The British politician Nigel Farage is riding a wave of good fortune with the success of Brexit and Donald Trump’s triumph in the Presidential election. Photograph by Dan Kitwood / Getty

Like everything else about the Trump transition, the President-elect’s approach to dealing with foreign leaders and dignitaries has been completely off the wall. In the first nine days after the election, the Times reported, Donald Trump received thirty-two congratulatory calls from world leaders—none of them routed through the “Ops Center” of the U.S. State Department, which typically choreographs such conversations. The Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, got in second to congratulate Trump (after the Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi), having secured the President-elect’s cell-phone number from the golfer Greg Norman. Trump told the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, in the manner of someone you might sit next to on the plane, “If you travel to the U.S., you should let me know.” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, of Japan, dropped by Trump Tower for a ninety-minute audience without a single American diplomat on the scene.

Nigel Farage with Donald Trump on November 12th. Photograph Courtesy @Nigel_Farage / Twitter

But none of these interactions carried quite the same ring of two-thousand-sixteenness as Trump’s first meeting with a foreign politician after his election. On the evening of November 12th, a picture appeared on Twitter of Trump and Nigel Farage, the fifty-two-year-old British right-wing populist and Brexit campaigner, standing in front of the golden door of Trump’s apartment, grinning like schoolboys. “We were both roaring with laughter,” Farage told me last week, in London. “We were two people who had been through quite an ordeal. But suddenly, you know, we’d won.”

Farage, a former metals trader in the City of London, has led the anti-European Union U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP, on and off since 2006. Back then, David Cameron, as leader of the Conservatives, described UKIP members as “fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists.” An arch-nostalgist dressed in a double-breasted suit, who is most often pictured holding a pint of English beer in a crowded pub, Farage thrived on the disdain. He is a disarming figure, part nationalist, part jester. “The way that you get something to stick in people’s minds is to constantly break up the serious stuff with light stuff,” he told me. He declared war “on the entire political establishment.”

UKIP has never come close to political power in Britain. In the 2015 general election, it won 12.6 per cent of the vote and a single seat in the House of Commons. But Farage’s singular, destabilizing contribution to British politics has been to connect a popular anxiety about immigration with a concern over the remote bureaucracy of the E.U. Arriving late for a meeting in Wales in 2014, he blamed “open-door immigration” for the traffic. In a televised election debate in 2015, Farage spoke of foreigners with H.I.V. coming to Britain to game the National Health Service. Although his personal popularity is often questioned, sometimes by his own party—Farage has tried and failed to become an M.P. seven times—his fixations were critical to the Brexit vote, on June 23rd. Farage himself was frozen out of the official “Vote Leave” campaign, led by mostly renegade Conservative M.P.s, such as Boris Johnson, but that did not stop him from running his own, more populist and anti-migrant one, or from claiming credit for the victory. “You all laughed at me,” Farage told the European Parliament, where he has served as a member for the past seventeen years. “Well, I have to say, you’re not laughing now.”

The arc that ends with the interim leader of Britain’s fourth-largest political party, a boob and a roisterer, becoming the first foreign politician to meet with President-elect Trump began late at night at the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland, in July. Farage, who is rumored to be eying a career on the American right-wing lecture circuit, was in town, working on his “Mr. Brexit” brand. His wingman was Andy Wigmore (known as Wiggy), the spokesman and fixer for Arron Banks, an insurance entrepreneur from Bristol who gave around seven million pounds, or eight and a half million dollars, to UKIP and to Farage’s Brexit campaign. Over drinks, Wigmore and Farage struck up a friendship with the delegation from Mississippi, whose Republican governor, Phil Bryant, turned out to be a Farage fan. “They say, ‘Oh, Governor Phil Bryant just loves you, Nigel! He watches all your videos,’ ” Farage recalled. The delegates invited Farage to visit later in the summer. “The idea of a trip to Mississippi? Rather. Absolutely,” he said.

About a week before he flew to Mississippi, Farage learned that his trip was going to coincide with a Trump visit to the state, on August 25th. Also, Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, was by that point in charge of the campaign. Bannon and Farage have been close for years. “I have got a very, very high regard for that man’s brain,” Farage told me. Bannon is a student of right-wing nationalist movements in Europe, and in the summer of 2012, shortly after his appointment at Breitbart, he’d invited Farage to spend several days with him in New York and Washington, where the UKIP leader was introduced to, among others, the staff of Jeff Sessions, the nativist Alabama senator who is Trump’s pick to be the next Attorney General.

In 2014, Breitbart opened an office in London. Its editor, Raheem Kassam, went to work as Farage’s chief of staff for almost a year. (This autumn, Kassam briefly ran to succeed Farage as party leader under the slogan “Make UKIP Great Again.”) Farage began writing a column for Breitbart—with headlines such as “UK Universities Hotbeds of EU Propaganda”—and some fellow UKIP officials became alarmed by the influence of the organization at the top of the party. One described to me the links between Farage, Kassam, and Breitbart as “a completely parallel structure” within UKIP. When I asked Farage whether he shared Bannon’s martial conception of politics—Trump’s chief strategist has said that “politics is war”—he made a joking reference to the two armies of the English Civil War, placing himself on the dashing side. “I am more cavalier; he is more roundhead,” Farage said. But he did not attempt to disguise his regard for the alt-right forum. “I speak to Breitbart every day,” he said.

In Jackson, Governor Bryant suggested that he speak at a fund-raising dinner for Trump, Farage said, and the Brexit campaigner and the Republican candidate met beforehand, at a cocktail reception for around sixty donors at the city’s convention complex. “Donald says a few words,” Farage recalled. “And he says, ‘Where’s that? Where’s Nigel? Where’s the Brexit guy?’ So I go up. He gives me a big hug, and he says, ‘This guy is smart. This guy is smart. We’ve got to do what he does.’ ” Publicly, at least, Farage had expressed reservations about Trump’s candidacy until this moment, but in Jackson any doubts disappeared. “I was very, very flattered, actually, by the way he treated me,” Farage said. The double act went down well at the dinner, and Farage ended up speaking at a Trump rally at the Mississippi Coliseum that evening as well. At first, he was taken aback by the razzmatazz and the vehemence, the cries of “Lock her up.” “Elements of that I thought . . .” Farage gave a careful sigh. “This is extraordinary.” But once he was onstage he loved it.