May 20, 2017
Trump's First Presidential Trip Abroad: What Could Go Wrong?
On my first presidential overseas trip I got stranded outside a Russian checkpoint, frantically texting sleeping colleagues about whether I could allow security guards to scan my bag. Later, in a McMansion-style villa on the Gulf of Finland, I staffed congressional calls on the proposed U.S. response to the Syrian chemical-weapons attacks, listened to an electronic accordion band with my boss during a late-night dinner, checked in to my hotel room around 3 a.m., and returned to the summit site four hours later. I helped draft, lost due to shaky IT systems, and then redrafted a joint statement on some crisis of the day, warned colleagues not to use the helpful USB drive “gift,” and returned to my seat on Air Force One hoping to sleep and confronted by a 3-inch stack of paper requiring immediate attention faxed to me by helpful colleagues in DC.
That was a normal day on a normal presidential trip.
Read the full article on The Atlantic.
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