Nigel Farage: Donald Trump should accept result and ‘go play golf’ if Kamala Harris wins

Donald Trump should concede defeat and "go and play golf" in Scotland if he loses decisively to Kamala Harris, his friend Nigel Farage has said.

In an interview with The Telegraph during a visit to the former president's home in Palm Beach, Mr Farage also said Ms Harris should pardon Trump if she is re-elected.

Polling shows Trump neck and neck with Harris going into the election on Tuesday , with late surveys suggesting Ms Harris is enjoying a late surge.

Washington DC and the US are braced for possible civil unrest and election interference.

Mr Farage said that if Trump loses Tuesday's poll by a clear margin , he should move on for the sake of US democracy rather than claim the election was stolen as he alleged in 2020.

He said: "If it was clear and decisive then maybe it's time [for Trump] to go and play golf at Turnberry. If it was clear and decisive. It's all hypothetical and I still think he is going to win."

He said Ms Harris should pardon Trump "to dampen down" the threat of violence in the aftermath of polling day.

"If she gets in on Tuesday I hope she pardons him. She could look magnanimous and it would dampen down potential tensions," he said. Trump faces sentencing in November for using campaign funds as hush money to pay off porn actress Stormy Daniels.

But Mr Farage, the populist leader of Reform UK, said he believed Trump will win Tuesday's election and lambasted Ms Harris for possessing "zero spontaneity" and being incapable of speaking without a teleprompter.

The British MP landed in Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday evening after being invited by Trump to attend his election day party at his home Mar-a-Lago.

Mr Farage, 60, is due to attend two Trump rallies in the swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan on the eve of the election before flying back to Florida to be with the Republican nominee, his family and close aides. He will be the only British MP at Trump's home on election night.

Mr Farage also took a sideswipe at the British monarchy, suggesting that the Royal family could "learn a lot" from the loyalty shown by the Trump clan.

He said a second Trump term offered the "really exciting" prospect of Elon Musk, the world's richest man, instituting mass sackings in Washington DC and closing down whole government departments in his promised new role in charge of making efficiency savings.

The swingeing cuts would serve as a blueprint for what Mr Farage wants to do in the UK in taking a "knife" to Whitehall bureaucracy.

Farage in mischievous mood

Sitting in an Italian restaurant in Palm Beach, having just got off a plane from London, Mr Farage is in typically mischievous mood, relishing the looming election battle.

He has acted as a friend and adviser to Trump for some years and was famously photographed with him in the immediate aftermath of Trump's unexpected victory in 2016 and was in Washington DC in 2020 when the president was defeated but refused to concede, culminating in the Jan 6 insurrection.

With the palm trees inevitably swaying in the breeze and sitting outside under the lights of a balmy November evening, Mr Farage feels at home in a town he has visited often.

"I was just asked [by Trump] 'are you coming?' and I said 'yes please'. One of his right hand men reached out to me. It's far better being here than in Washington. Everything's right about this place. Look at it. Look how dreary Britain and Europe are compared to here."

He said he did not accept Trump's version of the 2020 election.

"I have never gone along with the stolen election narrative," he said, and was happy to tell that to Trump's face. "Let's hope and pray that is not an issue this time. If it [the outcome] was clear then Republicans have to accept the result.

"The whole point of voting is we don't need to fight. It is what we fought two world wars for. We settle our differences with the ballot box."

But Mr Farage, sitting MP for Clacton, expressed concerns about the way elections are run in the US.

"Do I have huge doubts about election integrity? Yes and so do about 70% of Americans. About half the Democrats question the way the election is conducted," he said, "I have to say the way they conduct elections is abhorrent.

"I just hope to god it's a clear result. It is nearly a quarter of a century ago we had the hanging chads and dimpled chads and here we are 25 years on with huge questions about how Americans conduct elections. I find it incredible."

He praised Trump for his work ethic - "rally after rally, the pressure he is under, the guy's incredible" - adding: "I have supported him loyally all the way through and I want him to win very badly. Had I not stood to be an MP I would spend a lot more time here."

He also cast doubt on recent polls - including one in traditionally deep red Iowa showing Ms Harris ahead - suggesting that pollsters and the media might be attempting to "try and make the Trump train seem as if it's slowing down" at a time when momentum is everything.

Echoes of Brexit

Mr Farage, the arch Brexiteer, likened the polls starting to turn against Trump to ones prior to the Brexit referendum which showed (falsely as it turned out) that the UK was about to vote Remain and stay in the European Union.

While Ms Harris and her team have by turns called Trump "unstable" and a "fascist" and pointed to series of peculiar incidents including swaying in time to music for 39 minutes rather than answering questions at a town hall rally, Mr Farage has insisted Trump remains on top form despite what he called some "unforced errors".

Mr Farage said: "You have seen more humour from him [Trump] in the last few weeks than you've seen in the previous nine years. He's been in public much more like he is in private. In private, he is a storyteller, a raconteur, he is very, very funny. Laughter is never far away when you are with him and we have seen some of that."

By contrast, he said, "Harris without a teleprompter... hasn't got anything to say. You see a big interview and they are all car crashes. She has zero spontaneity. She is scripted to hell. It's the way politics has gone."

Mr Farage said a second Trump term would benefit the UK with the former president determined to push through a post-Brexit trade deal.

"These are our real friends in the world and we should maximise the opportunity," said Mr Farage, "There are so many issues over the years that he and I have talked about in terms of the relationship between our two countries. He really sees us as being a much more important country than our size would suggest.

"I can promise you not just Trump but the big thinkers behind the whole Trump movement have always seen a trade deal with Britain as a desirable thing to do."

He said the Tories' failure to deliver Brexit quickly had scuppered a trade deal during Trump's first term and that Joe Biden "was an anti-British president who had no interest in even talking about it".

Mr Farage had US election broadcasting deals lined up which he had to scrap after becoming an MP for the first time in the summer and had hoped to spend more time in the US on the Trump campaign trail.

Swipe at Royal family

On election day, he will be inside Trump's Mar-a-Lago home and club inside the huge ballroom where Trump will host a watch party for his family, closest aides and biggest donors. "It will be very tense," said Mr Farage, adding: "The Trump family is an incredibly tight knit firm with huge loyalty to each other. The British Royal family could learn an awful lot from the Trumps."

He believes his friend has been wrongly maligned by the US establishment.

"They hate him in Washington. They're snobs. They call him a lorry driver. They think he's uncouth, vulgar. But they all forget he's a New Yorker.

"The snobbery against him is just incredible. But politics is aligning. We are seeing it in Britain, across Europe and America. Centre-Right values are much more attuned to working class people than they are to the upper middle classes and the trump campaign symbolises that. It's changing."

'This is the sexy bit'

Mr Farage would welcome a second Trump term for its promise of hacking cuts to federal government, overseen by Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and owner of X.

"This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.

"There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I'm hoping and praying that's the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.

"Because that's what Reform UK believes in - that we're over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that's really exciting.

"They'll all be gone. They'll all be fired. Why do we need Whitehall with all these useless, ghastly Marxists? Universities have all become madrassas of Marxism. The whole thing is appalling.

"Trump's first term taking on the deep state was impossible because they had no idea how it worked; he finished up with a lot of people around him who weren't supporters and who were imposed upon him.

"They didn't know an American president has the power to appoint 3,000 people. This time they have been working really hard on that for 18 months."

Recognising he will face criticism for abandoning his constituents and travelling to the US for the elections, Mr Farage said: "I happen to think that having spent all Saturday campaigning hard in Clacton, that the election of leader of the free world is quite important and I don't think my constituents would object to me being here for a couple of days In fact most of them are big Trump supporters."