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      How Donald Trump's hand-holding led to panicky call home by Theresa May

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      For the former prime minister Theresa May, one of the most pressing matters she confronted during her encounter with Donald Trump a few days after his inauguration went beyond mere diplomacy.May had travelled to Washington in 2017 with the intention of persuading the new US president to make a supportive statement about Nato. Little did she expect that she would be calling her husband, Philip, to warn him that images of the US president of holding her hand as they walked through the White House would soon be flashing around the world.With Trump out of power, those who had ringside seats during four years of dangerous and often chaotic foreign policy are now describing their – often bruising – encounters in a major new documentary series.The three-part BBC series, Trump Takes on the World, by the award-winning documentary maker Norma Percy, reveals extraordinary access to key observers of the president.With testimony from a who’s who of world leaders and senior US officials, it offers an unmediated reflection of Trump shorn of political hypocrisies.It was not just May who found Trump unsettling: to European diplomatic observers, he seemed a “strange creature”. And he also triggered alarm among some American officials in the room with him, with one defence official noting that the president’s notoriously short attention span suggested a “squirrel careening through the traffic”.May’s encounter with Trump, which is described to Percy by British aides as well as Trump insiders, was a taste of what was to come. May was seen as “not strong” by Trump, according to KT McFarland, the former US deputy national security adviser. But the prime minister had gone into the meeting determined to persuade the president to make a statement backing Nato and warn him over his closeness to Vladimir Putin.The meeting took a bizarre twist as they walked through the White House. “He held her hand going through the colonnades, which took us all by surprise, and as it turns out, took Theresa by surprise,” Fiona McLeod Hill, the former joint chief of staff at No 10, told Percy.“She couldn’t really take her hand back, so she was stuck … And the first thing she said [afterwards] was ‘I need to call Philip just to let him know that I’ve been holding hands with another man before it hits the media’.”Before May had the opportunity to call her husband, Trump hosted her for lunch, where another boundary-shattering episode was waiting. First May was treated to the “full bloom” – one of Trump’s stream-of-consciousness rants, described by Thomas Shannon, then US undersecretary for political affairs, as running “the gamut from his own inauguration to his disdain for the press”.Then, keen to raise the issue of Putin, May asked Trump if he had spoken to the Russian leader, which Trump denied. At that point, however, Trump’s chief of staff intervened to tell the president that Putin had actually called, but not been put through.Hill takes up the story of the “toe-curling” outburst. “Trump at this point looks not orange but red. He flipped. Furious.” In front of May, he scolded his advisers in what Shannon recalled as “an unseemly moment”. “He said: ‘You’re telling me that Vladimir Putin called the White House and you’re only telling me now during this lunch?… Vladimir Putin is the only man in the world who can destroy the United States and I didn’t take his call’.”May was far from alone in being exposed to Trump’s flagrant disregard for boundaries. From his unilateral withdrawals from the Iranian nuclear treaty and the Paris climate accord to his dealings with the Palestinians, Russia and China, few – even those close to him – could ever fully grasp the extent of his unpredictability or his disdain for detail.The former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was thrown off balance by Trump’s behaviour during an encounter at a G20 meeting in Hamburg also in 2017.Like May, Turnbull had important issues on his mind, in this case steel tariffs. Taking his chance, Turnbull collared Trump, who was obsessing about something else. “Donald said: ‘Malcolm, do you want to see my SCIF? It is so cool.’ I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought he was talking about a boat [a skiff]. We turned around a corner and there was this big steel box about the size of a shipping container.”Trump pulled Turnbull into what turned out to be a “sensitive compartmented information facility”, an ultra-secure communications hub, with the new French president, Emmanuel Macron, also in tow.“He said: ‘This is so cool – when you’re in there, nobody can hear you, not even the Chinese. It’s so secret.”Expectations of Trump from European leaders were not so much low as non-existent. For the former French president François Hollande, who dealt with Trump only briefly, an early red flag was raised when the US leader asked him in all earnestness who he should appoint to his team in the White House. “I thought he was just being courteous; it was pretty outrageous. Imagine I phoned Obama and said: ‘You know France well, who should I appoint as an adviser?’” Later, briefing his successor Macro during the transition, Hollande was clear how he regarded the US leader – sentiments Percy herself regards as a summing up how many foreign leaders viewed the Trump era.“I said to [Macron],” Hollande recalls, “don’t expect anything from Donald Trump. Do not think you’ll be able to change his mind. Don’t think that it’s possible to turn him or seduce him. Don’t imagine that he won’t follow through with his own agenda.”“Some friends asked me why I was doing it,” said Percy, who has made the documentaries The Death of Yugoslavia, End of Empire and Watergate, and who filmed the new series under lockdown. “The view was that we knew what Trump was like. He was on the news every night. But this is the inside story of those who had to deal with him.”Trump Takes on the World begins on Wednesday at 9pm on BBC Two More

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      TV networks left in limbo as America struggles to decide who won election

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      “This is why elections are fun,” said CNN’s John King, relentlessly jabbing at one of his two giant iPads as the lead in Florida lurched back and forth. Then he said it again. Absolutely no one agreed with him.About an hour and an epoch earlier, the networks and news channels had seemed as interested in their own redemption story as they were in the election itself. They hoped for a do-over of 2016, where every glib presumption would be replaced with a cautionary note, and a radical plan to wait, no matter how long it took, to see what would actually happen.That was temporarily good for democracy, but possibly difficult for television executives, whose solemn duty was to make their product as opaque as reality. “There is no telling when we are going to have a winner,” said Martha MacCallum, introducing Fox’s coverage with something other than a bang. “It could be hours, it could be days, it could possibly take even weeks.” On MSNBC, Brian Williams told viewers: “It’s going to be a night of a lot of math.” It wasn’t a thrilling observation, but it was at least unlikely to be clipped up and played on Twitter’s infinite loop in the days ahead.Of course, there was still the odd hostage to fortune. “Biden is doing much better with white voters, and I think that’s going to be a theme throughout this night,” said David Axelrod, the former Obama adviser, and you wondered if that would ultimately seem too obvious to remember or too idiotic to forget. In those moments, as the words left their mouths, the pundit class seemed like tightrope walkers: foolhardy or brave, one foot in front of another, the weight of history on their backs.Then the numbers came in, and the math went out of the window – or maybe just got more complicated. NBC’s Chuck Todd, swooshing around his own magic map, remarked: “All that tells me is, it’s going to take forever to call Florida.” Twenty minutes later, he said that the state “looked like an uphill climb for Joe Biden”. Half an hour after that, it was firmly in the Trump column.CNN’s entire broadcast, meanwhile, had become brutally compelling, appearing to jettison its ensemble of sedate anchors in favour of King’s one-man dramatic monologue on the Florida county of Miami-Dade. But, other than King’s unusual sense of what constitutes a good time, it wasn’t clear why it was still treating Florida like a toss-up.On the BBC, Andrew Neil and Katty Kay were formidable and austere, with Neil signing off from his perch at the corporation in a mood of magnificent irritation with America for not having made its mind up yet. The static cameras and distinct shortage of pounding theme music set them apart from their excitable US counterparts, which were increasingly difficult to distinguish from each other.CBS had a “what happens if” map; MSNBC had a “what if” map. Every studio adhered to an aesthetic of fluorescent Tetris. Countdown clocks and “key race alerts” with no outcome attached dragged viewers remorselessly from hour to hour. The phrase “blue wall” became ubiquitous, again.At some point , John King’s touchscreen stopped working. “You’re gonna have to come back to me,” he said. Meanwhile, the New York Times’ notorious election needles had swung firmly in Trump’s favour, and the prospect of days more trauma to come.Then one of them swung back again, and Fox News called Arizona for Biden ahead of anybody else. Karl Rove, who when Fox put Ohio in Obama’s column in 2012 had vocally disagreed on air with the station’s decision desk, vocally disagreed on air with the station’s decision desk.The only person who seemed certain of anything was the president himself.Trump tweeted that the Democrats “are trying to STEAL the election” and claimed that “Votes cannot be cast after the Poles are closed!” CNN’s Jake Tapper said that “the fact that the president misspelled ‘polls’ is just ‘chef’s kiss’”, which drew the kind of social media enthusiasm on the left that you might a few hours earlier have imagined would be reserved for a victory in Texas.Instead, the naive prospect of euphoria had been replaced with the desperate urge to stave off despair. In another time, those who found themselves unable to switch off might at least have hoped to absorb their anxiety with a few fellow travellers, and a drinking game or two. This year, the stakes are too vast, the lockdowns too dislocating. Instead, they sat in their bubbles, waiting – and waiting – for the future to burst through.Fun? Trump called it fraud. “We gotta dip in here because there have been several statements that are just frankly not true,” said the NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie, to her and the network’s eternal credit, even as rivals let him lie without interruption. On the BBC, a few hours earlier, the political scientist Larry Sabato had made a more plausible assessment.“We are very, very split,” he said. “This night has just begun.” More

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      'Let me finish': John Bolton clashes with BBC journalist Emily Maitlis over Trump – video

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      John Bolton, a former national security adviser to the Trump administration, gets into heated exchanges with BBC Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis over why he did not appear at Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. He repeatedly tells Maitlis to ‘let him finish’, and blames House Democrats for empowering Trump when they failed to convict him during the impeachment trial. Maitlis also pressed Bolton on why he worked alongside Trump despite admitting he saw him as corrupt and a threat to American security More