FRANCE/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “It wasn’t long after the oak tree arrived on the South Lawn of the White House, a gift from a World War I battlefield in France, that it suddenly disappeared. The oak, which was supposed to be a symbol of a longstanding French-American alliance, had been placed in quarantine, because it was a living thing imported to the United States, the French ambassador said. It would be replanted, he said. But that didn’t happen. Now, more than a year later, it appears we know why. The European sessile oak had died, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, confirmed. ‘It’s not a tragedy,’ Mr. Macron said in an interview in Geneva with the Swiss broadcaster RTS. ‘One shouldn’t see symbols where there are none.’”
–Mihir Zaveri, “Oak Tree Given to Trump by French President Has Died, Official Says,” The New York Times online, June 11, 2019