I have to say, most of the foreign coverage of this year’s presidential campaign that I’ve seen has been pretty atrocious; full of anti-Trump bias and almost devoid of any substantive information about the candidates or voters. 

So it was a welcome surprise to stumble across a piece at POLITICO EU on the “gun-owning Brits who will vote for Donald Trump”. While the headline implies they spoke to multiple gun owners among the pro-Trump immigrants who possess dual citizenship in the U.S. and Great Britain that were interviewed, the piece itself described just one of them as a gun owner; Fiona Bagley, a veteran of the British military who moved here 32 years ago with her American-born husband. 

POLITICO describes Bagley as the owner of “an English goods store, a quaint tea room, two deadly crossbows, and an AK-47 assault rifle”, and next Tuesday she plans on voting for 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 may not like Trump personally, but she’s been voting for him since 2016. While it might be expected that a Brit who has embraced her Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms would vote for Trump over Kamala Harris, another ex-pat who spoke to POLITICO offered a more surprising take. 69-year-old Mark says he’s “got some socialist” in him, particularly when it comes to things like healthcare and education. Still, he’ll be casting a ballot for Trump this year. 

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.”

That sounds like the start of a small collection to me, but I’m sure to her British friends and family Fiona Bagley does have a sizeable arsenal. She also sounds like an absolute hoot. According to POLITICO, the tea room she owns in Dahlonega is named after Waffles, her pet Corgi, who she dresses up as British royalty every Independence Day. Bagley herself dons a Redcoat uniform and joins the town’s Fourth of July parade, tossing bags of tea at the paradegoers on the sidewalk before presumably heading home for hot dogs, burgers, and a little fun on the range.

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.”

The hostility Harris has historically shown to the Second Amendment might have been enough to convince Bagley to vote for Trump on its own, but as with most other Americans, it’s the economy that’s emerged as Bagley’s most important issue. Still, if Trump wins next Tuesday, Bagley won’t just be breathing a sigh of relief for her retail business. Her right to keep and bear arms will be on firmer footing as well.