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Dispatches From the First Great British CPAC

Through conferences, media ventures, and fat public-affairs contracts, the MAGA industrial complex has spent 10 years trying to buy British politics.

If you have spent any time on the British side of social media—Elon Musk’s X, in particular—you will know that the United Kingdom is being invaded by foreigners.

They arrive professing their love of the place. They are made welcome. Then they settle in like Penelope’s suitors: occupying the hall, running down the estate, insulting the kingdom, and maintaining throughout the assumption that one of their own will soon be master. They hold British norms in contempt. They don’t speak proper English. They infiltrate British politics and influence it against British interests. They are convinced that their culture and religion are superior, and they won’t shut up about it. They are here, above all, to extract.

Let’s not be politically correct. We all know whom I am talking about: Americans.

For the UK, the “special relationship” has always been an unrequited love. Westminster will stay up until the last state is called. Washington cannot reliably remember that we have a chancellor of the Exchequer rather than a treasury secretary. In the past 10 years, Brexit and the war in Ukraine have turned the British desire to please Americans into the necessity of appeasing Donald Trump.

Through conferences and sponsorships, media ventures, no-bid State Department grants, and fat public-affairs contracts, the MAGA industrial complex has spent 10 years trying to buy British politics.

The question is whether MAGA got the return on investment it expected. Has Trumpism won British hearts and minds? Or is the sight of his brand on British soil no more meaningful an endorsement than a Kardashian holding up a bottle of gummies?

Musk’s purchase of X was the first turning point. British tabloids are even more swayed by what trends there than their Washington counterparts, and the dominoes fall fast: Whatever is trending by breakfast is what some minister has to answer for on the morning round. Back then, being liked by the man who owns the algorithm felt like a massive undeclared political donation. Now it is starting to feel like the kiss of death.

Michael Gove—“Baron Gove”—was once one of the most powerful men in the Conservative Party. A former cabinet minister, he is now editor of The Spectator, the oldest surviving magazine in the world and a home of British Toryism. He is critical of Trumpism’s entertainment-industry metastasis in the........

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