'The President of the United States has completely changed the acceptable level of decorum': Trim's Suzanne Lynch in Washington

Suzanne Lynch thought her years as a correspondent in Brussels were dramatic until she arrived in Washington two weeks after the inauguration of Donald Trump as 45th President of the United States of America. 
Having been through bail outs, the refugee crisis and Brexit, she thought she had seen it all, but life has been frantic for the Trim woman since she arrived in America as the Irish Times Washington correspondent on 1st February 2017.
Earlier this month, she was in the second row of the press conference in the White House which saw an encounter between President Trump and CNN's Jim Acosta that resulted in the reporter having his accreditation revoked.
“That press conference got very threatening,” she says. “You felt like you were watching in slow motion a fight about to break out in a bar, it looked like it was about to get physical.”
The press room is a very confined area, with lots of secret service around, “so it’s not a neutral atmosphere,” she adds.
“It was very threatening, it felt like it was going to break into violence. I thought back to Brussels and press conferences by Angela Merkel, David Cameron, or Francois Hollande, who would have never acted like that. The President of the United States has completely changed the acceptable level of decorum.”
In a decade in journalism, Suzanne has been at the centre of an extraordinary sequence of events. Journalism wasn’t her original choice of career, but while completing her PhD in Cambridge, she became arts editor of the Cambridge University newspaper, Varsity. 
“It got me writing and editing, and from that point I started building up a portfolio,” she says.
She spent a few years trying to break into journalism, freelancing around Dublin, knocking on doors, and got some work with the Irish Times and RTE Radio’s ‘Morning Ireland’.
“Then, my big break came in 2008, when the financial crisis was happening. Somebody got sick and I got a call from Drivetime to do the business news. I was trained in by John Murray for the day, and did the business bulletin live on air for Mary Wilson. Then I started doing business a good bit.”
Suzanne contacted the business desk at the Times, and asked for a start. She was asked in for a day, and never looked back. 
“I started going in every day and worked on the business section for three or four years. I loved it. It was the time of the IMF visit and the bailout period. I was juggling between RTE and the Irish times, but mainly the Irish Times.” 
In 2012, Suzanne applied for the position of European correspondent at the Times, and in January 2013, was sent to Brussels. 
“We were still in the bailout. Then, there was the Greek crisis,” she says. “There would be meetings up till 5am with Enda Kenny and Michael Noonan. There were trips to Frankfurt, to the ECB. It was all about us coming out of bail out then.”
The focus then turned to the refugee crisis, which was a fascinating time, Suzanne says.
She went to the Turkish/Syrian border to meet refugees coming in from Syria.
“It was shocking, there were people coming in with legs blown off and dreadful injuries.”
She visited refugee camps in Bulgaria and Calais as the crisis began to emerge.
When the terrorists attacked Brussels Airport, she was waiting for Irish times colleagues to fly in from Dublin to make a TV commercial for the newspaper.
“I got a call from them to say the flight had been diverted, and they were back in Dublin. Then, the calls started coming in from radio stations. I made my way to the centre of Brussels, to the European Commission, it was eerie, with deserted streets, and ambulances going by. People were shocked – they had got so close to the Commission.”
The Brexit referendum was taking place just as she was leaving Brussels. “I was watching it in a bar with British Commission people and journalists, trying to do a colour piece, and there was a sense of shock as the night went on. No one ever thought this would happen. There was a real sense of the European Union in crisis, and no one had seen it coming.”
The refugee crisis, Brexit and Trump’s Mexican wall all run along a similar theme of an increase in nationalisation and a retreat from globalisation.
“Everybody was just in shock after Trump’s election, and a relentless pace of news began,” she says. 
Living 20 minutes from Capitol Hill and the White House, Suzanne is pleasantly surprised at the amount of access the Irish media has in Washington, mainly due to the Irish-American ancestry of a lot of the White House people, and many congressman, with her British colleagues often envious.
She has also travelled around America on a road trip, from East to West, visiting the Deep South, talking to Trump supporters, visiting an Evangelical Church in Arkansas, Native Americans in Nebraska, and the US/Mexico border.
“I met an 18 year-old girl there whose mother was a Mexican who had come to America 20 years earlier, and had been working in McDonalds. Her mother was swooped upon, locked up and deported back to Mexico. This is the hardcore emigration policy up close.”
Suzanne believes Trump will be under pressure over the next two years.
“The Republicans did well in the mid-terms; a lot better than a lot of them secretly thought they would be wiped out on an anti-Trump vote. They held their own, even though the Democrats did well in the House of Representatives. The President still has lots of power, but his ability to introduce legislation is curbed, and the Mueller investigation is ongoing.”
She added that this is a President who thrives on disunity, governs on decision and disunity. 
“Most presidents try to bring a country together, working for country as a whole. He does the opposite, creating an ‘us and them’ narrative, and stroking division because he believes it helps him in the polls. There is a huge polarisation in this country which is disheartening, and it is entrenched in the media. There isn’t a strong national broadcaster – there are either pro-Trump or anti-Trump channels, no independent national broadcaster.”
She says Trump is a big man, over six feet high, with an aggressive stance,  that leads to combative atmospheres at his press conferences.
But there was good news on Wednesday last as we spoke to the Washington correspondent – she was on her way to the Capitol to hear that the US House of Representatives has voted to extend the E3 visa scheme to Irish citizens.
Though the Bill must still get Senate approval, its passage through the House marks a major breakthrough in Ireland’s efforts to secure new visa access for Irish citizens who want to live and work in the United States.
Up to 5,000 visas per year could become available under the scheme which is currently only open to Australian citizens.
And she has her own Australian man to worry about too – next year sees Suzanne marry her Australian fiancé, Barton, a BBC director, in a UK ceremony, giving her a break from the maelstrom of Washington politics.