Convenient timing for a trade deal, I suggested. Only you would think that, Trump replied
We had been ushered back to a cramped holding room, equipped with coffee and cookies and too few power sockets.
The European journalists had just been bussed out of the US president's Trump Turnberry golf club while the 13 of us in the White House pool filed our stories.
Then we got the call that we were heading back. It sent us scrambling for notebooks and audio recorders before running helter-skelter back to the Donald J Trump ballroom.
There could be only one reason.
'So we have good news,' Mr Trump said from his chair in front of the vast picture windows looking out on his famous golf course and dunes. 'We reached a deal.'
A small audience including his sons Don Jr and Eric as well as other White House staff applauded.
It came as a surprise in the moment. The burly cameraman behind me was still panting from our sudden exertion.
Barely an hour earlier, Mr Trump put the chances of a deal at 50-50. But to the canny, the signs pointing to a deal had always been there.
The meeting with Mrs Von der Leyen was a last-minute addition to Mr Trump's trip to Scotland.
He did not even have his top two trade negotiators on Air Force One. But on Saturday they flew out to join him. Something was obviously in the air.
And then Mr Trump, in that first press 'spray' (as it is called in White House lingo), had even hinted a deal was close.
'We have a good chance of getting it resolved,' he said. 'We'll probably know in about an hour.'
This was the deal he wanted; 'the biggest of all the deals', as he put it.
He flew out of Washington on Friday dogged by questions about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and just what his administration knew about the dead paedophile.
Deals with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines had been announced last week but hadn't budged the news media, which kept up a steady drip drip drip of headlines on a scandal that should have ended when Epstein died by suicide in a jail cell.
The five-day trip to Scotland was a chance to escape the crisis and spend time at his beloved golf clubs in Ayrshire and then Aberdeenshire, where he will open a new course on Tuesday.
Now he also has a major win, that will bring investment and cash to the US.
Could it be that the sudden breakthrough was the product of the need for a big win that could change the media conversation? That was the gist of my question to Mr Trump.
'Only you would think that,' he said with half a smile, 'on a day … which is good for European business and American business.'
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