Waking Hours RTE’s US Correspondent Brian O’Donovan

Brian O’Donovan (40) is the RTE Washington correspondent. Born in Cork, since 2018 he has lived in Washington with his wife, Joanna, and their daughters — Lucy (10) and Erin (six)

Usually the alarm goes off at 7.30am. The first thing I do is check Twitter to see what has been tweeted by Donald Trump overnight.

Trump keeps you busy. I think he enjoys jostling with journalists. His tweets could dictate the day. They tend to inflame. But then you have to do the professional journalist thing and not just report it. You put it in context, fact-check it, you get the other side of it and do the analysis. Why is he saying this? What is this all about? It’s important to explain a story.

So much of what he does is with the November election in mind. When he announced that he was reopening churches early, this was to appeal to his conservative Christian base.

My wife is a political junkie too, so she’s also scrolling the news. Like the rest of the world, the past five months have been very different for us. Usually we would be getting our daughters ready for school, but then it was all about home-schooling. My wife is a teacher, but she has paused her career in Ireland while we have this four-year adventure. I’m lucky that she’s doing the whole stay-at-home-with-the-girls thing because my job is very busy.

I go for a 20-minute jog in the morning, to set myself up for the day.

You’re always working on a five-hour time difference. Every night, I email my editor back in Ireland telling him what’s on the agenda for the day and then we’ll have a chat early in the morning. By the time I’m getting up at 7am, it’s already noon back in Ireland and decisions have been made about stories of the day.

You are always deadline-focused — so it would be 8am for the lunch-time news, 1pm for the 6pm news and 4pm for the 9pm news. And twice a week, I do 1am for Morning Ireland, so everything else gets fitted around that. I also do a weekly podcast called States of Mind with my co-host and producer Jackie Fox.

When I interview people, you end up with a small clip of it on TV and radio. The nice thing about the podcast is that you can give people the time to chat. When I was covering the UN Security Council in New York, I also did an interview with an undertaker who was based there. He was talking about the coronavirus deaths. He said that there were so many deaths that people couldn’t find funeral directors. They were ‘hailing hearses like taxis’.

Pre-Covid, I could go to the White House every day and I did lots of days. Trump used to do his under-the-helicopter press availability where he would walk out of the Oval Office, onto the south lawn and over to Marine One, which is his helicopter. He would stop and talk to the media and that was the best way to get him.

We, at RTE, are small potatoes compared to ABC and NBC, but if you are in the press gaggle, as they call it here, shouting questions at him underneath the helicopter, everybody is equal. The problem is that the helicopter is very loud and you have to shout over it. Then, if Trump doesn’t like a question, it’s easy for him to say, ‘I can’t hear you’. And, of course, there are days when he doesn’t stop to talk at all. But he is doing his rallies now, so we have access to him again.

With Trump, some people write him off for the way he handled Covid-19 and the riots following the death of George Floyd. But I say don’t write him off, particularly with Covid-19 and the economy. We have four months now until the elections and that’s going to be four months of positive economic data. The American economy, like the Irish economy and every other economy right now, is on the floor, so the only way is up.

Every month the unemployment numbers will be down and employment numbers will be up. Trump is a great marketeer and salesman and he will call press conferences every day to say that the economy coming back.

Joe Biden is popular, but he’s not a very strong media performer and we haven’t seen a lot of him yet. It hangs on a thread. You win a couple of swing states and you are in. It’s way too early to predict or write anybody off.

I love what I do and I love the buzz of live TV and the quick turnaround. As a kid, I used to do speech and drama and maybe that’s what got me into this job as well. There is a performance element to it.

We’ve been here since the start of 2018, and we love it from a family perspective. I

“We have four months until the elections, and I’d say don’t write Trump off ”

have found the American people to be incredibly friendly. When we first moved in, the neighbours were straight up to the door, welcoming us. I think in Ireland, sometimes we can be guilty of saying ‘we must have you over some time’, but it never comes to fruition. We live in a lovely street of families of similar-aged kids, so we get to know the fellow parents. We’ve gone on some really good road trips. It took us 13 hours to get to Tennessee, but we broke up the journey and it was fine.

When you are in Washington, you are in a bubble. It’s a very democratic city and you might have trouble to find a Trump supporter here. But when you get out to Georgia, Florida and Oklahoma, you will meet all different types with very different views. America has 50 states, but they are like 50 different countries. I love travelling around and hearing these stories.