The White House Oval Office, where its current tenant and host Donald Trump and his famous visitor from Kyiv, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had a historic war of words in full public glare on February 28, is by custom a makeover room after summit meetings, even if they are contentious behind closed doors.
As the 47th President of the United States, Trump is changing the character of this office, built 116 years ago. The lasting image of the Oval Office in my mind is of little Amy Carter roller-skating to its doors with her pet cat, Misty Malarky Ying Yang, in her arms. According to presidential historians, she frequently took her pet cat to the Oval Office to cheer up her father, Jimmy Carter, the 39th US President, who worked there.
Trump has claimed his is the “most transparent administration in US history”. In six weeks as President, Trump has used the Oval Office space to live up to his claim of spreading transparency. The public spat with the President of Ukraine is not the first such experiment. However, it will go down in history as a watershed because Trump may have pulled back the world from the possibility of World War III by telling Zelensky some home truths. Ukraine’s West European backers in the doomed enterprise to degrade and destroy Russia watched in shock as another Dunkirk was in the making inside the Oval Office last Friday.
A day before the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting collapsed into a debacle, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer, cleverly connived to use his time in the Oval Office to the UK’s advantage. Banking on Trump’s penchant for transparency, the Prime Minister pleasantly surprised the President by pulling an envelope out of his coat pocket a few minutes into their meeting. To Trump’s genuine and visible surprise, the letter was from King Charles III inviting Trump to an unprecedented second state visit to London.
British royalty charms Americans. More so, Americans like Trump, who have no hope of being put on the same pedestal – like the Kennedys, for example – and be the American equivalent of Europe’s surviving royalty. Trump read the letter as reporters watched. It elicited praise for Charles with repeated descriptions that the King is “a beautiful man, a wonderful man, a great, great gentleman”. That should have been the way for Zelenskyy to go. Like Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba earlier in the Oval Office. Before arriving, Ishiba rehearsed what he would say to Trump with his predecessor, Fumio Kishida, in Tokyo. He even consulted the widow of another former Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, who played his way into Trump’s heart through golf courses. Ishida came out in flying colours after meeting Trump.
Unlike the Trump-Zelenskyy encounter, the Oval Office is, more often than not, where foreign leaders and their American host declare their admiration for each other. Like Trump said about the UK’s monarch. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh once declared in the Oval Office that “the people of India love” George W Bush, the 43rd US President. On another occasion, I watched a visiting Prime Minister of Slovakia, Mikuláš Dzurinda, who came to the Oval Office in 2006 despite a fractured leg and told Bush, while holding on to a crutch for support: “My leg is broken, but my heart is heavy because we are friends and strong allies.” Bush was happy.
The Oval Office setting is intimate, with a fireplace alight on these chilly days and two chairs in front of it. The room has items of high sentimental value, some of which were rescued from a huge fire in the White House in 1929. Starmer was in the Oval Office for the first time, so Trump showed him around the room. Trump made it a point to tell Starmer that a bust of Winston Churchill had been put back in the Oval Office. The East Room of the White House, where most of the joint press conferences with visiting Indian Prime Ministers have been held, has the most formal setting. It is the largest room in the complex and had been chosen because of the large size of the accompanying Indian delegation and the press corps.
When Narendra Modi first visited Trump in the President’s earlier term, Trump chose the Rose Garden for their joint media interaction. The grapevine said then that First Lady Melania and daughter Ivanka decided on that venue. Both women attended. It was astounding to see the depths of sycophancy in the White House then. Cabinet members lined up to pay obeisance to the President’s family to the point of giving short shrift to the special visitor from New Delhi. Modi’s opening statement in Hindi was so long that everyone sweated profusely in their lounge suits in the June heat. Trump had simultaneous translation equipment in his ear, but it was evident that the President was not listening. The only time he jolted himself to attention was when Modi uttered “Make in India”. Trump was then trying to get entrepreneurs to “Make in USA”. Since then, India has mastered the art of handling this American President with a notoriously short attention span.
Multiple considerations go into the choice of venues for public engagements between US Presidents and their foreign guests. The American side had a hard time when Vajpayee went to see President Bill Clinton once because the Indian side insisted that their joint press conference should be in the Rose Garden with its open space and the beautiful blue sky above. Vajpayee’s height was 1.68 meters. Bill Clinton is 1.89 meters tall. His guest was visibly shorter. The US Protocol Office rehearsed the setting alongside an Indian advance team. They put a footstool behind Vajpayee’s intended lectern so that the Prime Minister did not appear diminutive. The White House carpenter eventually ordered a new footstool since none of those in their stock was of the right height. It is entirely possible that if a Chief of Protocol had been in place, thought would have gone into damage limitation during the Trump-Zelensky meeting. Trump has nominated a Chief of Protocol, but Monica Crowley is yet to be confirmed by the Senate.
(Views are personal)
(kpnayar@gmail.com)
K P Nayar | Strategic analyst