Jon Sopel My Week
White House gossip is raging and it’s hotting up in the Rose Garden
TO dinner in the garden of a European ambassador. Two days earlier I was asked my preferences for food and drink. When I arrive, there are three tables in a perfect equilateral triangle, for the ambassador and his wife, another couple, and me, Billy No Mates, my drinks laid out. Embassy staff bring food to a fourth table (I’ve gone for the steak and chicken wings). We take it in turns to collect it. The evening is great fun, the chat no less gossipy with us at separate tables, and we never come within six feet of each other. The ambassador should get a social distancing engineering medal from the proud nation he represents.
FACE masks have become weaponised in the US. Donald
Trump is yet to be filmed wearing one, and many of his supporters see them as a Deep-State plot. But I’m struck by the pictures from the UK, where hardly anyone seems to use one. What is it about the British personality that eschews something so minor yet accepted so widely elsewhere in the world? Here in DC for months you have been unable to go into a shop without one. Like my keys, glasses, phone and AirPods, I wouldn’t leave home without it. Come on Britain, get with the project.
THIS isn’t science, or copperbottom sourced, so I treat it with a small pinch of salt … but it’s striking how many well-connected people have told me that if the polls stay as bad for Trump as they are right now, then come Labor Day (September 7) they wouldn’t be surprised if he quit the presidential race. Remember, in his lexicon, no word is more insulting than “loser”. The argument goes that if he becomes convinced he won’t win, he’ll find a way to extract himself from the fray. I had dinner with a Republican strategist who was exasperated at Trump’s self-defeating conduct and quietly admiring the Biden do-next-to-nothing strategy. His phrase to sum it up seemed to come from the Don Corleone playbook: there’s no need to murder someone who is committing suicide.
IT’S just been July 4 weekend, and everywhere people are saying “Happy Fourth.” I struggle to get into the swing, partly because I’m British, and owing to my apartment in Georgetown being next to the Potomac river and C and O canal — the favourite places for fireworks. There are bangs and whizzes at 3am and I am sleepless. Sunday is a welcome relief — until 2am when, for an hour and a half, there are mighty claps of thunder, lightning, and rain hammering at the windows. Enough already. I AM off to the White House Rose Garden for the President’s news conference with his Mexican counterpart Andrés Manuel López Obrador. We are escorted by the Secret Service into the magnificent Rose Garden, take our seats and wait. And wait. It is 34C with high humidity, no shade, not a whisper of breeze. Eventually the pair emerge. As sweat forms rivers down my anatomy, the Mexican president is off on a historical ramble. He ends. The two men sign a trade deal and depart, not staying for a single question. They say journalism is 80 per cent hanging around and 20 per cent adrenaline. Today it was 100 per cent sweaty hanging around. Still, the roses were pretty.
It’s striking how many people have told me that if the polls stay bad for Trump he might quit the presidential race