What do Donald Trump and Rebekah Vardy have in common?

It might be strange but the former president and the Wag share one key detail, writes Holly Baxter

Trump and Vardy have both painted themselves as victims (Getty/iStock/PA)

When you work in transatlantic news, it’s amazing the parallels you start to see. For instance: a disgraced former reality TV star ends up getting rid of evidence for fear of it appearing in a courtroom. Do you read that sentence and think former president Donald Trump? Photographs shared by New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman this week and published in Axios appear to show torn-up documents floating in the White House toilets. Haberman, who has been working on a book about Trump’s time in office called Confidence Man, says she obtained the photos from a DC insider.

“You have to be pretty desperate to sell books if pictures of paper in a toilet bowl is part of your promotional plan,” a Trump spokesperson told Axios in response. Indeed – but then you also have to be pretty desperate to cover up what you’re doing if you’re disposing of your notepaper in toilets while at the head of the country. Trump was aware of the Presidential Records Act, which requires all sitting presidents to keep meticulous records of their meetings and phone calls in order to “preserve historically relevant material”. Throwing documents into the toilet doesn’t exactly scream “proud of what I’m doing here”.

But then maybe, when I said a disgraced former reality TV star ended up getting rid of evidence for fear of it appearing in a courtroom, you didn’t think of Donald Trump at all. Maybe you thought of Rebekah Vardy, former contestant on I'm a Celebrity and now surely best-known for her long legal battle with Coleen Rooney. Vardy recently lost that battle after a long back and forth with her former friend and fellow football Wag.