“Anything is possible if enough decent people are prepared to stand up against the establishment.” Never one to shy away from attention, Nigel Farage was in his element at a Trump rally in Jackson, Mississippi. He reminds me of a dog chasing a car. What would the dog actually do if it caught the car? Nigel, to his own surprise, finds himself in such a predicament. To his own admitted surprise, the voters of Britain chose to side with him in the EU referendum. We backed Brexit; Nigel caught the car.

Missing the thrill of the chase, Nigel’s now in pursuit of a new car. Or perhaps it’s an ostentatious Hummer, to be more specific. He now sees himself as Donald Trump’s comforter-in-chief. Down in the polls, Trump’s had a rough month since the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Not only has Hillary Clinton been enjoying consistent leads in some of the key battleground states, notably Ohio, but she has also been hot on Trump’s heels in states that shouldn’t even be competitive.

“The polls are tightening,” Trump curiously proclaimed a few weeks ago, in one of his alternative reality pantomime acts. “They are… in South Carolina,” a reporter retorted. Polls there put Trump a mere two points head of Hillary Clinton, a statistical dead-heat. South Carolina hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential election in 40 years. It remains unlikely that it will ditch its habit this time around, but the fact that it is in semi-contention, along with Arizona, Utah and Georgia, must be sounding alarm bells at Trump HQ.

We saw signs of this panic last week when Trump reorganized his campaign and appointed a new campaign manager – a mere two months away from the election. The new woman in charge, Kellyanne Conway, claims that the polls are wrong. She claims that they fail to capture what she calls “undercover” Trump supporters because it is “socially undesirable” to admit to supporting Trump. In a dramatic turnaround, Trump himself is beginning to acknowledge his underdog status, tweeting: “They will soon be calling me MR BREXIT!”

And this is where Nigel comes in. Having been dismissed as a realistic possibility, Leave campaigners defied the odds and won. The polls said Brexit wouldn’t happen, and it did. Now Trump is hoping to channel the Brexit spirit and allow a mutual loathing of the ‘establishment’ to carry him to the White House. Indeed, there are plenty of parallels to be drawn between what has happened and what might happen on either side of the Atlantic.

For all their similarities, however, there are at least two reasons why Brexit should not be used as a comfort blanket for Donald Trump.

The first is mathematical. For one thing, it isn’t so straightforward to say that the polls didn’t predict Brexit. In the two months ahead of the referendum, the polls were consistently volatile. That in itself told us something: voters were deeply conflicted, and the result could very easily go either way. In the United States, as Kellyanne Conway suggests, the polls could indeed underestimate Donald Trump’s level of support because, as she herself says, it is “socially undesirable” to admit to supporting the business mogul. We must remember, of course, that although Hillary Clinton is flawed in different and unequal ways to Trump, it is hardly “socially desirable” for wavering voters to admit to supporting her either. That should allow us to infer that her present lead is, indeed, real. She leads Trump by 2:1 among women, and an even larger margin among non-white voters.

Those margins matter. Since women are more likely to vote than men and since a quarter of the American electorate is non-white, Hillary Clinton can take some comfort from the consistently solid lead she enjoys among these key demographic groups. But, of course, if a week is a long time in politics then the next two months will feel like a lifetime. Anything could happen. Statistical forecasts currently give Donald Trump a 16.5% chance of winning and Hillary Clinton a whopping 83.5% chance of taking the White House. But maybe we’ve been here before. In May bookies estimated an 82% chance that the UK would vote to remain in the EU. In this sense Nigel Farage is perfectly right: American voters certainly can “beat the pollsters.” The race is far from over.

The second difference between Brexit and Donald Trump, however, is more fundamental. It is moral. Disappointed as I was by the Brexit vote, I can understand why a majority of people voted the way they did. To quote Nigel Farage, there were indeed millions of “decent people” who voted against the advice of the establishment; people who were fed up being part of an EU with too little democracy and too much bureaucracy. Disagree with them as I did, I acknowledge that there were some good, well-considered and morally sound reasons for leaving the EU. I deeply struggle to find any for supporting Donald Trump.

On 23 June the people of the UK voted to leave a complex political organization. On 8 November the American people aren’t just voting on abstract questions of policy. They are voting for a person who is qualified to be their leader and commander-in-chief. Their decision is fundamentally one about character. Hillary Clinton has her flaws, but they pale into insignificance to those of her opponent. She is disliked by plenty of Americans, but his presidency poses a greater threat to the social fabric of the nation and to its constitutional order than anything America has seen in modern times. He is a misogynist who has cast Mexicans as racists. He is a thin-skinned bully who mocks the vulnerable and the disabled and praises authoritarian autocrats. He peddles conspiracy theories, insults the parents of a dead soldier, and wishfully implies that his opponent could be assassinated.

“Anything is possible if enough decent people are prepared to stand up against the establishment.” Nigel has a point. It is mathematically possible though improbable that Trump wins in November. What would be much harder to fathom is the prospect of enough decent people being prepared to support a candidacy so blatantly indecent as that of Donald Trump.