What do you give a world leader who has just about everything?
Why not a bald eagle?
Statues of the national bird have become a go-to gift for President Trump, who has handed out several of them during his second term.
On Thursday night at a state dinner at the White House, Mr. Trump presented Xi Jinping, China’s leader, with a statue of a bald eagle perched on a branch atop a podium.
“The bald eagle is a national symbol of the United States and an embodiment of the free and soaring spirit of America,” Mr. Trump said. “We hope it’ll find a nice place, a wonderful place, in Beijing.” (Mr. Xi gave the United States two — living — pandas.)
Mr. Xi is the latest world leader to receive such a present from the American president.
Last year, Mr. Trump sent a bald eagle statue to Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s president, as an inauguration gift, the Polish news media reported. (It wasn’t totally out of the blue: Mr. Trump had backed Mr. Nawrocki, a nationalist and former boxer, in the election. Eagles are also a national symbol in Poland, though a different species.)
On a visit to Scotland last July, Mr. Trump gave the first minister, John Swinney, a bald eagle figurine. In exchange, the Scottish leader presented Mr. Trump with gifts that were somewhat more personal: a century-old census record pertaining to his Scottish-born mother and an 1853 document registering the marriage of his great-grandparents.
The next month, during a summit in Alaska with President Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Trump planned to give the Russian leader a desk statue of a bald eagle, according to printouts that NPR reported had been left behind at a hotel near the summit. The White House did not immediately answer an emailed question on Friday about whether Mr. Trump in fact gave Mr. Putin that gift.
Certainly, Mr. Trump does not rely only on eagles when it comes to his diplomatic gift-giving. In April, for example, when King Charles III of Britain visited Washington, Mr. Trump gave him a framed copy of a letter written in 1785 by John Adams, then the U.S. ambassador to Britain, to John Jay, the American secretary of foreign affairs.
And the bald eagle — a symbol of the United States since it first appeared at the center of the Great Seal adopted by the Continental Congress in 1782 — has been a token of choice for other presidents.
When President Gerald R. Ford visited the Vatican in 1975, he gave Pope Paul VI a small sculpture of the bird. “Ah, the eagle, symbol of liberty,” the pope was reported to have said.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan gave Prime Minister Mohammed Karim Lamrani of Morocco an eagle statue when he visited Washington. State Department documents at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library describe the statue as a “crystal eagle with wings outspread in red leather presentation case with Presidential seal in gold leaf on the top.”
The same year, Mr. Reagan made an official state visit to China and presented Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader, with a crystal bald eagle. It now can be found at the National Museum of China in Beijing.
Exchanging gifts between world leaders is a longstanding custom but a delicate one. The State Department maintains a Gift Office, under the Office of the Chief of Protocol, that not only logs diplomatic gifts received by the president and other senior officials but, it says, “also helps select the gifts presented to foreign dignitaries.” The gifts may be personal or symbolic, or display American craftsmanship.
It can, of course, be difficult to keep coming up with new ideas, especially in a second term. But as with all gift-giving, variety is important.
“If someone stays in power for many years,” Selwa Roosevelt, a former U.S. chief of protocol, told The New York Times in 1984, “you don’t want to keep giving him the same eagle.”
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