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There are plenty of experienced diplomats whom Donald Trump could’ve turned to for tackling complex foreign negotiations, but the president instead tapped Steve Witkoff to serve as his Middle East envoy and the White House representative who’d help end the war in Ukraine.
As The New York Times recently reported, the choice “prompted head-scratching in diplomatic circles.” The report added, “Many foreign officials had never heard of Mr. Witkoff, a billionaire New York real estate developer who has known Mr. Trump since the mid-1980s. The president’s new envoy not only lacked expertise in the region apart from some business dealings, he had no diplomatic experience.”
Occasionally, it shows. “I underestimated the complications in the job, that’s for sure,” Witkoff told Tucker Carlson last week. “I think I was a little bit quixotic in the way that I thought about it. Like, I’m going to roll in there on a white horse. And no, it was anything but that, you know.”
Complicating matters is the envoy’s apparent naivete. The Washington Post reported on Witkoff’s recent experiences during his second visit to Russia in mid-March.
Witkoff said Putin gave him a “beautiful portrait” of Trump that Putin had commissioned by a “leading” Russian artist, and asked that Witkoff bring the painting back to the White House. Trump “was clearly touched by it,” Witkoff said, sharing the story as part of a broader conversation about Russia-Ukraine negotiations. “So this is the kind of connection that we’ve been able to reestablish through, by the way, a simple word called communication.”
This is a difficult perspective to take seriously. Indeed, it sounds an awful lot like two political amateurs — with backgrounds in real estate, instead of governing — having been played by a Russian leader and former KGB agent with decades of experience.
It also offered a timely example of the degree to which the White House’s recent events can be seen through the lens of wall décor.
For example, Trump appeared preoccupied this week with a years-old portrait of himself that was hanging in Colorado’s state capitol building. It came on the heels of a mural of Anthony Fauci being removed from a National Institutes of Health hallway.
It also dovetailed with Trump taking great pride in putting a copy of the Declaration of Independence on the wall in the Oval Office.
Alas, the list keeps going. For example, the day after Trump’s second inauguration, NBC News reported that the Pentagon had taken down a portrait of retired Gen. Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had become a frequent target of Trump condemnations. Soon after, the Defense Department also took down a different Milley portrait, which recognized him as a former chief of staff of the Army.
Soon after, CNN, The Washington Examiner and Stars and Stripes, among other outlets, reported that the Pentagon also had taken down a portrait of former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who had repeatedly clashed with his former boss as well. (After working side by side with Trump, Esper concluded that the president was “unfit for office,” a national security threat and a “threat to democracy.”)
In case that weren’t quite enough, after Trump met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House last month, reporters noticed that a framed copy of a New York Post cover, featuring the president’s mug shot taken after his criminal indictment in Georgia, had been placed on a wall just outside the Oval Office. (White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino later confirmed the presence of the photo in a social media video.)
I’ve followed plenty of presidents and their teams over the years, but I can’t remember the last time there were quite so many stories about wall décor emanating from a new administration.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.