I’m sitting in a Senate office building on Capitol Hill with Tommy Tuberville, the Republican Senator for Alabama. His front office is full of young people chatting to constituents through their ear pieces. Tuberville is lean, in a yellow tie and not entirely sure who I am or what we’re doing here. When I mention Tommy Robinson, he sharpens. “Oh yes,” he says, gesturing to a couch opposite. “Tommy sat right there.”
I try – and fail – to imagine Robinson getting comfy on a British politician’s sofa. At home, he is shunned by the mainstream media (on 19 October, he will appear in court charged with harassing two journalists, a charge he denies).
He has a reputation among many Brits as a racist thug, but that is not what Tuberville sees.
To Tuberville, Robinson is a prophet, a martyr who has suffered for warning about the Islamification of Britain. “I trust people like Tommy Robinson who has lived it, who has been put in jail because of what he said,” he tells me. “He’s doing a great job.”
“They’ve got five or six per cent of the UK that come from Muslim countries, that don’t want to assimilate, don’t want to go by their laws,” he adds. “We wanna keep that from happening in our country.”
Tuberville is not the only American interested in Tommy Robinson. Last September, when Robinson brought 150,000 people onto the streets of London for a rally, he beamed Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, onto giant screens above the crowds to give a speech. In February, despite his criminal record, Robinson was allowed to enter the US, where he spent six weeks hobnobbing with Maga podcasters and politicians. While we in the mainstream media ignored Robinson, he seemed to be gaining ever more influence. Powerful Americans were growing ever more interested in his version of Britain. I wanted to understand why. So, as part of a podcast series about Robinson for The Economist, I followed him to America.
My first stop was Washington DC where, in March, Robinson had met with a group of anti-Islam congressmen. They belonged to the “Sharia-Free America Caucus”, which is one of the fastest-growing caucuses on the Hill. Robinson didn’t introduce himself as the co-founder of the English Defence League (EDL), the street movement he set up in 2009 and where he first took the pseudonym “Tommy Robinson” (his real name is Steven Yaxley-Lennon). Instead, he called himself “the most-watched journalist in Britain” (his six-week tour is also a content blitz) who had watched his country change first-hand. When he was born in 1982, he told them, there was one mosque in his home town of Luton. “There’s now 45.”
Robinson has been trying to take his message to America for years. In 2013, he was convicted of using a friend’s passport to get into the country. He first caught American attention in 2018, when he was jailed for livestreaming outside a grooming gangs trial in Leeds.
Early in Donald Trump’s first term, an official from his administration raised Robinson’s imprisonment in a meeting with Kim Darroch, the then-British ambassador. In Trump’s second term, the message had become even more useful. A couple of months before Robinson’s US tour, the White House published a national security strategy warning that Europe faces the prospect of “civilizational erasure” because of its immigration policies, loss of national identities and the suppression of free speech.
Britain has become a cautionary tale: a dystopian place of no-go zones overrun by Islamic invaders, a nation betrayed by woke liberal elites and Robinson is the unofficial ambassador. “I’ve experienced everything that’s about to happen in this country,” he tells his American viewers in one video. “Don’t make our same mistakes.”
Although it’s not known whether Robinson has met Trump or Musk in person, he visited the US Department of State in Washington DC, hosted by senior official Joe Rittenhouse, who called him a “free-speech warrior”.
Joe Rittenhouse via X/Reuters)
His US supporters are helping him to gain influence at home. On Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform, Robinson’s profile is one of around 100 accounts that new users are automatically signed up to follow. The others include cabinet ministers, alt-right media outlets and Donald Trump Jr, the President’s son. Musk – who likens England to the Shire, the setting for JRR Tolkien’s stories, and says it needs hard men like Tommy Robinson to protect it – interacts with him a lot on X and has amplified his posts. Robinson’s posts received 168 million views during the Southport riots because of this. Robinson also recently went to Russia with Elon Musk’s father, Errol.
Robinson’s wealthy American backers include Bob Shillman, a strong supporter of pro-Israel advocacy groups, and Patrick Byrne, a businessman who has helped bankroll efforts to overturn the 2020 election result.
After DC, my producer and I flew to Texas. Just outside of Dallas, the American Jewish Conservatives organisation had to find a larger venue for their event with Robinson and the two Texan founders of the Sharia-Free Caucus “due to overwhelming demand”, settling on a venue known for its quinceañeras. We met a mosque leader accused of seeking to create a “Sharia enclave” with his plans to build a residential community, and a state lawmaker in an old frontier town who worried that the English church his ancestors were buried in would soon emit a call to prayer. Robinson had encountered both.
In Texas, I noticed the rising anti-Islam sentiment seemed to be driven by an increasingly visible form of Christian nationalism. And I remembered how, in his last spell in prison in 2024-25, for contempt of court, Robinson found Jesus, emerging bearded and with a rosary around his neck.
By May, Robinson was back in Britain and preparing for another rally in London. He called me on a Friday afternoon while “up a mountain” walking his German Shephard, the signal dipping in and out. He was giving me his right of reply to an article – I was writing about the rally – and occasionally launched into the tirades so familiar to me from his videos. But he’s not the pantomime villain he’s made out to be. I told him I was coming to the event, and asked, as a mixed-race journalist, if I’d have any trouble. “Oh, you’re off your head,” he snorted, and gave my producer and me press passes.
On the day of the rally, we joined the YouTubers and TikTokers setting up their phone stands in front of Westminster Abbey. It felt like Robinson had brought Maga back with him. The event had its own crypto coin and began with the Lord’s Prayer. I lost count of the number of people who told me we’re living through the “End Times”.
It all feels rather farcical. A sizeable Maga movement is never going to grow in a country where Trump is hugely unpopular. But that misses the point of the Robinson’s growing transatlantic connection. He helps supply a cautionary tale to America. In return, wealthy backers help push his message back across the Atlantic and fund his rallies.
A growing number of Britons now believe that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with Western values, and that the Government should carry out mass deportations. Nigel Farage talks of a “two-tier” state that is racist against white people, a phrase used by Robinson’s cousin and EDL co-founder, Kevin Carroll back in 2016. British politicians and the public will likely never embrace Robinson like Tuberville does. But they are already embracing some of his ideas.
‘Shire Folk’, a three part podcast on Tommy Robinson by Georgia Banjo, Sam Western and Gemma Newby is available now at theeconomist.com. Episode one is free to listen for non-subscribers to The Economist