Official presidential travel is a weighty business. Unlike unofficial travel—for events like Pope Francis’s funeral—official trips are planned months in advance and carefully choreographed to send certain messages and sound selected themes.
Case in point: President Donald Trump’s recent trip to the Persian Gulf. There, in an echo of his first term’s first trip, his travel set up unprecedented U.S. economic and technological engagement with the region in a bold gambit to bind the three wealthiest and most dynamic monarchies in the Persian Gulf to America.
In June 2017, Trump embarked on a historic trip from Riyadh to Jerusalem to Rome to visit the centers of the three Abrahamic faiths: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Air Force One made its first direct flight from Saudi Arabia and Israel, foreshadowing the crowning foreign policy achievement of the…
