A Year At The Circus Read online

  JON SOPEL

  A Year at the Circus

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1 The Oval Office

  2 The Office of the Chief of Staff

  3 The Cabinet Room

  4 The Briefing Room

  5 The Residence

  6 The Surgery

  7 The Office of the Vice-President

  8 Air Force One

  9 A federal building somewhere in Washington

  Index

  About the Author

  Jon Sopel has been the BBC’s North America Editor since 2014. He has covered the 2016 election and Trump’s White House at first hand, reporting for the BBC across TV, radio, and online. As a member of the White House Press Corps, he has accompanied both President Obama and President Trump on Air Force One and interviewed President Obama at the White House. He has travelled extensively across the US and recently rode a Harley Davidson down the West Coast (that wasn’t for work though). He lives in Washington and London.

  He is the author of the If Only They Didn’t Speak English: Notes from Trump’s America.

  To Rosalind, my wonderful sister

  Foreword

  One of the things about covering the Trump White House is just how much is going on all the time – objects flying towards you 24/7, ceaseless noise, constant activity. It is exciting and relentless – and occasionally exhausting. But the frustration for most of us covering these events is how much goes unreported. My main outlet as the BBC’s North America Editor is the Ten O’Clock News in the UK. That will on average contain eight to ten of the most important and interesting stories from around the world that day. If I am to find a berth in the running order, it is going to be on the one stand-out event.

  That never does justice to all the stories that don’t quite pass the threshold of being globally significant but which, nonetheless, are fascinating. So, when BBC Books asked me to come up with an idea to follow on from If Only They Didn’t Speak English, my first thought was to try to find a mechanism to report some of the untold gems of this unique administration. That is what I have tried to do in the pages that follow. And thanks to my publisher Yvonne Jacob (and publicist Claire Scott and copy editor Steve Dobell) and literary agent Rory Scarfe for their support. Likewise Malcolm Balen in the BBC for his input.

  In this endeavour I have to single out Ron Christie. He is our in-house BBC analyst on this administration. He served with distinction in the Bush White House, runs his own political consultancy – and as well as being a Republican strategist also finds time to teach at Georgetown University and NYU. He also – somehow – found time to read my manuscript. And all I can say is lucky, lucky students to be taught by him. His incisive intellect picked up on any number of sloppy judgements, half-baked assumptions, weak arguments and occasional inaccuracies. And like all great teachers he managed to point all this out while being immensely encouraging too. Any errors that remain – are entirely down to me.

  There are three other people I need to thank. In Washington we seem to have an astonishing procession of super-talented young Americans coming into the bureau, straight out of college – three of the best are Morgan Gisholt Minard, Cosima Schelfhout and Aiden Johnson: brilliant minds, good fun to have around, great colleagues with an unbelievable work ethic. I have no idea what they will end up doing – but I am sure they have stellar futures ahead of them. I am only grateful they found some time to help with vital bits of research and fact checking on this book.

  One other shout-out: Jonathan Csapo is the logistics maestro of the office, and I cannot imagine how my life would function without him.

  And last but certainly not least, my wife, Linda, for her constant encouragement and enthusiasm for this latest project; oh, and Alfie our miniature German Schnauzer – editorially he is still weak, but for companionship he is an A+: never complaining about going for long walks when my mind became a mushy mess and needed to be cleared; and just as happy to doze for hours on the sofa in my study while I wrote.

  Jon Sopel

  Washington, July 2019

  Introduction

  It is 12 July 2018, and President Trump on a baking hot day has a much anticipated joint news conference with Theresa May at her official country house, Chequers, in the rolling Buckinghamshire hills. Much anticipated, because, the night before, Donald Trump has given a scabrous, freewheeling interview to the Sun newspaper, criticising Theresa May over her handling of Brexit, warning that America wouldn’t be much interested in a trade deal with Britain if it was still in some way yoked to the EU, and then to add a good sprinkling of chilli powder onto an open wound, went on to say that Boris Johnson would make a very good prime minister. Well, if that was a game of darts in your local pub, those three barbs would have the scorer calling out ‘one hundred and eighty’. Unerring darts, Donald.

  Except he probably hadn’t meant it, or at least hadn’t calculated the fall-out. But this was day three of a tour which had already seen the US president clash with the leaders of NATO over the resistance of many member states to paying 2 per cent of their GDP into the collective security coffers. And while he was in Brussels he got into a fight with the leaders of the EU over trade. And then he came to London and gave Theresa May a mauling. In this topsy-turvy world, the President was going on to Helsinki in Finland on the last stop on his tour to hold a one-to-one summit with the Russian leader Vladimir Putin, which he predicted would be the easiest leg of his journey. The Trump circus was on the move.

  But back to the news conference on the parched, dun-coloured lawn of Chequers. In a heatwave summer, Mrs May was feeling distinctly cool towards her visitor. And he knew it. He was in full contrition mode. At their private talks before they met the press, he was behaving as a man who knew he was in trouble. Gushing in his admiration for Theresa May, saying this time, and in contradiction of the Sun interview, there could still be a trade deal. One of those present told me that unlike on previous occasions, he listened attentively to what she had to say. No interruptions. No changing the subject and cutting her off. And he complained that the newspaper had not published all the flattering things he’d said about her.

  This he repeated at the news conference. Repeatedly. From Chequers he was going on to meet the Queen at Windsor Castle and, from there, up to Turnberry for the weekend to play the championship golf course that bears his name. And then he started talking about the vote to leave the European Union, and the last time he’d been in Britain.

  ‘If you remember I was opening Turnberry the day before Brexit,’ he told us. ‘They all showed up [the journalists covering the trip, myself included] on the ninth hole, overlooking the ocean, and I said “What’s going on?” and all they wanted to talk about was Brexit.

  ‘They asked for my opinion and I think you will agree I said Brexit will happen, and it did happen. Then we cut the ribbon.

  ‘The reason I felt it was going to happen was because of immigration. One of the reasons I got elected was because of immigration, I felt that Brexit had the upper hand, and most people didn’t agree with me.’

  I am now listening intently, wondering whether I have misheard. As I say, I was at Turnberry with the then Republican hopeful for the presidency those unforgettable few days in June 2016. He wasn’t there the day before Brexit. He didn’t stand on the ninth tee and predict the result of the next day’s vote. People didn’t disagree with his forecast. And the reason that nothing of the kind like that happened was that Donald Trump didn’t arrive in Scotland until 24 June, the day after the Brexit vote. It is a claim he would repeat again at length.

  So onto Twitter I went and rather clumsily and hurriedly wrote this: ‘Bizarre. @realDonaldTrump says he came to Turnberry the day befo
re Brexit and he told everyone that he thought Brexit would happen. And that he predicted correctly what would happen the next day. Umm. Not true. He came the day after Brexit. I was there. June 24.’

  I guessed that might get a bit of pick-up, but when I quickly got a reply to my tweet – from a woman called Stephanie Grisham – a small fire went ‘whoosh’. After the election Grisham became the First Lady’s director of communications, but during the presidential campaign she was one of Donald Trump’s press officers, and she was with us on the 2016 trip. She tweeted this back to me: ‘He did. It actually is true. I was there. June 23.’

  So I replied to her: ‘Stephanie – I hate to argue as we were there together. He was NOT at Turnberry on the day before the referendum, as he said at the news conference. He was not there on polling day itself. He was there the day after, on Friday 24th. These are indisputable facts.’

  And back she came: ‘Nope. I have photos. I also have a newspaper from the morning after Brexit. I remember sitting in a pub the night before, watching the results come in.’

  So then I went scrolling back through Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, and sure enough there it was, dated 24 June: ‘Just arrived in Scotland. Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No more games.’

  Someone else found the flight manifest from the Trump plane, and that too proved he’d arrived the day afterwards. After that I heard no more from Ms Grisham, and I have emailed her a number of times to discuss it, but she has never replied. Now leave to one side the small fact that Scotland had voted decisively to remain, this was a most odd episode that I honestly still struggle to fathom. We all misremember from time to time things that happen. And I am sure I am not alone if I admit to occasionally being prone to giving some of my stories a light sprinkling of icing sugar. And I’m honestly not saying it’s a big deal in the sweeping arc of history. It’s pretty irrelevant. But what still leaves me scratching my head is why over something that was so easily disproved did the President choose to perpetuate a falsehood? And why would communications professionals in the White House seek to prop up an obvious falsehood?

  At the end of June 2019, it was announced that Stephanie Grisham would take over as the White House Director of Communications and Press Secretary to the President.

  In the circus these people are the illusionists or mentalists. But there’s another word for this. In 1938 a British author, Patrick Hamilton, wrote a play called Gaslight, which was later made into a film with Ingrid Bergman. Set in Victorian times, the play concerns a celebrated opera singer who becomes a victim when fed continuous falsehoods by her evil, manipulative partner and ultimately starts questioning herself over what she thought she knew to be true. Today a whole discipline within psychology now studies this phenomenon, and in honour of the original play it is called ‘gaslighting’. The best definition I have seen is this: ‘Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilise the victim and delegitimise the victim’s belief.’

  But before we get carried away with a single psychological theory to explain what the President and his inner circle does to bamboozle us, the reality is more complicated. Yes, there are things that happen where you do sort of think that maybe Donald Trump is a Bond villain, stroking a white pussycat, while carefully figuring out every move that will ultimately deliver him world domination. But there are other times when this presidency is more Austin Powers than Ernst Blofeld.

  The one thing that you can be sure of, is that it will be rough, verbally violent – occasionally brutal. The appointment of Stephanie Grisham as the new press secretary came a matter of weeks after Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK. The President had loved it; the White House entourage had been dazzled. On the eve of the 75th anniversary of the D Day invasion the leader of the free world went to Portsmouth with the Queen and spoke of the joint sacrifice. At a news conference with Theresa May standing by his side, he declared the bond between the US and the UK as the “greatest alliance the world has ever known.”

  Past criticism from the President of Theresa May was also discarded by Mr Trump at this press gathering at the Foreign Office. Mrs May had done “a very good job” in getting the Brexit negotiations to this point, he declared and with unusual generosity added: “she’s probably a better negotiator than I am.” This president best known for glowering was now glowing.

  Much of the praise for the smooth running of this potentially awkward State Visit was given to Sir Kim Darroch, Britain’s ambassador to Washington. It was him who had liaised with the White House on a daily basis to work through the programme and the different meetings that would take place. Three weeks after the state visit Linda and I went for Saturday lunch with him and his wife Vanessa at the magnificent Lutyens residence, which is home to the ambassador on Massachusetts Avenue. There were a few other people there – another foreign ambassador and his wife, a couple of people from the Washington Post, one of my British counterparts. The night before he and another senior British official who had played a key role in the organisation of the trip had been at a party thrown by Kellyanne Conway, the president’s closest and longest serving advisor, at her house to celebrate the success of the visit.

  Shares in Darroch were at a high. His posting was due to end at the end of 2019, but he had been told he might be asked to stay on a little longer. We spoke of his plans for the future outside the civil service after 40 years as a public servant. As you might expect from Britain’s most senior diplomat he is super smart, not in the least bit pompous, good fun (though fiercely competitive on a tennis court) – and he was looking forward to his summer holiday - going sailing in Cornwall where he and Vanessa have a cottage. Life was looking pretty damn peachy.

  A week later the world looked a very different place. For reasons that are almost entirely to do with the toxic political debate over Brexit (there are many conspiracy theories), someone wanted Darroch compromised, and a more keenly pro-Brexit ambassador put in his place. The method by which this was to be achieved was malevolent. Unprecedented. Someone in the Foreign Office chose to leak a pile of Sir Kim’s cables that he had sent back to a very restricted circulation list, recording his impression of the comings and goings in the Trump administration. It is the very definition of an ambassador’s job: to analyse what is happening in a foreign government and how it might impact on the foreign policy goals of your own administration. An important part of that is feeding back to your government the latest gossip and intel – and of course to keep ministers and officials appraised of the way key policy discussions are unfolding. Diptels – or diplomatic telegrams – are most definitely NOT written for publication or wider dissemination.

  Given the swirl of gossip you get about the administration, what Darroch had to say in his telegrams could on one level be seen as pretty benign. Trump’s White House was ‘dysfunctional’ and would be likely to remain so. No shit, Sherlock, as some might say. The Iran policy was in disarray (a commonly held view in Washington). The Trump administration was inept. In one cable he wrote for his very limited audience of senior mandarins and ministers that “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.” At any Washington cocktail party, you will hear people – some of them Trump administration members - using much more colourful language, telling far more lurid stories.

  In the diplomatic world though, this wholesale leak of the British Ambassador’s memos was an exceptional breach of security. The odd cable has very rarely found its way into the public domain – but the journalist who had been the recipient of the leak, Isabel Oakeshott – had been handed something altogether more explosive. She is someone who has close links to the uber-Brexitee
rs, Aaron Banks and Nigel Farage. She co-wrote a biography (with another leading Euro-sceptic Lord Ashcroft) of David Cameron. The Sunday Times would point out she was in a relationship with the leader of the Brexit Party, who categorically denied being involved in or handling the information. Foreign Office staff I spoke to in the immediate aftermath of the leak saw their fingerprints all over it.

  When the embassy got wind on the Friday before that the story was to break in the Mail on Sunday, British diplomats contacted the White House and the State Department to forewarn them. Darroch was assured it would blow over; it was small beer and not that grievous. That came from the Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, no less. But in this White House what officials might say and what the president will eventually do are two entirely different things. Balm offered up by an underling counts for nothing.

  The president had three options on how to respond. The first was – quite simply - not to respond. Does the leader of the most powerful country in the world need to dignify the leaked comments of an anonymous ambassador reporting back to his ministers and masters? The second way to respond was with humour and irony: ‘Oh so the masters of the Brexit ominshambles at Westminster think my administration is dysfunctional and inept?’ It would have hit the bull’s eye. And, of course, can you imagine the cables that the US Ambassador to the Court of St James has been sending back to Washington on the daily road-crash on government and parliament?

  There was of course a third option. And given the gossamer like thinness of the President’s skin when it comes to criticism, it was always the most likely - and that was to go ballistic. Yes, Donald Trump went utterly ballistic. At Kim Darroch. At Theresa May too; the woman he had been praising a month earlier at their joint news conference in London. Onto Twitter he went: