Steak and ketchup with your kabsa, Mr President?

WASHINGTON: When President Donald Trump sits down for dinner in Saudi Arabia, caterers have ensured that his favourite meal – steak with a side of ketchup – will be offered alongside the traditional local cuisine.

At Nato and the Group of 7 summits, foreign delegations have received word the new US president prefers short presentations and lots of visual aids. And at all of Trump’s five stops on his first overseas trip, his team has spent weeks trying to build daily downtime into his otherwise jam-packed schedule.

It’s all part of a worldwide effort to accommodate America’s homebody president, on a voyage with increasingly raised stakes given the ballooning controversy involving his campaign’s possible ties to Russia. For a former international businessman, Trump simply doesn’t have an affinity for much international.

Even before Trump’s trip morphed from a quick jaunt to Europe into a nine-day behemoth, White House aides were on edge about how he would take to the gruelling pressures of foreign travel: the time zone changes, the unfamiliar hotels, the local delicacies.

Two officials said they feared that a difficult trip might even lead him to hand off future travelling duties to Vice-President Mike Pence.

Trump’s final itinerary hardly eases him into the delicate world of international diplomacy on foreign soil. After departing on an overnight flight on Air Force One, he will hopscotch from Saudi Arabia to Israel to the Vatican.

He will close his trip with a pair of summits in Brussels and Sicily, often staid affairs that require leaders to be locked in lengthy plenary sessions.

“The chance of something going wrong – you insult the hosts, you get sick, your boss gets sick, you miscommunicate with your hosts, you make a scheduling error, you need to change the schedule just hours before a meeting, the motorcade get stuck in traffic, or the plane is stranded due to bad weather – is extremely high,” said Julianne Smith, who served as a foreign policy adviser to former vice-president Joe Biden and is now a senior fellow at the Centre for New American Security.

The one trip that Trump took abroad as a candidate was to mark the opening of a new golf resort in Scotland. He led journalists on a roving tour of the course and said his property would benefit if Britain’s currency tanked following its decision to leave the EU.

The stakes will be far higher as Trump makes his debut on the international stage. He’s the first US president since Jimmy Carter to not travel abroad during his first 100 days in office.

And he’ll depart under a cloud of controversy, much of it of his own making, including the White House’s botched handling of FBI director James Comey’s firing.

Nearly all of Trump’s senior White House officials are travelling with him. First Lady Melania Trump will also be on the trip, headlining her own events on each stop.

Trump’s hosts on his upcoming trip are well aware of his aversion to travel and are trying to make accommodations to keep him happy.

In Saudi Arabia, people with knowledge of the planning for his trip say the caterers are planning to offer him steak and ketchup alongside the lamb and rice (kabsa) on the menu. All the meat will have been butchered in a shariah-compliant halaal manner as per Islamic custom. – AP