Donald Trump’s noisy, shambolic and furious convention in Cleveland broke every rule in the US campaigners’ handbook – including the relatively esoteric one that says British politics never, ever gets a mention. Deemed both obscure and irrelevant, the affairs of the UK have been reliably invisible in the US political argument since 1945.



But not this week. Alongside a speech from a would-be first lady rapidly exposed as plagiarised and a primetime address from a US senator drowned by boos from the convention floor, the Republican gathering in Cleveland also recorded another first. It made room for interest in Britain.

Or rather in last month’s decision to leave the European Union. In fringe meetings and from the podium, the vote for Brexit was regularly cited as a source of inspiration for Republicans. As one pro-Trump T-shirt spotted in Cleveland put it, showing the two nations’ flags alongside each other: “1st the UK. Now, the US. Take back America.”

For some Republicans, the 23 June decision offered heartening proof that a cause once dismissed by pollsters, reviled by elites and written off as a reactionary embarrassment can nevertheless prevail. Trump may be trailing Hillary Clinton now, they said, but leave once lagged behind remain. The Trump-backing pollster Kellyanne Conway told a panel that, just as there had been shy leavers in Britain, she believed there were “hidden Trump” supporters – Americans cowed by the “social desirability” of being seen to oppose the reality TV star in polite company.

Others drew ideological comfort from the Brexit precedent. Before he was booed off the stage, Trump’s defeated rival, the Texas senator Ted Cruz, told the convention: “Something powerful is happening ... We’ve seen it in the United Kingdom’s unprecedented Brexit vote to leave the European Union. Voters are overwhelmingly rejecting big government.”

But while the former Ukip leader Nigel Farage enjoyed his trip to Cleveland, milking the applause of admiring US conservatives on the fringes of the convention, the arresting parallel between the current politics of the two countries is one far less comfortable.

For what was most visible this week in Cleveland was a raw, pulsing anger. If 2008 was hailed by Barack Obama as the year of hope and change, 2016 is turning into the year of fear and rage, a mood captured by the long, dark address delivered – or rather shouted – by Trump himself on Thursday night.

Among the Republicans, some of that wrath is directed at their own. The party’s leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, was booed before he had even opened his mouth, presumably damned for being too slow to back Trump – or perhaps just for being a face of the Republican establishment. As Cruz came to his peroration on Wednesday night, and as it dawned on the crowd that he was going to offer no formal backing of the party nominee, delegates began to shake their fists as they chanted, “Endorse Trump! Endorse Trump!” and “Keep the pledge”, urging Cruz to honour the promise all Republican presidential candidates had earlier made to support the eventual winner.

Trump-backing delegates were spitting with anger as they booed Cruz, several of them telling me that Cruz was an embarrassment, that he was “done”, that he would never be forgiven, that his career was over. In turn, Cruz supporters said they were appalled by the “level of disrespect” they had faced at the convention. One, Selena Coppa from Washington state, said she regarded Trump as “a bigot and a proto-fascist”. All this was astonishing to witness in a US convention, which for decades have been tightly controlled, stage-managed shows of unity. Such was the atmosphere in the hall that night, security personnel had to escort Cruz’s wife, Heidi, away for her own safety.



But that was a brief diversion. The chief target of the ire that coursed through Cleveland this week was the woman who was never there, but whose name appeared in platform speeches more than any other: Hillary Clinton.

Of course, all parties seek to tear down the opponent they hope to defeat in November. But one analysis showed Clinton was mentioned far more frequently than previous Democratic candidates at previous Republican conventions. And the venom directed at Clinton was of a different order. The slogan of the week, the one that erupted spontaneously night after night, was “lock her up!”, the chanted accompaniment to the placards that stated baldly: “Hillary for prison.”

This was a new departure for a US political party, presenting the actions of a rival not as policy decisions but as crimes. And it came not just from random hecklers in the crowd, but was validated – even incited - from the platform. Admittedly, Trump played the responsible adult on Thursday, stilling the “lock her up!” chants that interrupted his speech with the calm instruction: “Let’s defeat her in November” – as if he were the voice of restraint, rather than the man who has been stoking this anger for months, as if he were the fireman rather than the arsonist.

Others showed no such reticence. The New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, cast his speech in the manner of a prosecutor seeking a conviction, presenting Clinton’s record as secretary of state as if it were a rap sheet: the nuclear deal with Iran, the thaw with Cuba and, crucially, her use of a private email server, a practice which the director of the FBI condemned last month as “careless” with US secrets. At the end of each paragraph Christie asked his audience to render their verdict: “Guilty!” they roared. When they bellowed their sentence – “Lock her up!” – Christie replied: “We’ll get there.” Later in the week, Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, said: “Lock her up ... I like that.”

Hillary Clinton costume at the Republican convention. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

In this, the Republicans inside the hall were merely echoing the noise that had long been throbbing outside. Around town, there were signs depicting Clinton behind bars, some showing her in the orange jumpsuit of a convicted felon. On sale were T-shirts bearing the slogan “Hillary sucks – but not like Monica” or badges with Clinton’s face above the words: “Life’s a bitch – don’t vote for one.”

At a rally organised by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and the long-time Trump backer Roger Stone, Jones branded Clinton “a foreign agent” working for the Saudis and the Chinese, while Stone called her “a short-tempered, foul-mouthed, bipolar, mentally unbalanced criminal”. (A heckler added: “She’s a reptile.”) On Wednesday the Trump delegate and adviser Al Baldasaro suggested that Clinton “should be put in the firing line and shot for treason”.

Watching, the American novelist, Joyce Carol Oates, warned that “witch-hunts never ended with one witch”. One comedian, nodding to Monday’s revelation that Melania Trump had stolen words from a speech delivered in 2008 by Michelle Obama, quipped that the rest of the Republican convention had plagiarised from the Salem witch trials. (Some Israeli commentators have compared the mood in the US to the demonisation of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 – a wave of fury that culminated in Rabin’s assassination.)

For decades, all this seemed an ocean away from the gentler combat of British politics, the stuff of condescending TV documentaries about the craziness of those crackpot Americans. But as Republicans were gathering in Cleveland, Labour’s Angela Eagle announced that she would no longer be holding advice surgeries for constituents, following police advice. She had received too much abuse and too many threats after she declared herself a leadership candidate against Jeremy Corbyn. The day after Eagle mounted her challenge to Corbyn, a brick came through a window of the building that houses her constituency office.

That had come in the context of many Labour MPs and activists, especially women, complaining of bullying and intimidation as well as death and rape threats. And all this a matter of weeks after the murder of Jo Cox (an event mentioned rather less often by the Brexit admirers gathered in Cleveland).



Of course the current tension in the US, like everything else, is on a far bigger scale. That’s inevitable in a country where people routinely bear arms and in a party where the demonisation of opponents has long been sanctioned from the top. But there are some striking common currents all the same.



For one thing, it cannot be ignored that it is women who are facing most of this rage. The misogyny poured on Hillary Clinton is cruder and more lurid than much of what’s been seen in Britain, but the echo is distinct.

The same is true of the climate in which these fevers have been incubated. In Cleveland the talk was of immigration that had to be stopped, of the need to take back control of the country’s borders, of a process of globalisation that had gone too far and was depriving hard-pressed, native-born workers of their livelihoods. Indeed, this is the wave that has brought Trump to the brink of the White House.

It’s not the same as the Brexit campaign. The accent is different. But in the hot, bitter summer of 2016, Britain and America can look like two nations united in rage.