The
BBC series features a raft of interviews with top-ranking aides and senior
diplomats from around the world. The director reveals how, amid the pandemic, it came together
Getting a behind the scenes look at Donald Trump’s diplomacy was never going to be easy. Our aim for the series Trump Takes On the World, was to get those who were in the room to describe what happened at the critical moments of Trump’s foreign policy. Access to Trump’s
White House was notoriously difficult to secure – especially for those of us from the “mainstream media” – and we were asking top insiders to tell us about some of their most sensitive conversations with the president.
We got a taste of the challenges we’d face during our first research trip to
Washington in September 2019. We thought we’d made a real breakthrough by securing a meeting with the top press aide of
John Bolton, the national security adviser. Then, just as we flew to the US, we found out that Bolton had been fired and was taking his team with him. Just a couple of weeks later, before we flew back to the
UK,
Nancy Pelosi announced impeachment proceedings against the president, and we started to hear a phrase we would become all too familiar with as the White House lurched from one crisis to another: “You’ll need to wait for the dust to settle.”