It’s your classic dilemma.
You are president of the United States, and you’ve started a war in Iran that’s not going your way. Polls show that most Americans are unhappy with the war and are blaming you for how much more expensive everything has become as a result of it. Your oldest son is getting married this weekend. The wedding is reportedly in the Bahamas.
Do you go?
“That’s one I can’t win on,” President Trump mused from behind the Resolute Desk on Thursday after a reporter asked if he was going to make it.
It was Mr. Trump who broke the news at a White House holiday party back in December that his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was engaged to a Palm Beach socialite named Bettina Anderson. The two are set to marry at a ceremony this Memorial Day weekend.
“He’d like me to go,” the father of the groom said Thursday, “but it’s going to be just a small little private affair, and I’m going to try and make it.” (A representative for Donald Trump Jr. did not return requests for comment.)
But there was that little issue of the war he’d started halfway across the world.
“I’m in the midst — I said, ‘You know, this is not good timing for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things,’” he said.
Mr. Trump can often be quite unfazed about the sort of optics that would sting another president — “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” is an actual sentence he spoke last week — but this one evidently stretched the limits. “If I do attend, I get killed,” he said. “If I don’t attend, I get killed — by the fake news, of course, I’m talking about.”
When Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president, his granddaughter Naomi Biden threw a big White House wedding. She posed with Jill Biden, then the first lady, for the cover of Vogue. There’s a long history of presidential children and relatives using the White House for weddings.
Mr. Trump plays the role of patriarch to a dynastic clan of Trump children and spouses. He relies on his daughter Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, as one of his principal negotiators on the world stage. He pushed the wife of his son Eric to become a party boss at the Republican National Committee. The husband of his daughter Tiffany is involved in Trump family deals. And in his second term, the president named Don Jr.’s former flame, Kimberly Guilfoyle, as ambassador to Greece.
And now he’s gaining a new daughter-in-law.
“He’s got a very — a person who I’ve known for a long time,” Mr. Trump said Thursday of his son’s bride-to-be. “And hopefully they’re going to have a great marriage.”
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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