Image source, Getty Images/BBC
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- Author, Gary O’Donoghue
- Author's title, Chief correspondent for North America, BBC
Donald Trump has the habit of calling journalists out of nowhere. The US president seems to prefer improvised telephone conversations than a formal interview in front of the cameras.
On Monday night it touched me. And, I must be honest, I was asleep when the call of the White House sounded.
I had spent most of the five days thinking that I would have a distant chance of granting me an interview with him, to mark a year from the attack on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania.
My information from that shooting had created headlines worldwide and had probably attracted the president's attention. So I deduced that perhaps that connection could be the way to guarantee a presidential interview, something quite unusual for a foreign news organization in the USA.
On Sunday night they told me I was a few minutes away from receiving the call, so my team and I were ready to record, but never arrived.
Last night, I had already given up, and then a long weeks without a day off, I was exhausted and taking a nap. It was when the phone rang.
I answered sleepy, and heard the voice of press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “Hello, Gary, I am here with the president, here you have it.”
I ran to the room, quickly looking for my digital recorder; The line fell and thought he had lost it. But then I heard them in the line and I was almost 20 minutes talking with Trump of everything, from that fateful night in Butler, to his frustrations with Vladimir Putin, his rediscovered faith in NATO and his opinion of the United Kingdom.
Here are the five key conclusions that I took from our surprise conversation.
1. Trump shows a different side by remembering his murder attempt
He was very contemplative about a couple of things and sounded quite vulnerable when talking about his murder attempt; It is clear that he feels uncomfortable talking about that.
For a president loved by his followers for speaking openly and without a filter, there were moments of reflection and several long pauses before the answers that the public rarely listens to.
When I asked him if the attack had changed it, the president showed a touch of vulnerability in saying that he tries to think about it as little as possible.
“I don't like to ponder that because if I did, it would be, you know, it could be something that changes your life. And I don't want that to be so.”
He said he liked “the power to think positively, or the power of positively not thinking.”
There was also a very long pause when I asked if I trusted the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin.
In the end he replied: “I don't trust almost anyone to be honest.”
2. Do not commit to a deportation number
When addressing the American internal policy, I asked him if his mass deportation plan was working, in terms of speed and since some individuals who were falling into the raids perhaps the president did not want them to be deported.
Trump insisted that his team had done a “great job” fulfilling his campaign promises, citing the drastic decrease in migrants crossing towards the US from Mexico.
Some members of the Trump team have expressed frustration with which deportations are being carried out very slowly. When I pressed it on how many deportations in his second mandate they would constitute a success, Trump refused to give a figure.
“Well, I don't put a number, but I want to get criminals quickly and that's what we are doing, as you know,” he said. “We are taking them to El Salvador and many other places.”
3. More frustration with Putin
Trump expressed frustration with the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, at the end of a day in which he threatened to hit Moscow's economy with secondary sanctions if an agreement on the war in Ukraine was not achieved within 50 days.
After campaigning with the promise to end the war quickly, Trump seemed perplexed that he had not yet been able to reach an agreement with his Russian counterpart to end the conflict.
He indicated again that there was a gap between the words and the action by Putin: “I thought we had an agreement four times and then you return home and you see that it has just attacked an elderly residence or something in Kyiv.
Image source, Getty Images
The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky and other European leaders for a long time have accused Putin of not wanting to end the war.
But, when I asked Trump if he had broken the relationship with the Russian leader, he continued to leave the door ajar: “I have not finished with him, but I am disappointed from him.”
4. New Opinion of NATO
I pointed to Trump that he had previously suggested that NATO was obsolete, and replied that he now thought that the Western military alliance was “becoming the opposite.”
He had just received the boss of NATO, Mark Rutte, a man who seems to work well with him. The two exchanged warm words in front of the cameras and announced that the US would sell weapons to NATO that it would then send to Kyiv.
During our call, Trump indicated that he was getting rid of his resentment due to the fact that his country spent more proportionally in defense than his allies.
“It was very unfair because the United States paid almost 100% of that, but now they are paying their own accounts and I think that is much better,” he said, apparently referring to the commitment achieved last month with NATO members of allocating the expenditure in defense of 5% of the GDP of each country.
“We change NATO a lot,” he told me.
Image source, Getty Images
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