As the Trump-Pence White House crashes and burns around him, Donald Trump is facing his first foreign trip and boy howdy, does he not 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.
A nine-day trip out of the country is four days longer than Trump usually goes between visiting one of his own properties. A nine-day trip means nine days of being in countries that find him appalling and aren't going to be praising him in their morning television programs. His routine will be disrupted. There's no red button to tell his hosts to bring him another Coke. Being the president is hard.
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.
The odds that he's going to make an unannounced trip to his Scottish golf course before heading home? About 150 percent.
The New York Times' sources aren't shy in admitting that they've been having a hard time keeping Trump focused on, well, anything, and that preparations for the trip haven't been going well to begin with. ("In an attempt to capture his interest, aides threaded Mr. Trump’s own name through the paragraphs of one of the two-page memos they wrote for him.")
And while Trump doesn't want to go because Donald is a lazy, lazy man, the current half-dozen White House tire fires have rendered the trip even more dangerous for Team Trump than it was back when all they had to worry about were the daily-expected humiliating diplomatic fiascos launched by their boss. Most of his core advisers are tagging along for at least portions of the trip—nobody dares go nine days without sucking up to the boss lest he forget who they are on his return—and that means the team itself will be hopelessly scattered and otherwise preoccupied as these fires burn around them.
Will Donald come back? Will he request asylum in some other country that better suits his own interests? Will he cancel halfway through, demanding to be dropped off at Mar-a-Lago? Will his planned speech on how Muslims in Muslim nations can do Islam better—crafted in part by his team of white nationalist nuts—result in worldwide protests?
We don't have a clue what's going to happen, but it's pretty much a given he can only make things worse, not better. By this time next week Republican leaders Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are going to have to invent whole new ways of pretending they've never heard of the man.
