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Hello, it's Sarah here in the BBC's Washington Bureau.

And it's Anthony, across the river in Arlington, Virginia.

So, Sarah, have you had any interesting phone conversations today?

Yeah, one or two. I mean, it's always a pleasure to speak to you on the phone, Anthony, obviously.

But I made an outgoing call to one Donald John Trump who picked up the phone.

Good morning, Mr. President. It's Sarah Smith from the BBC here.

He picked up the phone. So was this a planned conversation? Did you get his phone number? How did this happen? Give me the details. So Donald Trump's phone number is, well, I was going to say it's a very well-kept secret in Washington. That's not true. Lots of journalists have it and have taken to calling him up in the White House. but it's a carefully guarded secret among those who have it, of course. But yeah, I've had it for a few days. And we decided this morning to give it a go. So actually, I had to phone him four or five times, and it was going to voicemail. And then finally, the last time, after about four or five rings. He has voicemail? Yes. But it's not him. It's just like a recorded, you know, it's like the standard recorded message saying, you know, this caller is not available.

This is Donald Trump. I can't come to the phone.

Yeah, please leave a message. No, unfortunately not. So of course, it's not really clear that you've got the right number when you just get this standard recorded message.

So he answered the phone. You told him you were from the BBC, but he didn't react to that.

No snide remarks about the BBC? A bit later on, he did say the BBC needs to be careful.

And he repeated that he has an issue with a panorama documentary which

you know as many people know he is suing the BBC over in court at the moment and

so he kind of made a glancing reference to that and said you know that he normally

likes the BBC but he was angry about that and that we need to be careful if we

want to maintain our global reputation but which is probably probably a warning, you know, about, you know, don't take his words out of context, don't put words in his mouth when we're reporting about what he had to say on the phone call. But other than that, no, he seemed perfectly happy to chat. Right, right. No fake news hang up the phone. So, I mean, you got through the gate, you got into a conversation

with them. Had you planned out ahead of time, I mean, you must have planned out exactly what you

were going to do and in what order in order to try to not scare him off, but to get it deeper

into a conversation? Well, absolutely. But I have to say, I know that a lot of people who have managed to get him on the phone

get a chance to ask him one question and he'll toss off an answer and then hang up.

So if you see it reported that somebody had a brief phone call with Donald Trump,

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