One of President Donald Trump’s most recognizable aides invoked a madcap Sandra Bullock film to describe the administration in which he serves during a business roundtable held as part of Trump’s historic visit to the U.K. earlier this week.
White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf was caught on a hot microphone exchanging pleasantries with British participants in the roundtable, which featured Trump, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and a group of corporate luminaries from both countries on the second day of the president’s historic second state visit.
Scharf, whose job includes managing the flow of paperwork to and from the Oval Office, is best known as the White House official who hands Trump documents during public appearances while often offering him a brief description of what he is about to sign.
As he was greeting an unknown person, he was asked how things were going.
At first he replied, “wonderful” before adding an unexpected aside: “Our brand is crisis.”
After a beat, he explained that the phrase was the title of “a Sandra Bullock movie that’s a bit too true to life sometimes.”
The 2015 comedy Our Brand is Crisis stars the Academy Award-winning Bullock as a political consultant tasked with helping a colorful Bolivian politician win re-election to the country’s presidency.
It co-stars Billy Bob Thornton and Anthony Mackie and is based on a documentary which depicted the efforts of the consultancy Greenberg Carville Shrum to use American campaign tactics in support of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada’s ultimately successful effort to win his country’s 2002 presidential race.
