Global effort to keep Trump happy while abroad
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 Seven summits, foreign delegations have gotten word that 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 jampacked schedule.
It is all part of a worldwide effort to accommodate the United States’ 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 does not have much of an affinity for anything international.
Even before Trump’s trip morphed from a quick jaunt to Europe into a nineday behemoth, White House aides were on edge about how the president would take to the gruelling pressures of foreign travel: time zone changes, unfamiliar hotels, local delicacies.
Two officials said they feared a difficult trip might even lead Trump to hand future travelling duties to VicePresident Mike Pence.
Trump’s final itinerary hardly eases him into the delicate world of international diplomacy on foreign soil. After departing yesterday on an overnight flight on Air Force One, Trump will hopscotch from Saudi Arabia to Israel to the Vatican.
He will close his trip with 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 mis communicate with your hosts, you make a scheduling error, you need to change the schedule hours before a meeting, the motorcade gets stuck in traffic or the plane gets stranded due to bad weather – is extremely high,” said Julianne Smith, who served as a foreign policy adviser to former vicepresident Joe Biden and is now a senior fellow at the Centre for New American Security.
“Personally, I think they should cut it back now before they regret it,” she said of Trump’s long jaunt. The trip marks the first time since taking office that Trump has spent a night away from the White House or at a property that does not bear his name.
And it’s not just the bragging rights Trump gets when he goes to his own properties: Staffers know his meal preferences and the exact temperature he likes a room set at. He is often surrounded by longtime friends and acquaintances who have memberships to the commander in chiefowned retreats.