UnPresidented: Politics, Pandemics and the Race That Trumped All Others by Jon Sopel

Author:Jon Sopel [Sopel, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785944406
Google: 5NjgDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1785944401
Published: 2021-01-14T14:02:17.526100+00:00

11 July

Forgive me a moment of self-indulgence. Today is the first anniversary of Max and Kate. We should have been in Europe together. Instead they are in Sydney, I am in DC, and Linda and Anna in London. And there is nothing that any of us can do about it. Talk about scattered …

I am going out to Middleburg in Virginia for lunch with Tom and Katty. Katty Kay is the incredibly impressive presenter of Beyond 100 Days, and one of the regular voices on the MSNBC breakfast show, Morning Joe. She is that rare British beast – someone much more famous here in the US than I suspect she is in the UK. Tom Carver, her husband, I have known for over 30 years. We started our careers together at Radio Solent. They have a lovely, slightly tumbledown old cottage in the countryside. To reach it you drive a mile and a half along an unmade road, then follow a dirt track for a couple of hundred metres, and it is there on the right. Suffice it to say, slightly in the middle of nowhere. On my way up the gravel track I see a coyote – my first ever sighting of one. It stares at me in my car and then in no particular hurry skulks off.

We sit out on the porch. There are butterflies fluttering all over the garden. And a bluebird is commuting between trees making a lot of noise. It is only 50 miles from Washington, but feels a lot further. And as we sit there, with Tom and me about to go and play tennis, the most incongruous of sights. A number of young, white men with big, bushy beards pass on horseback, dressed as Confederate soldiers, presumably as part of some Civil War re-enactment. When they see Katty they all doff their hats. We are back in 1863, and the Battle of Middleburg. Bizarre. In the age of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, with the heightened attention to statues and flags, you don’t really expect to come across the Confederacy on a Saturday lunchtime in July.

I drive back to Washington late afternoon. And the big breaking news is that – finally – Donald Trump has put a mask on, and has allowed himself to be seen and filmed wearing it. He has gone to the Walter Reed military hospital in Bethesda. After ripping into Biden for his insistence on wearing one, and slamming a reporter for being ‘politically correct’ for keeping a mask on while asking the President a question at a White House briefing, Trump has succumbed – three months after the White House Coronavirus task force told Americans to put on a face covering to reduce the risk of transmission.

It comes as a poll is put out which finds that 67 per cent of Americans say they think he has mishandled the health crisis. So, the issue which has sparked a new frontier in the culture war is resolved (sort of).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.