I’ve known Greg Walton of Agence France-Presse since we were hanging out in Doha’s shisha bars trying to make sense of Qatar and the Gulf generally.
Late last year he got a foreign correspondent’s dream assignment: covering the US amid an election campaign that had already promised to be the weirdest - and most consequential - in decades. Anywhere.
Early Sunday morning I got a message from Greg. Weeks earlier he’d been in the New York courtroom when the former president was convicted on 34 felony counts. And now he’d been there at the Pennsylvania rally when Donald Trump was shot.
So I was grateful that he could make time to talk to us about what he saw. Not just the clip that will be seen more times than the Zapruder film, and the still image Trump created by raising a fist above his bloodied face. But what it was like at the scene and how those events have already changed things.
Like the 800-word story he had to desperately claw back from senior folk in AFP. That story focused on the heat - the rally lacked shade and adequate water, and the US East is sweltering in an historic heatwave of the frequency and intensity that few now deny is related to climate change. Rallygoers were suffering heat stress. And the oil and gas executives who were primed to speak at the rally in support of the candidate who promises to end offshore wind and sign executive orders gutting the Inflation Reduction Act on Day One in 2025 - all of that on the cutting room floor.
The Republican National Convention that will formally nominate Trump hasn’t even started yet, but coverage around the world is already reflecting the fact that the new UK Labour government now seems extremely likely to be a lonely leader on climate action next year.
As Politico notes:
And that is before factoring in the increasingly clear prospect of a second Donald Trump presidential term in the U.S. Starmer will carry the hopes of climate advocates around the world, all looking to the U.K. to show that bold climate action can still be good politics.
“It’s frightening that the international response so far amounts to hoping that Keir Starmer … will save us from the orange shitgibbon,” said one veteran climate expert, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the state of the movement.
Thanks to Greg and the good folks at AFP who lent him to us for part of his drive down I-79 in western Pennsylvania as he was on his way to do more reporting on the story.
We’ll be back soon.
Front Row at Trump Assassination Attempt