Donald Trump gave me the biggest break of my career at 60: KATTY KAY reveals how Trumpmania has transformed her world

Daily Mail​

13 hours ago

There are few critics of Donald Trump who would admit he has done them a favour. But Katty Kay, veteran British reporter and presenter, is on a career high at the age of 60, in no small part due to the President of the United States.
'Yes, Donald Trump is good for business,' says Kay. 'Donald Trump, at the moment, is the only game in town, which is exactly how he likes it.'
As one half of the hugely successful podcast The Rest Is Politics US, along with the outspoken Anthony 'The Mooch' Scaramucci (who famously managed just 11 days as Trump's communications director in 2017), she has seen the numbers rise from 2.1 million listeners in December to 7.5 million right now.
The podcast only launched in April 2024, during an election year in which within months the sitting president had been forced out of the race after a catastrophic debate performance against his rival, the convicted felon Donald Trump. What followed has often seemed like chaos that needed explaining.
In the second act of the Trump presidency, it seems that the more headlines the man in the White House grabs, the more people tune in. And the more famous Kay gets. This very morning, as she landed at Heathrow, someone recognised her. 'That happens most times I arrive in the UK. People say hello on the tube,' she says. 'It's always a bit of a surprise.'
Weeks later, after Trump sends US bombers to strike Iran and boasts their 'spectacular success', I talk to Kay again. Trump's reaction reminds her of 2003 and George W Bush's early 'Mission Accomplished' jubilance in the Iraq war: 'We know how that ended.' But while other commentators are downbeat, with The Atlantic running the headline 'American democracy might not survive a war with Iran', Kay is circumspect. 'I'm pretty optimistic that the system holds,' she says. But she has been texted a lot of 'emojis with head exploding'. 'Or dumpster fires. A lot of dumpster fires have arrived on my phone over the last couple of years.'
As a US correspondent, Kay has seen six presidential terms and two of them have been Trump, but the Washington veteran says this administration feels different. Contacts of hers – good contacts, she says, people who speak to Trump regularly – are more reluctant to talk. Journalists, she adds, are spooked that Trump might go after them by going for their taxes or burying them in lawsuits.
Is she nervous at regularly holding him up to scrutiny? 'I did have a moment recently. I'm a green card holder. I'm not a citizen. And I had a moment of thinking, 'I wonder if I'll get hassled at the airport. I wonder if I'll get turned around.'' But scared? In a word, no. 'So they come after me. I mean, what are they going to do?'
I ask Kay how she got the Rest Is Politics US gig and am told gently that she invented it. She'd come across an article by one of the co-founders of Goalhanger, the production company behind the The Rest Is podcast franchise, saying that they wanted to break into the US. 'American audiences are the Holy Grail and I remember reading that thinking, 'Hmm, maybe I could help them.''
A text to Alastair Campbell, a presenter on The Rest Is Politics (UK), led to a pilot episode. All Kay needed was a co-host. She and Scaramucci seem, on the surface, to make an odd couple. But she brings the calm to his storm. 'We definitely have different roles,' she says. 'After years of being a BBC journalist, I see things with a 'data analysis' brain and Anthony comes at this as – what would we call it? – a civilian? He's somebody who's come out of politics very clear about his opinions – not as a journalist.
'People have this view of Anthony that he's, you know, this brash ex-Trumper, Long Island Italian American. But audiences have got to know him now and appreciate how thoughtful he is, how smart and how steeped in history he is. He's one of the best- read people on American politics and history.
'As Brits,' she says, 'we think we know America because we've seen it in the movies. Every Brit I know who arrives in America thinks, 'Oh, yeah, I understand this country.' And then the longer you're there, the more you realise how different it is. Anthony is steeped in a side of America that most Brits don't know.'
Kay's look is what you might call 'effortless Riviera': a white long-sleeved top, with its collar up and sleeve unbuttoned, and loose brushed sea-blue cotton trousers. Her perfectly blonde shoulder-length hair is swept back and she glows. Her sidekick, meanwhile, famously admits to careful skincare and judicious hair-dyeing. 'Anthony says that when people stop him in the streets in London it's always to ask, 'Which moisturiser do you use?' He says no one asks him about politics.'
What does she make of this peacockery?
'I think he's opened up a whole new conversation for British men that it was about time they had,' she says, in a voice that makes me want to rush to the gents and look in the mirror.
Katherine Kay was born in Blewbury, Oxfordshire, into a diplomatic family. By the age of two, she was living in Beirut, her dad serving in a number of countries across the Middle East and North Africa. Instead of sending their daughter to boarding school (save for a brief unhappy period when she was 11) her parents took her with them. The result was a change of school with every new posting, including a French-speaking lycée in Morocco. 'Six different schools in five years,' she says. 'I calculated once in three countries in two languages.'
There were several consequences of this peripatetic life. Young Katty became a linguist, fluent in French and Italian. Also, she says, it made her adaptable. 'I could fit into different cultures or countries,' she says. 'It made me good at making friends quickly. On the downside, I don't have friends from childhood. I don't have a sense of continuity. Before moving to Washington, I never had a house I lived in for more than three years.'
Paradoxically, in 2021, after a prolonged application process, Kay got Swiss citizenship (her father was born in Switzerland) and tweeted: 'Today I became Swiss. I cried when I opened the email. My dad, who died in January, was Swiss. As a child growing up in the Middle East, holidays with my Swiss grandmother were a refuge. When I arrive at Interlaken station, I feel I'm home.'
She graduated from Oxford with a degree in modern languages, worked for a short, unhappy period at the Bank of England, then joined an aid agency in Zimbabwe. While there she met an old friend, the BBC correspondent Matt Frei (now with Channel 4 News), who seduced her into journalism. Her CV since then easily occupies two sides of A4, with stints at the BBC and The Times. In 2021, she left the BBC to work at a short-lived new company called Ozy Media, from which she resigned when allegations of fraud were made against senior figures there.
She and her husband Tom Carver, a former BBC reporter, live in Georgetown, Washington, in the house they've owned for 25 years, and are there most of the year. They also have a house in West London's Hammersmith. She has two children, Felix, 31, and Maya, 29, with her first husband, Sebastian Mallaby, a former staffer at The Economist and The Washington Post, who now writes books (they're still 'very good friends' and spend Christmases together), and two with Tom: Jude, 25, and Poppy, 19. She is enormously proud of all of them.
'Felix works in the US Senate, as a camera technician. Maya is a PhD astrophysicist, which she really didn't get from me, and wants to work in climate modelling. Jude did a master's in marine engineering at Southampton University, having done architecture at the University of Virginia, and is now back in Washington looking for a job. And Poppy has just finished her first year of university in New York but is spending this summer working at the River Cafe [in Hammersmith]. She started this week, so I hope she doesn't drop the plates.'
Their Washington home also has a helpful new perk: half the Trump cabinet has moved into the street around the corner. 'Literally, [Secretary of Health] RFK Jr lives 300 yards from my front door and passes my house every morning on his way to his AA meetings,' says Kay. 'And as I walk my dog now, I pass Kristi Noem [Secretary of Homeland Security] and Scott Bessent [Treasury Secretary] on my way to the park.'
Interesting neighbours, and possibly nosy ones. I ask if she thinks that what's on the podcast gets back to Trump. 'He knows who I am, absolutely, because I do a TV show in the States, Morning Joe, two or three times a week, which is on in the White House. The President says he doesn't listen to it, but everybody on the show is convinced he does, because he quotes it back.'
Has she interviewed him? Once, she tells me, but, she adds regretfully, not face to face. It was down the line. 'He told me that I was very negative about his [2016] campaign, but I didn't need to worry about it.' Did she get the impression he respected her? 'Donald Trump respects ratings. So if you have a platform that has reach, he respects the fact that you're reaching people. I don't think the fact that Donald Trump criticises you means that he doesn't respect you. I'm sure he respects Anthony. The fact that he criticises him often is a kind of compliment. It means he's listening to you.'
So would she like to meet him again? 'Yes, but I think he's a difficult person to interview because you have to make the decision, do I fact check him in real time? In which case you will spend a lot of the interview fact-checking. But if you decide not to do the fact-checking in real time, you're allowing him to say things that aren't true.'
One thing stands out in our encounter. Kay is having a ball. Her Instagram account is a sea of pictures of her with her family: trips to Paris and Spain with her daughters, Marseille with her husband. Far from fading out, her life couldn't be fuller.
'I spend weekends making jam and chocolate cakes. That's my relaxation,' she says. And there are the ballet classes. 'That's my favourite exercise. When I was about 13, I applied to the Royal Ballet and I didn't get in. I got into Elmhurst, another ballet school, and then decided not to go. But it is a thing I love doing. It's an exercise in humiliation, because I used to be quite good, and now I'm bad. So it's actually good for my sense of hubris.'
And there's a lesson that she's keen to pass on to younger women. 'When I was in my 30s, I remember thinking I had to do things now; that I was going to run out of time and how could I possibly manage having kids and a career and there just weren't enough hours to do it all. I wish I could say to my younger self, 'It's OK, you don't need to rush. You're going to have years after your kids have left home when you can carry on working and be successful and reinvent yourself.''
Watch or listen to The Rest Is Politics US wherever you get your podcasts
COOL FOR KATTY
AI: terrific or terrifying?
Definitely terrific, probably terrifying.
Your idea of holiday hell
A cruise.
Go-to karaoke song
Hey Jude - it's my son's name. He hates the song, I love it.
Spotify song of last year
Bob Dylan's It Ain't Me Babe. I've always been a huge Dylan fan. I've seen the movie four times already – Timothée Chalamet is perfect: cool and aloof.
Film that makes you cry
Casablanca. Best movie ever made.
Cat or a dog person?
With a name like Katty Kay I don't think I have much choice. Feline all the way.
Word you most overuse
Yesbut… all one word. Obnoxious, definitely.
Astrology: believe it or bin it?
I'm a Scorpio but honestly, bin it. I don't even know what time of day I was born and Anthony says that's key.
Hero beauty product
Dermalogica Daily Microfoliant. An instant skin brightener – I'm addicted.
Best breakfast
In my ideal world, a cappuccino and a chocolate croissant. I have a sweet tooth.
Favourite swear word
F**k. Speaks for itself.
Picture director: Ester Malloy.
Stylist: Nicola Rose.
Make-up: Sonia Deveney using Sisley.
Hair: Federico Ghezzi using Bumble and Bumble.