Gtaking a behind-the-scenes look at Donald Trump’s diplomacy would never be easy. Our goal for the Trump Takes On the World series was to get those in the room to describe what happened in the critical moments of Trump’s foreign policy. Access to the Trump White House was notoriously difficult to guarantee – especially for those of us in the “mainstream media” – and we were asking key insiders to tell us about some of their most delicate conversations with the president.
We got a taste of the challenges we would face during our first research trip to Washington in September 2019. We think we had made a breakthrough in securing a meeting with John Bolton’s press officer, the national security adviser. Then, when we flew to the United States, we found out that Bolton had been fired and was taking his team with him. Just a few weeks later, before we flew back to the UK, Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment process against the president, and we began to hear a phrase that we would become very familiar with when the White House staggered from one crisis to another: “ You will have to wait for the dust to settle. “
This is the fourth series I do with producer Norma Percy. His reputation for interviewing presidents, prime ministers and their top advisers goes back decades and is invaluable in getting in the way of important politicians. But this is only the first step. Then there are many months of talking to people unofficially to try to persuade them to go on camera. With Trump, it would always be a step into the unknown. When it became clear that we would have to do the series during a pandemic, without the possibility of meeting anyone face to face, most of the team wondered if that was possible.
Still, despite all the chaos, the constant staff turnover at Trump’s White House had a positive side: many employees had stepped down and had a story to tell.
One of the first we met was Thomas Shannon, acting secretary of state in the early weeks of Trump’s presidency. He told us about a remarkable lunch during Theresa May’s first visit to the White House, where the president attacked his own team for not taking a call from Vladimir Putin. Another was KT McFarland, deputy national security adviser, who revealed how she convinced Trump of wanting to assassinate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. And just a few weeks before non-essential trips to the U.S. were banned, we were able to find former national security adviser HR McMaster, who described how his South Korean counterpart almost fell off his chair when Trump revealed he was ready to meet Korea’s dictator North Kim Jong -un.
In a film about Trump’s foreign policy, we would need the other side, those people he met, and then our team started to make use of all possible contacts in Europe, the Middle East, China and Korea. When traveling abroad became impossible, we feared the worst, but we were surprised at how open some people were for an unofficial conversation or even an interview filmed on Zoom.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told us about an extraordinary meeting outside the G20 in Hamburg, where Trump left French President Emmanuel Macron speechless. Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande, told us about the advice he gave Macron: “Don’t expect anything from Donald Trump. Do not think that you will be able to seduce him. “We were even able to interview Iran’s foreign minister and his deputy, who described Trump’s attempts to plan a meeting with Iran’s President Rouhani at the UN general assembly.
The intention has always been for the series to end at the end of Trump’s presidency or the start of his second term, depending on the outcome of the election. We were prepared for a flurry of late interviews when the results were clear – and filming everything remotely allowed us a degree of flexibility here that would normally not be possible. So our indefatigable team continued to pursue the White House, the State Department and all of our contacts abroad until the last possible moment. It was worth it – we had interviews with key employees and also with those who resigned or were fired, some of which took place just a few weeks before the scheduled broadcast date.
On a particularly busy day, we got up at 4 am to film an interview with a South Korean officer who had been at an important meeting with Kim Jong-un, before filming Trump’s ambassador to NATO in the afternoon and then a midnight interview with the Israeli ambassador we have been chasing for months.
The dust we were told to wait never settled – the White House was an even more chaotic place when we finished the series than at the beginning of production – but, piece by piece, the stories came together.
Trump Takes On the World is on BBC Two on February 10 at 9 pm