For a leader who wants to make America great again, Donald Trump spends a lot of time in the United Kingdom. From September 17 to 19, he will travel to Britain for an unprecedented second state visit. It comes eight weeks after Trump checked in on his golf courses in Scotland. Between the President’s two visits, his vice-president, JD Vance, has been on holiday there, splitting his time between an 18th-century stately home in the Cotswolds, the foreign secretary’s grace and favour mansion, Chevening, and the Carnell Estate, in Scotland.

Other Maga luminaries are forever popping up in Britain. Peter Thiel has delivered the Scruton lecture in Oxford’s grand Sheldonian Theatre and debated at both the Oxford and Cambridge unions. Elon Musk devotes more attention to British politics on X than to the politics of any country other than the United States.

Why this obsession with a middle-ranking power that no longer offers a gateway to the European Union? The obvious answer lies in old-fashioned anglophilia. American conservatives have always believed that America and Britain are joined by bonds of blood, history and sentiment. The US was founded by a combination of religious refugees in Boston and entrepreneurial adventurers in Virginia. The Wasp establishment (White Anglo-Saxon) created a British-oriented world of British-style clubs, British-style public schools and British-style universities. “Fundamentally, America is an Anglo country,” says Vance.

Trump ascribes his “love” for Britain to his Scottish-born mother, who worshipped the Royal Family, while Musk ascribes his own “love” to his Liverpudlian grandmother, who helped to bring him up in South Africa. Usha Vance fell for the country when she was a postgraduate student at Cambridge. Maga-leaning businessmen and women are also drawn to the country by its status as Europe’s pre-eminent power in tech and finance — and a pre-eminent power, moreover, with a decent supply of country houses for sale.

But something more is going on than either regular anglophilia or material ties: a peculiar mix of love and hate that is quite alien to the old Anglophile establishment. The Maga elite not only gives the impression that it regards Britain as an Islamic hellhole bent on destroying free speech and importing the Third World. It frequently intervenes in the details of British politics.

Trump has declared that Britain’s speech codes are “sad” and “strange” and London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, is “nasty” and “very dumb”. Vance has joked that Britain under the Labour Party is the first “truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon”. Musk has been like a dog with a bone, declaring that “civil war” is inevitable in the wake of the Southport riots and denouncing prime minister Sir Keir Starmer as complicit in the “mass rapes” of young girls by gangs of Muslim immigrants.

This combination of love and hate springs from the contrast between Maga’s idealised vision of Britain and the reality they encounter on the streets. They treat Britain as the embodiment of conservative virtues: this is the country that Trump encounters when he watches the Trooping of the Colours and Vance luxuriates in when he goes fishing with David Lammy — now the former foreign secretary — at Chevening. Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, caught this mood exactly when he gave Vance a signed copy of Roger Scruton’s England: An Elegy, a moving evocation of the England we have lost, during his recent visit.

But they are furious about what the country has become — most obviously because they disapprove of Britain’s ethnic transformation, particularly the arrival of millions of Muslims, but also because they are affronted by the country’s grubby mediocrity. The old Britain they idealise combined economic dynamism with respect for tradition: the first thing that successful industrialists did with their money was to invest in a magnificent country house. Modern Britain, in their view, is as hostile to entrepreneurialism as it is to beauty.

The American establishment’s old anglophilia was comfortable — the geopolitical equivalent of a leather armchair. The new fixation on Britain is angry and agitated. Maga’s leading figures are arrivistes rather than Anglo-aristocrats: Trump’s German great-grandfather would not have had a chance of being admitted to New York’s Knickerbocker Club, while Vance’s hillbilly ancestors would not even have secured jobs as scullions. (In Hillbilly Elegy, he writes of not knowing what cutlery to use while attending a dinner put on by a white-shoe law firm at Yale.) Other figures such as Thiel and Musk were also born outside the Anglo pale. Yet in their view they have inherited the duty of saving Anglo-American civilisation, the very heart of the West, from an old establishment that has betrayed its calling in the name of cosmopolitanism and wokery.

Maga America is forming tightening bonds with a group of British conservatives who share this same complex of emotions: disappointment with what Britain has become and anger at the failed establishment. The central member of this group is James Orr. A professor of theology at Cambridge and devotee of Roger Scruton, he is at the heart of several new conservative organisations such as the National Conservative Conference, which convenes under the slogan “faith, family, flag, freedom,” and the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which promises to “re-lay the foundations of our civilisation”. Vance, who has stayed at Orr’s compound, the Moorings, near Cambridge, describes him as his “British sherpa”. Other less closely aligned members include the hedge-fund king Paul Marshall, who founded GB News and owns The Spectator and UnHerd; Maurice Glasman, a Labour peer who founded a socially conservative faction of the Labour Party — “Blue Labour” — in opposition to Tony Blair’s progressive modernism and who was the only British politician to be invited to Trump’s inaugural lunch; and a host of post-liberals who write for UnHerd and hang out in London’s UnHerd Club.

The formation of close bonds between America’s ascendant party and its allies in Britain is a regular feature of Anglo-American politics: The Oxford-educated Bill Clinton built close ties with Tony Blair and his allies, while Ronald Reagan did the same with Margaret Thatcher and her acolytes. This has benefited Britain by keeping the roots of the special relationship watered.

But this time around the story will be more explosive, not least because the British and American political cycles are now out of sync. For all the diplomatic cooing we will hear this week, we should be in no doubt that Maga has no time for the leftist human rights lawyer in Downing Street. Trump’s “generosity” in imposing lower tariffs on Britain than on Europe could thus easily turn into its opposite.

The complications could become even greater if Maga retains control of the White House and Reform or a Tory-Reform alliance wins the next election. When Tony Blair supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Britain’s close ties with the US were converted from a source of domestic political stability into a source of instability. That will be as nothing compared with the impact on British politics if a Prime Minister Nigel Farage tries to march shoulder-to-shoulder with President Vance into the sunny uplands of faith, family and flag.

• Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is author of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World