Donald Trump gets on the phone... with Sarah

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30Schwab offers. Because Schwab knows that when it comes to your finances, choice matters. No matter your goals, investing style, life stage or experience, Schwab has everything you need, all in one place, so you can invest your way. Visit schwab.com to learn more. Hello, it's Sarah here in the BBC's Washington Bureau.

0:52Anthony Zurcher:And it's Anthony across the river in Arlington, Virginia. So Sarah, have you had any interesting phone conversations today? Yeah, one or two. I mean, it's always a pleasure to speak to you on the phone, Anthony, obviously. But I made an outgoing call to one Donald John Trump, who picked up the phone.

1:17Good morning, Mr. President. It's Sarah Smith from the BBC here.

1:21Anthony Zurcher:He picked up the phone. So was this a planned conversation? Did you get his phone number? How did this happen? Give me the details. So Donald Trump's phone number is, well, I was going to say it's a very well kept secret in Washington. That's not true. Lots of journalists have it and have taken to calling him up in the White House. But it's a carefully guarded secret among those who have it, of course. But but yeah, I've had it for a few days and we decided this morning to give it a go. So actually, I had to phone him four or five times and it was going to voicemail. And then finally, the last time, after about four or five weeks.

1:52He has voicemail? Yes, but it's not him. It's just like a recorded, you know, it's like the standard recorded message saying, you know, this caller is not available.

2:01Anthony Zurcher:Hi, this is Donald Trump. I can't come to the phone. Yeah, please leave a message. No, unfortunately not. So, of course, it's not really clear that you've got the right number when you just get this standard recorded message. So he answered the phone. You told him you were from the BBC, but he didn't react to that. No snide remarks about the BBC? A bit later on, he did say the BBC needs to be careful. And he repeated that he has an issue with a Panorama documentary, which, you know, as many people know, he is suing the BBC over in court at the moment. And so he kind of made a glancing reference to that and said, you know, that he normally likes the BBC, but he was angry about that and that we need to be careful if we want to maintain our global reputation.

2:46but which is probably a warning you know about you know don't take his words out of context don't put words in his mouth when we're reporting about what he had to say on the phone call but other than that no he seemed perfectly happy to chat right right no no fake news hang up the phone

2:58Anthony Zurcher:so i mean you got you got through the the gate you got into a conversation with him had you planned out ahead of time i mean you must have planned out exactly what you were going to do and and in what order in order to try to not you know not scare him off but to get it deeper into a conversation Well, absolutely. But I have to say, I know that a lot of people who have managed to get him on the phone, get a chance to ask him one question and he'll toss off an answer and then, you know, and then hang up. So if you see it reported that somebody had a brief phone call with Donald Trump, that usually means, you know, it lasted seconds.

3:33They had one answer. So I spent quite a lot of time trying to work out what the first question ought to be, so that one that he would like and that he would talk about, but also that might give us some kind of news line because it might be just one shot. And I was so worried about it being an incredibly brief call that when he seemed happy to stay on the phone for, I mean, close to five minutes, I was starting to think, oh, I wonder what else I can possibly ask about because I was so worried about it being brief. I hadn't really made a brilliant plan for it going on for a long time.

4:08Anthony Zurcher:You wanted to hook him. You wanted to find a question that would pull him in. What did you go with? So I knew that mentioning the king and the royal visit that's coming up in Washington next week would be something that he would want to talk about. We know how much he loves the British royal family and how excited he must be that the king and the queen are going to be at the White House, that he's going to be hosting a state banquet. So that's something that would probably, you know, put him in a good mood, maybe mean that he would want to talk to us. And also, you know, it's a reason for him to talk to the BBC, isn't it?

4:37That he's got the British king coming over to visit him. But how do you ask a question that you're going to get a substantial answer to more than just, you know, are you excited that the king's coming to the White House? He's just going to say, yeah, he's very excited. He can't wait. And that's not exactly big news. So I specifically said, look, I'm sure you're looking forward to hosting the king and the queen at the White House next week. At a time when relations with the United Kingdom are particularly difficult, do you think that King Charles can help repair that relationship? So that was a way of getting into the slightly more substantial problems that there are in the special relationship.

5:19The way he's been really critical of Keir Starmer recently, but leading off with a sort of gentle thing about talking about the king being at the White House. And, you know, it worked reasonably well in that he stayed on the phone. He was prepared to start talking to me about it and said that he's really looking forward to the king coming, that he's a fantastic man. And in terms of can King Charles help repair the relationship? He said, absolutely. The answer is yes. I know him very well. I've known him for years. He's a great man. And he thinks absolutely it will be very positive.

5:49Anthony Zurcher:He reacted well to the king. Did he have any harsh words about the UK from there? Did he acknowledge that the tensions were strained? Yeah, so the next thing I said was that you probably know Keir Starmer's in a lot of trouble in the United Kingdom. Do you think it's time he stood down as prime minister? Because obviously, you know, in the UK, there are a lot of calls for Keir Starmer to resign. And I wondered if Donald Trump would pick up on that, given that he has said how unhappy he is about Keir Starmer recently. Now, he didn't leap on that and say, yes, yes, yes, it's time for him to go or anything.

6:28Instead, he returned to some topics that he's pretty familiar with. I think we're well aware that Donald Trump is not happy about some of the wind turbines in the North Sea, particularly the ones that are near his golf course in Aberdeenshire. So that was what he started on saying, that more importantly than whether or not he thinks Keir Starmer should stand down, he's got to get rid of those windmills, he's got to start drilling in the beautiful North Sea, he said. It's ridiculous that there's all that oil under the sea and yet the UK is continuing to buy oil from Norway and that they need to do more drilling there.

7:05And so I was trying to get in there, I have to say. Now, it sounds like a weird thing. I wanted to stop the president talking to me, but we know very well his views about wind turbines and oil in the North Sea. So I interrupted him a bit to say, look, you said on Truth Social the other day that Keir Starmer had plenty of time to recover. And so I wanted to ask him what he meant by that, because it was a slightly weird post where he said that Keir Starmer had made a big mistake by appointing Peter Mandelson to be the Washington ambassador. but he still had time to recover. And so I asked him, you know, did you mean that he can recover his relationship with you?

7:44And he said, well, if he opened up the North Sea, and if his immigration policies were stronger, he could recover. But that if he doesn't do that, i.e. if he doesn't start running the UK in the way that Donald Trump thinks he should, then I don't think he has a chance. So he wasn't leaping on the opportunity to stick the boot in to Keir Starmer. But that's quite a strong line. I don't think he has a chance. Now, if we were a news site that was less reputable and responsible than the BBC, we would be flashing a headline that just said, Donald Trump tells the BBC, I don't think Keir Starmer has a chance.

8:22And that would make it sound as though he thinks that the Prime Minister is going to get kicked out of number 10 any minute now. That would be not an entirely fair assessment of what he was saying. He was really criticising Sir Keir's energy and immigration policies rather than saying, you know, the man's only got minutes left of his premiership.

8:43Anthony Zurcher:Right. And interesting that he went after energy and immigration and not the Iran war and British support for it. Did that come up? Did you press him on that as well? Yeah. So the next thing I did was say, look, I know you're very disappointed that he didn't join the war in Iran. What could he do to win your trust back? And this is so this is so Trumpy. He said, you've no idea how many people from the UK have sent us letters, calls, everything else, including high officials. I don't know who he could mean saying how incredibly bad a decision that was, because we've always been there for them. But NATO, we've always been there for them.

9:21And people were very surprised they didn't make even a minimal effort to help out with the war on Iran. Now, I literally do not know what high officials he's saying have written and called the White House to say they're disappointed in Keir Starmer. He may mean opposition politicians or possibly retired officials, something like that. He may well have had communications from some opposition politicians saying if we were in office, we would have done things differently, Mr. President. But so, yeah, he was, you know, he was keen to lay out just how he feels that he was let down by all of his NATO allies.

9:54But he always seems to be particularly critical of the UK when it comes to that. So I don't know why he's so disappointed in Sir Keir Starmer. Maybe because they did have such a warm and close friendship previously that seems to have been really ruptured by this row over Iran.

10:08Anthony Zurcher:Right. And so did he bring up Lord Mendelsohn or did you in your question? Because that's kind of interesting that that topic came up. Yeah, so I didn't specifically reference Lord Mendelsohn. I referenced that social media post that he'd put out a couple of days ago saying that Keir Starmer had plenty of time to recover. I didn't read out the bit of it where he had written about Lord Mandelson. So, in fact, we didn't get into discussing him. I mean, that would have been quite interesting probably to get into because Donald Trump met Peter Mandelson several times when he was the U.S. ambassador.

10:40And obviously, it's his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein that has caused all of the problems. And, you know, Donald Trump had his own relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. But, yeah, we didn't go down that track. I carried on just asking him about NATO allies in the war in Iran and why he felt he needed help from the UK and others.

10:58Anthony Zurcher:Did he give anything more interesting about the Iran war and about some of the rhetoric he's used and where the state of negotiations are? Well, yeah, because this is something I've been intrigued by myself. Sometimes we ask pro-former questions in interviews, don't we, that we know exactly what the answer is going to be, but we just need to get it on the record. And sometimes you've got a genuine query, something that you want to find out. And I have been wondering why he gets so exercised about the fact that nobody else joined the Iran war, given how much time he spends telling us how brilliantly it's gone, what huge victory they've already achieved in Iran, boasting about the military success.

11:39So I said to him, look, given how proud you are of what the armed forces from the US and Israel have achieved in Iran, why did you need allies like the UK to get involved? And of course he said, oh, I didn't need them at all, didn't need them at all, but still they should have been there. We've wiped out Iran's military. He said they've gone, the Navy's gone, the Air Force is gone, their leaders are gone. I didn't need anybody. So I said, so why then did you want them involved? And he said, because I wanted to see whether or not they would get involved. He said it was more of a test that these countries ought to have helped him and the US would have been there for them, they should have been there for America.

12:17It was a bit of a test and clearly a test that he thinks that the UK and others failed.

12:22Anthony Zurcher:Right. I mean, that is kind of the contradiction, right, that he keeps bringing up. We didn't need them, but we wanted them because they should have been there. And so he didn't really cover too much new ground there. It's interesting for him to frame it as a test and a test clearly that they failed. Was there any other Iran conversation? Did he did he cover anything about about his rhetoric or what do you know where the war is going now? Yeah, he made some rather optimistic would be a generous term, bombastic claims about how well it's going. And I actually asked him sort of a slightly tangential question.

13:01I'm sure everybody remembers that slightly shocking Truth Social post that he put out saying that a whole civilization was going to die tonight in Iran just before he agreed to the first ceasefire. And I said to him, look, you know, people were shocked when you said that. Was that a threat to use nuclear weapons in Iran? Because people were speculating about that at the time. I'm sure you remember, Anthony, you know, what would it take to kill an entire civilization if that's the threat that you're making? And I wondered if it was meant to be an implied threat that he could use nuclear weapons.

13:38But he dodged completely away from that. Didn't answer that directly. He just said the other side is dying to make a deal. I'm not sure that's strictly true at the moment, but that's what he said. The other side's dying to make a deal. So whatever I'm saying or whatever I'm doing, it seems to be working very well. i.e. if I make these shocking threats on social media that's all part of the strategy and he believes it seems to be working but that was the point I'd obviously pushed it too far because he finished that off by going thank you very much and I sort of dived in trying to just get that one last question in as we're always trying to do aren't we Anthony?

14:14But you know are there any circumstances in which you would consider using nuclear weapons but he'd gone by then. Would you ever consider using nuclear weapons?

14:25and he's gone.

14:26Anthony Zurcher:No, talk to you later. Catch you at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, anything like that? Well, we'd have had to disappoint him, wouldn't we? I'd have to say, I'm sorry, Mr. President. Neither me nor Anthony Zucker are going to be there. We are flying over to London to take part in CASTFest. Maybe he wants a link for that. That would be good. Maybe. You should have. That was what you missed out on. You could have plugged CASTFest to the president. But do you think, walking away from this. Do you think you got anything new out of him? Do you think you got any kind of a new insight from what, about a five-minute conversation, would you say?

15:00Yeah. So that's an interesting question, isn't it? I mean, I'd sort of feel obligated to say yes, because, you know, this is the BBC talking directly to President Trump. And of course, we're making news. But I don't know. Did we learn a huge amount more? He's, you know, he's boasting about how well he's done in Iran. He thinks it's all going fantastically well. He's not happy with the UK and NATO and he's very, very keen on King Charles and excited to have him at the White House. No, I don't think any of that is shocking or even that surprising to us. It's good to have it from his own lips, though.

15:34It's good for him to confirm the things that we believe about him because you will not believe what happened after that, Anthony. It's the strangest thing. So I've got him saved in my phone just as DJT, right, his initials. So he's hung up And we recorded the call. We're not allowed to play the audio, but we recorded it so that we could get an accurate transcript and make sure that we were quoting correctly. So I'm sitting with a couple of colleagues going through the transcript, and the phone rings. And it says on the screen, DJT. It's like, he's phoning back. What? So I picked it up. Like, what on earth is this?

16:15And he's not there, but I can hear Fox News playing in the background. and we put on the TV and it is, it's live. Yeah, he butt-dialed me as he was clearly sitting watching the television and I'm shouting into the phone, Mr. President, are you there, Mr. President? Hello, Mr. President? And, you know, I don't know where he had the phone, but he obviously couldn't hear me and we could hear Fox News playing away. And eventually I thought, well, he's obviously not going to speak to me. What should we do? I mean, there's a chance we were about to overhear some kind of amazing Oval Office conversation or something that we thought, well, actually, probably to be on the safe side, we'd better hang up.

16:51So yeah, I hung up on the president.

16:54Anthony Zurcher:That is incredible. I think that actually may be better than the conversation itself, but it is fascinating. And you did get some news out of it, I think. I mean, the fact that he still thinks that the US-UK relationship can be repaired, that this visit by the king is going to accomplish exactly what I think the Brits may want it to, which is to use the power of the monarchy to kind of smooth over strange relations. I think I do find that interesting. And yeah, I mean, just what a rush to be kind of in the spot there on the phone and knowing that at any minute he could hang up on you. So you have to find a way of keeping it going.

17:31Yeah, yeah. So it's quite stressful to be listening to what he's saying and at the same time computing, OK, is that news? Is that a good line? if I push him further on that are we likely to get something that we can use as a great headline or is it going to irritate him to the point where he'll just hang up because this is the problem with these calls Anthony, I'm sure you've thought about this as well it's all very well journalists phoning him up and he's prepared to take their call and speak to them directly well that's fantastic in terms of access of speaking to the most powerful man in the world but he's in control even though we've phoned him.

18:11He can hang up any time he likes. So it's not like a pre-prepared interview where he's sat in a television studio or speaking to a newspaper and you can keep pushing him on questions, on difficult things, you know, ask him why he thinks he's so incredibly optimistic about the war in Iran if you look at the facts on the ground, for instance. There's not proper accountability when he can hang up at any point he wants without penalty. So I think, you know, we need to be a little bit careful about this whole idea that we can just phone up the president any time we like and get an exclusive interview, even if he's talking to several journalists all at the same time, on the same day, because I think he's retaining more control than it looks like.

18:50And we shouldn't necessarily fall into a pattern where a sort of, you know, one or two minute phone call is in lieu of a proper interview or a proper press briefing or something where he can be pushed harder on some of these issues.