Of all the splashy announcements that marked President Trump’s trip to the Middle East last month, there was one that delighted him in a way that was different from the rest. It had nothing to do with money or military might.
It had to do with cats. Big, rare, glamorous, killer cats.
Perhaps you missed it; there was a lot going on. When the White House put out its “fact sheet” highlighting the various investments it claimed to have secured in Saudi Arabia, there was one line, buried way down low, that stood out: the “creation of a dedicated exhibit in Washington” for “the endangered Arabian leopard.”
The Smithsonian had spent months trying to get its paws on a pair of Arabian leopards, and now the Saudis are agreeing to send two of them to live at the National Zoo as part of a conservation program. A proper habitat will need to be constructed, and the exact pair of leopards has yet to be chosen, but if all goes according to plan, the cats will make it to the capital city while Mr. Trump is still in office.
Brandie Smith, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, spoke briefly with Mr. Trump about all this and said that he was “very interested in the leopards as a species.” Most of all, she said, he wanted to learn about the leopards’ “personality.”
Ms. Smith traveled to Saudi Arabia last month for the announcement. She was there at the royal palace in Riyadh when Mr. Trump arrived on the first day of his trip. Foreign dignitaries, business titans and muckety-mucks of various other stripes had lined up to shake hands with Mr. Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the kingdom. When the two leaders reached the end of this very long line, they met the zookeeper. She explained to them why she was there.
“As soon as I said leopards, I saw both of them, their attention popped,” she recalled in a recent interview from her office back at the National Zoo. She said that Mr. Trump had many questions about the leopards: “Like: ‘How big are they? What do they eat? How dangerous are they?’ That kind of stuff.”
Mr. Trump does not own pets and, unlike his sons, he does not hunt big game. But he has shown a particular fascination for animals at the top of the food chain. Last year, he talked constantly on the campaign trail about shark attacks. While campaigning in 2015, he was nearly mauled by a bald eagle he posed with in Trump Tower for a Time magazine photo shoot. (“This bird is seriously dangerous but beautiful!” he chirped after the raptor lunged at his head.)
During his first term, Mr. Trump asked aides about dropping snakes and alligators into a hypothetical moat he wanted built on America’s southern border. He also reportedly became fixated on the viciousness of badgers, badgering his former chief of staff Reince Priebus, who is from the Badger State, as Wisconsin is known, about whether badgers were mean or friendly, according to “Sinking in the Swamp,” a book about the first Trump administration. (Mr. Priebus did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
The Arabian leopards are unlikely to disappoint. They are ferocious, meat-eating beasts. They are, however, the smallest of all leopard species.
About half a million years ago, they slinked east out of Africa, over the Nile and into the Arabian Peninsula. As they prowled the high and craggy places around the Gulf of Aqaba, feasting upon horned goats, the fur around their black rosettes gradually turned the colors of sand and stone. And they shrank a bit.
Over the centuries, the Arabian leopard appears as a near-mythical creature in art, history, literature and scripture. The Bible’s Song of Solomon 4:8 spoke of “the mountains of leopards” in that part of the world. Marauding Romans trapped the desert cats and brought them back to fight in their gladiator arenas.
“I heard a leopard cough somewhere on the slopes above us,” the British explorer Wilfred Thesiger wrote in “Arabian Sands,” his 1959 book about embedding with the Bedouins. “Others heard it too and Musallim called out, ‘Did you hear that? It is a leopard.’ I found it difficult to sleep…”
There are believed to be fewer than 200 of these cats alive today, some of which live in captivity in Saudi Arabia. The Smithsonian said that there are estimated to be only 120 remaining in the wild. The last time one was spotted in the wild in the kingdom was 2014; it died after eating a poisoned camel carcass put out by a Saudi shepherd to protect his herd from other predators.
Whichever two leopards the Saudis choose to send to the National Zoo will need to be “an ideal genetic pair,” Ms. Smith said, “so that they would breed.”
The cats’ arrival would represent the most high-profile exchange of charismatic megafauna since Chairman Mao sent two giant pandas to Richard Nixon’s Washington.
“They’re much cooler than pandas, let’s face it,” Roger J. Stone Jr., a Nixon protégé who went on to become one of Mr. Trump’s earliest political Svengalis, said of the Arabian leopards. “They’re sleek, they’re dangerous and they’re stylish,” Mr. Stone said. “It conjures up, you know, fashion imagery.”
Indeed. From the Italian socialite Marchesa Luisa Casati strolling with big cats on a leash to Katharine Hepburn walking a pet leopard in Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby,” such creatures have historically conferred glamour and a certain camp aura. The president’s wife, Melania, a former fashion model known to be Sphinx-like, recently wore a full leopard-print look to make a speech at the State Department. Could she possibly walk the Arabian leopards on a leash through the Rose Garden, like in a Cartier advertisement?
“No, no, no, you definitely wouldn’t want to do that,” cautioned Ms. Smith, the zookeeper. “They won’t be tame in any way. Leopards are going to behave like leopards.”
One passionate Trump supporter who is most intrigued by the leopards is Joe Exotic, the former Oklahoma zoo owner known as the “Tiger King” and whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage. He was recently sentenced to 21 years in prison for a failed murder-for-hire plot against an animal-rights activist named Carole Baskin.
“Leopards can be very unpredictable,” Mr. Maldonado-Passage said knowingly in a phone interview conducted last week from a prison in Fort Worth. He has fed and bred many species of big cat, but even for him, the Arabian leopard is an awe-inspiring specimen. “I’ve never seen one in real life, just in photographs,” he said excitedly.
He also had an idea for the president.
“I think it would be absolutely amazing if he would put some endangered cats like that around the White House,” Mr. Maldonado-Passage said. “I’ve never been there. I don’t know how big the Rose Garden is, but I would imagine you could build a pretty nice size complex” if it extended to the South Lawn.
He pointed out that the crown prince of Dubai “has his own private zoo in his backyard.” Mr. Maldonado-Passage claims to have sold the prince two “liliger” cubs; that is a two-parts-lion, one-part-tiger crossbreed. He added: “Putin loves tigers. You always see him with pictures of young tigers. So why shouldn’t Trump have them?”
The day that The New York Times spoke to Mr. Maldonado-Passage, Mr. Trump happened to be pardoning some other imprisoned reality television stars. Mr. Maldonado-Passage had heard the news. It seemed very much to be on his mind as he made the case for letting the Arabian leopards roam the White House grounds.
“Let me out,” Mr. Maldonado-Passage pleaded, “and I’ll come take care of ’em!”
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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