With crises flaring at home and abroad, President Trump on Monday took a surprise detour to Graceland, where he mused about whether he could beat Elvis Presley in a fistfight and signed a replica of one of the king of rock ’n’ roll’s guitars with a golden Sharpie.
Mr. Trump was in Memphis for an event to promote his crackdown in the city, but he took a moment during the appearance to muse about the superstars of old.
“I never met Elvis,” Mr. Trump said. “Everyone said, ‘Did you?’ I met them all. I met Sinatra. I knew all of them. I never met Elvis. Sometimes I feel I should tell a little fib — said that I knew him well.”
“I’m going to go see Graceland after this,” Mr. Trump said, a cache of seized guns stacked in front of him. “I think I’m sure it’s not going to be a very long stay, but I want to see that.”
Later, as he entered the Graceland mansion, Mr. Trump asked: “Who doesn’t love Elvis? Everybody loves Elvis!” A Presidential Medal of Freedom, which Mr. Trump had posthumously awarded to Presley during his first term, was on display nearby.
With Attorney General Pam Bondi and other officials in tow, Mr. Trump spoke at length of his affection for Presley. In what appeared to be an effort to stay on topic, the president claimed that the singer would “be very happy” about the deployment of federal forces in Memphis.
Minutes later, the president was signing a replica of one of Presley’s guitars with a golden Sharpie.
“Just give me a piece of paper to make sure,” said Mr. Trump, who worried about the possibility that he had been given a defective pen that would “ruin the guitar.” After signing the replica, he added that “Biden couldn’t do this,” alluding to Mr. Trump’s fixation on his predecessor’s use of an autopen.
Upon being informed that Presley had been a karate master, Mr. Trump asked an employee of the estate who would win in a fistfight — the singer or the president of the United States.
“Could I have taken him in a fight?” Mr. Trump asked.
The employee demurred, but another staff member suggested that “he would have been respectful enough to let you win.”
Mr. Trump, 79, noted that he had been around long enough to have seen Presley — maybe not in his prime, but “in his semiprime at least,” he said.
Presley was most prolific in music and film in the 1950s and early ’60s, though he remained a cultural force into the 1970s. Mr. Trump was born in 1946.
Throughout the Graceland tour, and at the round table before it, Mr. Trump lamented that he had never met the King.
“For some reason I didn’t know him,” Mr. Trump said. “I knew just about everybody else, knew all of them, but I don’t know why with Elvis.”
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.
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