Two sides of the same presidency played out simultaneously along the National Mall on Thursday afternoon.
At one end, President Trump was telling the world to give peace a chance at a meeting with African leaders. It was possible, he said, “to begin healing old wounds and transcending past differences and creating a future where every child of God can live in dignity, prosperity and peace.”
At the other end of the mall, top officials from his Defense Department were being grilled by lawmakers about potential war crimes. Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said video of one of the administration’s lethal boat strikes was “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.”
Washington in the Trump era is filled with contradictions, but the cognitive dissonance on display Thursday was particularly acute.
The first setting was the U.S. Institute of Peace, which was created at the height of the Cold War when Ronald Reagan was president. It’s one of those wonky and obscure Washington entities along that mall; it was largely overlooked until Mr. Trump’s DOGE team took a chain saw to the place earlier this year.
On Wednesday, workers showed up to the building to slap some new large, silvery letters onto its exterior. Its new name: “DONALD J. TRUMP UNITED STATES INSTITUTE OF PEACE.” (The office of Gov. Gavin Newsom, the California Democrat, promptly mocked the rebranding, posting an image of the building with the words “KFC INSTITUTE FOR VEGANISM.”)
The president went around the room, warmly shouting out officials from Angola, Burundi and Kenya. When he spotted the vice president of Uganda, who was wearing a yellow dress, Mr. Trump complimented her look. “You just stand out, for a lot of reasons,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”
To the leaders of Rwanda and Congo, he said: “They had stories to tell me that were incredible, really fascinating in so many different ways. Sad and beautiful. Both sad and beautiful, and today makes them beautiful.”
He made no mention of Somalia, another African country, whose people he described earlier this week as “garbage.”
Mr. Trump was there to preside over what he described as a peace deal between Rwanda and Congo. Experts on the conflict have cautioned that the agreement is symbolic at this point and has done little to quell the killing. But Mr. Trump, who is determined to score a Nobel Prize, cast the agreement as a major achievement “where so many others have failed.”
The tone was very different on Capitol Hill.
Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Frank M. Bradley, a top Special Operations commander, were there on Thursday to meet behind closed doors with senior members of Congress who are concerned over the administration’s strikes on boats it has accused of carrying drugs. Lawmakers were shown video of a Sept. 2 attack; a follow-up strike on survivors at sea has been at the center of growing furor about whether the Trump administration has committed war crimes.
It wasn’t just Democrats who were concerned; Republicans, including Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, have raised serious questions about the strikes.
The Trump administration has argued that the strikes are lawful because the president “determined” that the United States is in a formal armed conflict against drug cartels — though Congress has not authorized one — and that the people the administration suspects of running drugs are “combatants.” But the military is not supposed to target civilians who do not pose an imminent threat of violence, even if they are suspected criminals.
Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have defended the strikes even as they have distanced themselves from responsibility for the missile strike that killed the initial survivors of the Sept. 2 attack. And Mr. Hegseth has been cavalier in the face of the uproar. He even posted a meme of a made-up cover of the Franklin children’s storybook series depicting the beloved turtle firing a rocket at drug-smuggling boats. “For your Christmas wish list…” Mr. Hegseth wrote.
The president who carved his name into a peace institute and who talks about how badly he wants a Nobel Prize is the same president who has members of his own party worried about the way he is conducting deadly strikes in the Caribbean.
After night fell, Mr. Trump was back along the mall for a Christmas tree lighting at the Ellipse, the park that sits between the White House and the Washington Monument.
“We just settled another war today, you saw that with Rwanda and the Congo,” he said excitedly. “We just settled it today. That was a big one.”
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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