US PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP ABROAD

Last week, Trump embarked on a nine-day visit to Saudi Arabia, Israel, The Vatican and Belgium, his longest foreign tour so far.

Some of the sidelights of his trip are interesting. “Love your shoes. Boy, those shoes, man,” Trump told Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi during a bilateral meeting at the palatial Ritz Hotel in Riyadh. According to his prepared remarks, he was supposed to use the terms “Islamist extremism” and “Islamist terror” in his speech. Instead, he used the politically less correct “Islamic extremism” and “Islamic terror”. The gaffe was serious enough for a White House spokesman to explain that the President got confused between the two terms because he was “exhausted”.

In Israel, Trump called Benjamin Netanyahu, who had differences with Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, by his nickname, Bibi, referred to him as a friend, and talked endlessly of how “beautifully” he was treated by Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, who came to the airport to greet Trump in Riyadh. The media in Israel was austerely quiet about these observations.

“So amazing!” he wrote in the book of remembrance at Yad Vashem, the sombre Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. “I will never forget”. By contrast, when Barack Obama visited the museum to remind the world of the millions of Jewish people who were killed by Hitler, he wrote: “At a time of great peril and promise, war and strife, we are blessed to have such a powerful reminder of man’s potential for great evil, but also our capacity to rise up from tragedy and remake our world.”

In his first bilateral meeting in Jerusalem, Trump noted that he “just got back from the Middle East”, implying Israel is not in the Middle East. This statement had the Israeli Ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, put his head in his hands and grimace.