Art Of Bearding Donald Trump In His Oval Den

The Oval Office setting is intimate, with a fireplace alight on chilly days. The room has items of high sentimental value, some of which were rescued from a huge fire in the White House in 1929

- K P NAYAR

HE White House Oval Office, where its current tenant and host Donald Trump and his famous visitor from Kyiv, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had a historic war of words in full public glare on February 28, is by custom a makeover room after summit meetings, even if they are contentious behind closed doors.

As the 47th President of the United States, Trump is changing the character of this office, built 116 years ago. The lasting image of the Oval Office in my mind is of little Amy Carter rollerskating to its doors with her pet cat, Misty Malarky Ying Yang, in her arms. According to presidential historians, she frequently took her pet cat to the Oval Office to cheer up her father, Jimmy Carter, the 39th US President, who worked there.

Trump has claimed his is the "most transparent administration in US history". In six weeks as President, Trump has used the Oval Office space to live up to his claim of spreading transparency. The public spat with the President of Ukraine is not the first such experiment. However, it will go down in history as a watershed because Trump may have pulled back the world from the possibility of World War III by telling Zelensky some home truths. Ukraine's West European backers in the doomed enterprise to degrade and destroy Russia watched in shock as another Dunkirk was in the making inside the Oval Office last Friday.