Meet the gun-toting Brits who will vote for Donald Trump

DAHLONEGA, Georgia — Fiona Bagley was born in Epsom, a historic spa town in a leafy corner of England. She owns an English goods store, a quaint tea room, two deadly crossbows and an AK-47 assault rifle. On Nov. 5, she will vote for Donald Trump.
“I don’t particularly like Donald Trump,” the 64-year-old said, chatting over a cup of Earl Grey tea on the veranda of her café in the former gold-mining town of Dahlonega, Georgia. “I wish he would be a bit more presidential. But I like what he does.”
Speaking in an accent from southern England (with an occasional American lilt), she described the Republican presidential candidate as “obnoxious,” “loud” and “brash,” and said he “doesn’t know when to shut up.” 
“But the man knows how to run a country,” she added.
Bagley is one of numerous British-born dual citizens in Georgia — a crucial swing state in the looming presidential election — who will back Trump over his Democrat rival Kamala Harris. The friends and families of these Brits back home — where Trump remains deeply unpopular — can scarcely believe they could support the controversial businessman. 
But British Trump voters in Georgia canvassed by POLITICO said their experiences living in America under Democrat rule had made up their minds. 
Trump-backing Brits typically cite the economic woes they experienced under the Joe Biden administration, including rampant consumer and business inflation, as reasons to cast their ballots for the Republican. Abortion, foreign affairs and the gender debate come up in conversation too — not to mention Trump’s perceived mistreatment at the hands of the media and the so-called Washington elite. 
But certain U.K. political influences seem as difficult to shed as the enduring British accent.
“I’ve got some socialist in me, particularly when it comes to healthcare and education,” said Mark, 69, a Trump voter from Hove on the south coast of England. (He asked that his surname not be published.) 
Mark was not alone in expressing love for Britain’s treasured National Health Service, which provides free healthcare to U.K. citizens. By contrast, American-born Republicans like to paint the U.K.’s state-run health regime as a failed socialist experiment.
Most Brits in the U.S. are squeamish about America’s love of guns, too — though not Bagley, who has embraced the culture.
“I have an arsenal,” she said proudly, listing an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, several handguns and a shotgun among her haul at home, alongside the AK-47 and two crossbows mentioned above. “I’m probably very different to a lot of the Brits, who think the gun culture is out of control.”
Crucially, Bagley was exposed to guns long before she lived in America. She served in the British armed forces, patrolling the Berlin Wall, where she met her American future husband. The pair moved to the U.S. 32 years ago, after she retired from the service. 
Settling in Dahlonega, north of Atlanta, Bagley opened a bed and breakfast and tea rooms, a flower farm, and Crown and Bear, a British food and gifts shop on the town square. Her collective businesses employ 18 people. 
The tea room is named after Waffles, her corgi dog, who attends Independence Day parades dressed as an English king. Bagley dresses as a British red coat soldier from the American Revolutionary War and throws tea bags at the crowd. 
The shop, upstairs in an old townhouse, sells endless British-themed items including Sherlock Holmes candles, London Underground t-shirts and assorted royal family memorabilia. No one in the town knew what a crumpet was before Bagley opened the shop in 2020; now she has dozens of customers on speed dial for when a new pallet of tea-room delicacies arrives. 
Bagley has been on her own journey of discovery in recent years. She says she would never have voted for Trump had he been a candidate when she first arrived three decades ago. “I would have thought, ‘wow, that man’s kind of rude,’” she said. 
As recently as 2016 she berated a neighbor for backing Trump, branding the Republican a “fool.” But by the end of that election cycle she was backing Trump too: Now it’s her British friends and family back home who berate her for her political affiliations. “They are utterly shocked that I would vote for that man,” she said. “And I’m kinda shocked too.” 
But she said she feels she has little choice, due to fears her businesses might not survive if the Democrats win again. “When he was in power, I had more money in my bank account,” Bagley explained. “Things weren’t as tight. In the last four years it’s been brutal for retail businesses.”
Other British Trump supporters argue their favored candidate should not be so unpalatable to folks back home.
“There was nobody more brash and more forthright than Margaret Thatcher,” said Manchester-born Mike Long, 68, referring to the former U.K. prime minister who won three general elections despite being a hugely divisive figure. “The British loved her.”
Long was speaking in the back office of Taste of Britain, another British shop that has been a fixture in Norcross, a suburb of Atlanta, for three-and-a-half decades. The store has an enormous range of British food products, including niche items like Smith’s Scampi Fries crisps, Soreen malt loaf, Bird’s custard powder and a full menu of Scottish pies. 
Roxanna Aguilar, who has run the store for 12 years, was born in south London and grew up in Colchester, Essex. She has watched fellow Brits who move to Georgia slowly become more polarized — just like their American neighbors — the longer they spend in the U.S. Many now watch Fox News or other hardline conservative media, she said, and rail vocally against the more left-wing bias of other broadcasters.
“In Britain, your political view is very personal. It’s not here,” Aguilar said in her Union Jack-themed office, where the rug, tissue box and baroque armchair are all splashed with the British flag. “But I think the English people that live over here have gotten used to that.”
Certainly, the British-American voters POLITICO spoke to were open and generous in sharing their views — even the more controversial ones.
One woman — who asked not to be named — repeated false claims that the 2020 election had been rigged against Trump, and accused the Inland Revenue Service, the CIA and other government institutions of colluding against him. The same person said of Harris: “If I see that laugh one more time, and that nodding head, I’ll put a baseball bat through the TV.”
Not all British-born voters in the U.S. reject the Democrat candidate, of course. In fact, numerous people said Trump-voting Brits are few and far between. 
Sonya Foley, 50, a cybersecurity contractor from Reading, a large town west of London, has been in the U.S. for 22 years. She voted for Harris under the early voting scheme in Georgia. “A woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body is critical for me,” she said of the abortion debate. “It affects us all.”
She also said she feared a second Trump presidency would be characterized by “retaliation” against his opponents, and that the former president had tapped into latent racism, misogyny and classism in the U.S. 
As for claims by Trump supporters that the Republican candidate would be the stronger leader, Foley replied: “I just don’t think being a bullying narcissist is showing leadership.”
A week from polling day, these same arguments are playing out in households across a divided nation.