AMBASSADOR/BRITAIN/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Ask members of the Washington diplomatic corps about the cables that Sir Kim Darroch, the British ambassador who resigned Wednesday [7-10-19], wrote to London describing the dysfunction and chaos of the Trump administration, and their response is uniform: We wrote the same stuff…So did Mr. Darroch, who, alone and with Mr. Araud, tried to navigate the minefield of serving as the chief representative of a longtime American ally to a president who does not think much of the value of alliances. Mr. Darroch submitted his resignation the morning after Boris Johnson, who this month is likely to become Britain’s next prime minister, notably declined during a televised debate to defend the diplomat and also refused to criticize President Trump…He came to that conclusion after he found himself in the vortex of what for years has been the definition of a classic Washington gaffe: He was caught in public saying something that is widely believed. It would have been stranger, his diplomatic colleagues said, if Mr. Darroch had been writing cables describing the Trump White House as a smooth-running machine.”
–David E. Sanger, “‘It Could Have Been Any of Us’: Disdain for Trump Runs Among Ambassador,” The New York Times online, July 10, 2019