Leaked diplomatic cables are a hoot, aren’t they? The Mail on Sunday’s big scoop shows that Britain’s man in Washington, Sir Kim Darroch, has been briefing his government about President Donald Trump in much the same way as the average American news pundit on TV on speaks to his or her audience. That is to say, he can’t stand the man in the Oval Office, and he makes his animosity pretty clear.
‘Inept’, ‘insecure’ and ‘uniquely dysfunctional’ — these quotes read like somebody who has just read Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s tell-all hitjob on the presidency, before sitting down to write. And Sir Kim’s line about Trump fans being ‘almost exclusively white’ sounds more like the sneering punditry of CNN.
Steerpike can’t help but wonder how much access and insight Darroch actually had on the Trump administration — given that he remembers officials moaning in late 2016 that they didn’t know anybody in Trump’s orbit.
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