On the National Mall, where Trump’s new tinge of paint made its way up the basin of the Reflecting Pool, three video-game consoles had been installed with an interactive game called Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell. It allowed players to simulate the Iran war. A few National Guard members took turns trying out the arcade game for a couple of minutes. I made my way downtown as one of the Police Week convoys sped in the opposite direction. Outside night clubs on Connecticut Avenue, girls hung out of the sunroofs of idling cars, cheering on the cops. Dozens of classic police cars from various departments were parked in front of the White House. A few men in red “Make Copcars Great Again” hats posed with the vehicles.
Inside the White House complex, a slightly languid mood, typical during a President’s foreign trip, prevailed. “I had lots of weird week-long, empty, ghostly West Wing days,” an official from a previous Administration recalled to me. “The structuring principle of everybody’s day is gone. Getting decisions out of the travelling crew is extremely difficult.” These were days for doctors’ appointments, haircuts, long lunches, coming in late and leaving early. “There’s also the question of, actually, can the government function normally for a week because the chaos has gone elsewhere?” the former official said.
On Wednesday, Vance and Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, were in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building talking about hospice. They invited reporters to the Indian Treaty Room, an ornate space where Dwight Eisenhower hosted the first televised Presidential press conference, in 1955; the walls are lined with panels of French and Italian marble, interspersed with cast-iron moldings of dolphins. “As you know, the President just landed in China a few hours ago,” Vance said. “I don’t travel outside of the country with the President. So, on days like today, I sometimes feel like Macaulay Culkin in ‘Home Alone.’ I walk into the White House and it’s very quiet and no one’s there, and it takes me a second to realize exactly what’s going on.” He paused, expecting laughter.
A dozen staffers from Vance’s fraud task force, a recently instated committee purportedly aimed at sniffing out misuse of federal funds, filed in. Oz announced a national moratorium on new hospice and home-health-care agencies, where, he said, “we see a lot of fraud.” I stood next to Gorka, the counterterrorism official, who was tweeting and looking at responses to the posts regarding his comments on Trump’s “if I die” letter. “It’s hard to get the whole machinery of government moving,” Andrew Ferguson, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, who, with Vance, runs the fraud task force, said. Oz applauded the group’s “spirit and desire to harness a group of stallions”: they were saving his vulnerable department, which he described as “a large rhino that can be stabbed effortlessly by foreign governments, syndicated criminal entities, and smaller-time operators who can take advantage of a system.” The group took questions on topics such as how many dead Americans were fraudulently receiving food-stamp benefits.
The night Trump left for China, he had posted on Truth Social about all the business leaders travelling there with him. “It is an Honor to have Jensen, Elon, Tim Apple, Larry Fink, Stephen Schwarzmann, Kelly Ortberg (Boeing), Brian Sikes (Cargill), Jane Fraser (Citi), Larry Culp (GE Aerospace), David Solomon (Goldman Sachs), Sanjay Mehrotra (Micron), Cristiano Amon (Qualcomm), and many others journeying to the Great Country of China where I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinction, to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic, and help bring the People’s Republic to an even higher level!” Jensen Huang, the founder and C.E.O. of Nvidia, was reportedly added to the trip at the last minute; he boarded Air Force One during a refuelling stop in Alaska, carrying his own bag. Brett Ratner, who directed “Melania,” a recent documentary about the First Lady, came along in part to scout locations for “Rush Hour IV.” (The project of turning Melania into a celebrity in China is also apparently under way. “Maybe releasing the movie there will be a deliverable?” the official mused.) Trump’s son Eric, who runs the Trump Organization, also joined; Trump owns dozens of trademarks in China. When one former diplomat commented on X that there appeared to be no China experts on the plane to advise the President ahead of his meetings with Xi, the White House communications director, Steve Cheung, responded, “You have no idea what you’re talking about you slope-brained, mouth breathing moron. Stop calling yourself an expert in anything, aside from sucking.”) Upon arrival at Beijing Capital International Airport, some C.E.O.s got off the plane with the Cabinet members, descending from stairs that led out onto a red carpet, as opposed to following the convention of exiting from the back of the plane, with staff. There were other questions of protocol. China is one of the hardest settings for secure communication. Those on the travelling delegation are expected to leave their personal devices at home; they get burner laptops and phones. U.S. digital-lockdown practice requires even the President to leave his normal phone behind. Had Trump really handed his in?
