President Donald Trump has turned Oval Office meet and greets with foreign leaders — once expected to be brief, generally dull if cordial photo ops for the press — into WWE-style smackdowns to very publicly dress down foreign leaders for slights, real and perceived.
In the past, the media were ushered into the Oval Office when the president was meeting with a foreign leader for a few minutes at most. The so-called “photo spray” conversations in front of the assembled press corps would be polite, sometimes even bordering on dull. If extended interactions with the press were planned, a press conference would be set up in one of the larger rooms of the White House.
