held in place by Islamists, a fifth column buttressed every day by a country which has all but abolished its own borders. This is all offered in a tone that is sorrowful, bewildered, but galvanised by an iron imperative: That the same must not happen in America.

This didn’t begin at CPAC but has built slowly. Trump has said we have Sharia courts. JD Vance has said Britain will be the first Islamist country to acquire a nuclear weapon. Elon Musk has spent months amplifying stories about Britain as a place where paedophiles walk free and citizens are jailed for harmless Facebook posts and labelling British ministers “rape genocide apologists.” The Trump administration has warned that Britain and other European countries may no longer be allies by the middle of the century as a result of massive population change. These are not the observations of people who are indifferent to us. This is a fixation. An obsession. We are living, absolutely and entirely, rent free in the head of the American radical right.

The person who crystallised this for me, improbably, was Liz Truss.

She was at CPAC for the third consecutive year. This former liberal spreads florid nonsense about the deep state, creeping Islamism, the need for a “Trump-style revolution” in Britain. As a taste of the waters she now swims in, she was speaking at an event called “Europestan: can the continent be saved?” A Prime Minister with a shorter lifespan than your average bunion, now shamelessly, on the MAGA grift.

I tried to speak to her afterwards. The famous ideological warrior stopped in her tracks, amid a sharp intake of breath exclaimed “absolutely not!” and scurried away to the VIP section, her tax-payer funded security bundling me and cameraman Shane out of the way. But Truss is not really the point. She is, rather, a symptom of something more malignant. She is one player in a growing MAGA industry which, among other things, relies on lies about Britain to make income, survive, to keep going.

The last time Britain occupied such a vivid place in the imagination of the American right, the story was quite different. Thatcherite Britain was something close to a model- a proof of concept. Markets work. Unions can be broken. National greatness can be reclaimed. Britain was exhibit A for the proposition that the Anglophone world, properly led, could remake itself. Even this wasn’t new. Britain has long been a warning as well as a model in the American political imagination, Jefferson’s cautionary tale; Hamilton’s template. What is new is how detached from reality that warning has become.

And it has fused with something darker than mere ignorance about Britain itself. MAGA now has a virulent anti-Muslim politics at its core, once only peripheral, now central to its thinking and conceptualisation of the world. I don’t write it lightly, but replace “Muslim” with “Jew” and the sort of language I heard at CPAC about Muslims and Islam would have felt entirely at home spewing from the mouth of a Nazi. Indeed, that shouldn’t be surprising, as the conference was full of neofascists and far right figures, many J6thers, now lauded as folk heroes. Talk, which trips off the tongue, about “an enemy within”, “conquest” and “replacement”, of a people. Many I met there denied the idea Muslim Americans, especially Somalians, could ever truly be American citizens, whatever their paperwork might say. It is this anti-Muslim crucible which partly explains the ease with which MAGA reconciles themselves to war: bombing an Islamic regime can’t all be bad.

I’ve been thinking, since I got home, about what it means to be on the receiving end of someone else’s mythology. To be the villain in a story you didn’t write and wouldn’t recognise. The Britain of MAGA’s imagination is not my Britain- not the one I live in and report on and walk through every day. But myths have consequences. The stories powerful movements tell about other countries shape how those countries are treated- diplomatically, commercially, culturally. And a Britain that exists, in the American right’s imagination, as a fallen civilisation is a Britain that cannot be a partner, an equal, a friend in any meaningful sense.

It is in this context that Trump’s Iran war and the widening rift with Europe must be viewed, as well as the constant insults thrown in Keir Starmer’s direction. There has been a constant, frantic attempt by European leaders to keep Trump onside- but it may be beyond their control. The tectonic political drift is happening, however much we might try to stop it. In a world where the most influential British political figure in America is not Keir Starmer, or Tony Blair, or even Liz Truss but Tommy Robinson the relationship has become intrinsically unstable and possibly unsustainable.

It used to be that the distance between us, when it opened up, was about money: burden-sharing, NATO contributions and trade. The language of transaction. That’s no longer what this is. The separation now is about values. Europe- just about- representing a liberal, plural, postwar cosmopolitanism. America morphing into something else. At CPAC, I was told more than once that we are different civilisations now. That the divide runs deeper than policy, deeper than politics, deeper than any single leader can bridge.

This view of Britain has seeped deep into Republican politics, beyond MAGA. Even old hawkish stalwarts - Marco Rubio, Lindsay Graham, have absorbed it and regurgitate it. And the MAGA grift will keep the myth alive. This ecosystem has its own commercial imperative. The Trusses of the world who feed off it need the outrage. They need Britain to remain the cautionary tale—because the cautionary tale is not just the politics. It is the product.

A year ago, standing in Washington for the inauguration, the story felt different. The multiracial working-class coalition that Donald Trump built. The possibility, briefly, improbably, of a genuine political realignment. Something new, built on economic grievance rather than racial hierarchy.

That opportunity is gone. The optimism has curdled. What is left, is a movement no longer defined by what America might become, but by what it must defend against.

I kept thinking about that line—that idea that Europe and America are now different civilisations. Whoever moved — and someone has — I left Dallas thinking that they might be right.

P.S. If you’d like to watch our full report from CPAC you can do so here.