When an arborist named Christopher Tattersall walked out of his house in Glen Arm, Md., before sunrise Wednesday, he had no idea he would soon be thrust into the most high-stakes moment of Donald Trump’s second presidency.
As the world waited to find out if Mr. Trump was really going to go through with bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, the president emerged Wednesday morning and chose to give his fullest remarks on the subject yet while standing with a crew of workers who had been contracted to do a job on the White House grounds.
Mr. Tattersall was there in his bright orange shirt and his climbing harness, hovering just over the president’s left shoulder, shocked to find himself cast as an unwitting extra on the geopolitical stage.
Any other president might have discussed such matters in an Oval Office address or in a formal news conference. Mr. Trump did it while hanging with a crew of guys at a job site in his backyard.
“I didn’t really know what to think,” Mr. Tattersall said later that day. “I was just there, in the moment you know, and I got the president next to me giving a worldwide press conference, which I thought was pretty cool.”
His adventure was set into motion about two months ago, when some friends who own a flagpole installation company called to tell him about a crazy job coming up: The White House was looking to erect two 100-foot flagpoles, one on the South Lawn and the other out front. His buddies would need some help rigging up the crane. Could he possibly come along?
Mr. Tattersall is 40 years old. He’s got a wife who’s a flower farmer and a 3-year-old daughter and a small business taking down trees, which he started with nothing but a trailer about 10 years ago. He is also a “cat rescue specialist” who has rescued “close to 100 cats” from trees. He doesn’t know much about politics nor does he care to. He didn’t vote in last year’s election. He scheduled a vacation to Thailand that week and got away from all that noise. But, hell, he thought to himself, it’s the freaking White House! He agreed to help.
At 3 a.m. Wednesday, he jumped into his 2004 Ford F-550 pickup truck, got a coffee from 7-Eleven, and drove down to Washington. By 7 a.m., he was on the South Lawn, helping to set up a crane. A few hours into the job, the crew looked up and saw the president of the United States strolling toward them. A mob of shouting reporters and pushy cameramen trailed in his wake.
To the extent that such a thing exists, this was no ordinary day at the Trump White House. Over the course of the previous 24 hours, the president had been threatening to drop a 30,000-pound bomb on Iran’s most precious nuclear facility, buried deep in a mountainside. He’d made a series of menacing social media posts, telling everyone the Iranian capital to “immediately evacuate” and musing about assassinating the Ayatollah. Then he gathered with his advisers in the Situation Room. Mr. Trump’s political party erupted into full on civil war as the capital convulsed with talk of regime change in Iran.
And then suddenly, there was Mr. Trump, on the lawn and ready to talk. He approached Mr. Tattersall and the rest of the guys, shook their hands, turned around and began to hold forth about striking Iran. “I may do it,” he said. “I may not do it. I mean nobody knows what I’m going to do.”
Mr. Tattersall listened closely while the president continued to talk about whether it was too late for the Iranians to negotiate and about nuclear annihilation. The fate of the Middle East hung in the balance with millions of people from Tel Aviv to Tehran looking to this one man to tell them what might come next.
What was strange about this mise en scène was the way Mr. Trump kept switching modes. He’d be deadly serious one minute and the next he’d be trying to get a laugh out of his new buddies, telling jokes and kidding them about whether they were in the country illegally. The crew nodded and laughed along gamely, if a bit confusedly at times.
Word War III might be imminent, but this was just guys bein’ guys.
At one point, Mr. Trump went on an extended tear about Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve. “I had no clue who he was talking about,” Mr. Tattersall said. “I was basically just there as a fly on the wall, waiting for him to wrap it up and then we could get back to work.”
Mr. Trump kept on spitting out headlines about Harvard, Vladimir Putin, Pakistan and India, and even the legal travails of Harvey Weinstein. “It was kind of a blur,” Mr. Tattersall said.
At another point, Mr. Trump made a crude joke about raising the flagpole. “They call it a lifting,” he said. “They also use another word, but I’m not going to use that word. Do you know what that is? It starts with an ‘E.’ You know what the word is? If I ever used it, I’d be run out of town.”
The guys knew what he meant. “I’ve worked on construction sites, so I’ve heard way worse jokes,” Mr. Tattersall said with a laugh. “But yeah, I knew where he was going with that.”
Gesturing at the crew, Mr. Trump turned to the reporters and said, “Let’s see how real people work. These are real people. You’re not real people.”
Mr. Tattersall reflected on the diplomatic uproar he witnessed Wednesday. “I thought he handled it very well, actually,” he said of his president. And as for what he personally thinks about dropping the big bomb on Iran? “I don’t want to see anybody getting hurt,” Mr. Tattersall said. “I wish we could all just get along.”
After the flagpole had gone up, Mr. Trump went back inside the White House and soon he was talking more about Iran while surrounded by an entirely new cast of unwitting characters. A soccer team had come to see him in the Oval Office that afternoon. The players looked stunned to be standing around the Resolute Desk while Mr. Trump talked of war.
By that time, Mr. Tattersall was already in his truck on his way home to Maryland, tired and a bit wet after a long day of working in the heat and the rain. But suddenly it didn’t seem so bad.
“I’m sure it’s a tough job to be the president,” he said.
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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