POLITICS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “For months, President Trump’s senior advisers had planned his first foreign trip with hopes of investing it with historic grandeur: a tour of the world’s three great monotheistic religions, capped by an address to the Muslim world in Saudi Arabia that will serve as Mr. Trump’s answer to the speech former President Barack Obama gave in Cairo in 2009.
Now, though, a cascade of damaging disclosures about the president and his relationship with Russia has shredded the White House’s narrative. Mr. Trump will go abroad on Friday [5-19-17] less as an anti-Obama figure than as a latter-day Richard M. Nixon or Bill Clinton — a wounded president fleeing political storms at home for an uncertain welcome overseas…
While administration officials said they were not worried that Mr. Trump’s disclosure of secret information to the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, would burn America’s intelligence-sharing relationships with Israel and other partners, they acknowledged it would be a distraction on a trip that will have no shortage of other complexities.”
-Mark Landler, “A New Goal for President Trump’s First Foreign Trip: Damage Control,” The New York Times online, May 16, 2017