Trust me: Trump’s revolution is coming to the UK

Oxford and Cambridge

When I was growing up, people often said British politics were where America’s would be in five, ten or 20 years. What this meant was that Britain was more to the left of America: more secular, more socially liberal, more environmentalist, more globalized. The assumption was that, over time, the left would always win out, so wherever Britain was now, America would soon be.

I traveled to the United Kingdom in May to debate the students and faculty of Cambridge and Oxford Universities in large part because that old assumption is dead and gone. Donald Trump’s political revolution has destroyed it. Now, Britain is the country trailing behind America. Make no mistake: Trump’s revolution is coming to the UK. But as I learned, just like in America, the students of elite universities may be the last to realize.

My first stop was at the Cambridge Union. Stepping onto the Union’s debate floor was like stepping into a time warp, and not just because that floor was once used to plot a map of the D-Day landings. The Cambridge student body might as well be stuck in the high summer of 2020. For all their learning and talent, the students were unprepared and appalled to hear takes that, by now, are mainstream and even boring in America. When I described lockdowns as pointless and forced submission to mRNA shots as tyranny, they seethed and muttered. When I said George Floyd died from a drug overdose rather than under a police officer’s knee, they went into an uproar. While these students have long abandoned the faith that named Trinity and Jesus Colleges, they remain deeply hostile to heresies against a different religion. The Oxford Union was slightly more open-minded. When I described America and Britain as two of the least racist nations in the entire world, the students merely laughed instead of going into a collective paroxysm.

In a way, the students at Britain’s two oldest universities were identical to those I meet in the US – namely, they were completely obsessed with the fine details of American politics, even our domestic issues. I was prepared for a lot of questions about tariffs, Ukraine and Israel. What I wasn’t expecting were complaints about American tax rates the students would never have to pay and Supreme Court decisions they would never have to abide by. One young man even brought up the Stormy Daniels case. It turns out that Stormy has been a guest speaker at both the Oxford and Cambridge Unions. Don’t Brits have their own dumb sex scandals to follow? Why are they so invested in a half-baked foreign one? More than once, students fretted about President Trump’s decision to admit white South Africans as refugees into America. How much do these students know about the asylum laws of their own country? Many were deeply outraged about Trump’s bid to abolish birthright citizenship, when Britain got rid of it in 1983. Keir Starmer shows no signs of bringing it back.

As in America, a distressing number of British students seem unable to deliver a question without reading it off their phones. That said, the students of Oxbridge are certainly bright – and better at insults than the average American. Some are impressively well-informed. When the Gaza war came up, I thought I could expose the excessive focus on it by asking a student to name what African state is now in civil war (Sudan); and what Asian country is seeing ongoing ethnic cleansing (Myanmar). Unfortunately for me, he aced both questions. But being clever is not the same as being wise. If Oxbridge students were long on wit, they were short on wisdom.

In the US, an ideological transformation has swept almost every campus I visit. Five years ago, I’d typically meet a wall of hostility like the one I found at Cambridge. But in today’s America, college-age students have moved toward Trump more heavily than any other demographic. The decline of religiosity among young people has halted and may be in reverse. On dozens of campuses in the past year I’ve met thousands of young people refusing to passively accept the decline of their civilization. In contrast, at Oxbridge I found the dominant outlook to be a depressed and depressing near-nihilism. They were students who hardly cared their country has less free speech than 50 or 100 years ago. They were appalled that a person might think life begins at conception, but not that their own country is being steadily Islamicized. They loved the abstract fight for “democracy” in Ukraine, but find the actual outcome of democracy in America very icky. That fixation on America says it all. There’s more interest in moralizing about the bad man across the Atlantic than in salvaging their own declining country.

In Britain at large, a very different attitude prevails. I spoke to everybody I could while there, from drivers and blue-collar workmen to journalists and the shockingly large number of people who recognized me in the streets. What I heard from them was clear. They’re angry at Britain’s net-zero-driven energy stagnation. They’re furious at the Biden-esque levels of immigration inflicted on them by their “Conservative” government in the past decade. Over and over, they told me they were ready to smash the British party system to bits and elect a Reform prime minister. The great turn in Britain is coming. And when it arrives, the students of Oxbridge will be the most surprised of all.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.