Looking Forward to tRump's Trip

Yesterday the White House announced that President Trump will deliver a speech about Islam when he visits Saudi Arabia this weekend.

  Mother Jones

"This has to go well," one official involved in the planning of the trip said on Tuesday evening. "There's not a lot of room to fail."

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Many of Trump's senior-most aides will pack into the staff cabins on Air Force One for the 14-hour flight to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Friday, even as Trump himself is contemplating firing some of them.

  CNN

So, the mood on the plane will be slightly tense, I'm guessing.

He doesn’t really want to go.

In recent days, Mr. Trump has groused to several friends that he is not looking forward to leaving his new White House cocoon for high-profile, high-pressure meetings with dozens of world leaders in unfamiliar settings. At one point, he barked at an aide that he thought his first tour abroad should be only about half as long. He will have to abandon his well-known preference for sleeping in his own bed (or in one at the hotels or golf resorts he owns) as he hops between Saudi Arabia, Israel, Belgium, Italy and the Vatican — all places without a Trump-branded property.

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A visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem, was cut short at his request.

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The president’s packed schedule is filled with opportunities for Mr. Trump to slip up, publicly or privately: back-to-back discussions with the leaders of other nations, many of whom are veteran negotiators well versed in issues they care deeply about.

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But even as he sat with briefing books and stacks of news clippings about global events, Mr. Trump has generally just skimmed through, according to several people familiar with his preparations. Instead, he has focused on the chaos swirling around his White House.

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[I]n private, Mr. Trump’s advisers acknowledge that they are concerned about his off-script eruptions, his tendency to be swayed by flattery and the possibility that foreign leaders may present him with situations he does not know how to handle. They worry he will accidentally commit the United States to something unexpected, and they have tried to caution him about various scenarios.

  NYT

Aside from Saudi Arabia, Trump plans to stop in Israel, the Vatican, Brussels and Sicily during his trip.

  CNN

The Vatican? That could be interesting.

Leaders attending the NATO and G7 summits at the tail end of Trump's trip have been told by organizers to keep their presentations brief -- a request made with Trump's short attention span in mind.

Brief, and accompanied by pictures.

Surely he has help in getting through this trip unscathed.

A minor diplomatic spat emerged between US and Israeli officials Monday while preparing for Trump's visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem -- the first stop by a sitting US president to one of the holiest sites in Judaism. The White House was forced to disavow comments by a US official planning Trump's stop who claimed the Western Wall was in the West Bank and not a part of Israeli territory.

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[The speech on Islam was] being drafted by Trump's policy adviser Stephen Miller, who helped write Trump's convention and inaugural addresses, with input from the large collection of advisers who are helping to plan the trip: son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, McMaster and deputy national security adviser Dina Powell.

  CNN

You might remember Miller from his role in drafting the Muslim travel ban.

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This combined with the fact that Miller is the protege of raging Islamophobe Steve Bannon should bode well for the delivery.

Given how Miller is one of the main scribes behind Trump’s bizarre “American carnage” inaugural address, we’re looking forward to some clever and subtle wordplay.

  Death and Taxes

It may not matter. Trump, under pressure, may simply go off script, as, aside from the inauguration speech, he always does.

“It’s a huge burden on the American psyche to have a president go abroad when a sword of Damocles is hanging over them at home,” said Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University and an expert on the presidency. “It turns our president, instead of representing the best of America on the road, into a traveling can of worms.”

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For his part, Mr. Trump, a confirmed homebody, has expressed dread about the trip, asking aides whether it can be shortened to five days from nine. His advisers concede that the intense schedule — dozens of interactions with leaders from the Middle East and Europe, over a range of delicate issues — could produce unscripted, diplomatically perilous moments.

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Israeli officials expressed alarm about the unwillingness of Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, to publicly affirm that the Western Wall, one of the holiest prayer sites in the Jewish faith, was part of Israel.

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General McMaster dodged when asked whether Mr. Trump believed the Western Wall was in Israel. The question arose after a report on Israeli television that an American official involved in planning the visit had rebuffed a request by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to join Mr. Trump on a visit to the wall because, the official said, it was not in Israel.

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“He’s in real danger of blowing up Jerusalem as an issue that divides rather than unites two of the Abrahamic religions,” said Martin S. Indyk, an American ambassador to Israel under Mr. Clinton. “That part of the visit needs to be handled with extreme care.”

  NYT

Wrong group for that.

[James B. Steinberg, a diplomat for former President Barack Obama] said Mr. Trump’s first trip should not be that difficult since he is meeting largely with allies at a time of relative peace and prosperity.

“A trip like this is an easy trip,” he said. “There’s no crisis. It’s a relationship-building trip. It’s hard for it not to be a success unless something goes wrong.”

  NYT

Unless? I'd say there's a remarkably fair chance of that.