Two sides of the same presidency played out simultaneously along the National Mall on Thursday afternoon.
At one end, President Trump was telling the world to give peace a chance at a meeting with African leaders. It was possible, he said, “to begin healing old wounds and transcending past differences and creating a future where every child of God can live in dignity, prosperity and peace.”
At the other end of the mall, top officials from his Defense Department were being grilled by lawmakers about potential war crimes. Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said video of one of the administration’s lethal boat strikes was “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.”
Washington in the Trump era is filled with contradictions, but the cognitive dissonance on display Thursday was particularly acute.
The first setting was the U.S. Institute of Peace, which was created at the height of the Cold War when Ronald Reagan was president. It’s one of those wonky and obscure Washington entities along that mall; it was largely overlooked until Mr. Trump’s DOGE team took a chain saw to the place earlier this year.
On Wednesday, workers showed up to the building to slap some new large, silvery letters onto its exterior. Its new name: “DONALD J. TRUMP UNITED STATES INSTITUTE OF PEACE.” (The office of Gov. Gavin Newsom, the California Democrat, promptly mocked the rebranding, posting an image of the building with the words “KFC INSTITUTE FOR VEGANISM.”)
The president went around the room, warmly shouting out officials from Angola, Burundi and Kenya. When he spotted the vice president of Uganda, who was wearing a yellow dress, Mr. Trump complimented her look. “You just stand out, for a lot of reasons,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”
To the leaders of Rwanda and Congo, he said: “They had stories to tell me that were incredible, really fascinating in so many different ways. Sad and beautiful. Both sad and beautiful, and today makes them beautiful.”
He made no mention of Somalia, another African country, whose people he described earlier this week as “garbage.”
