Of all the splashy announcements that marked President Trump’s trip to the Middle East last month, there was one that delighted him in a way that was different from the rest. It had nothing to do with money or military might.
It had to do with cats. Big, rare, glamorous, killer cats.
Perhaps you missed it; there was a lot going on. When the White House put out its “fact sheet” highlighting the various investments it claimed to have secured in Saudi Arabia, there was one line, buried way down low, that stood out: the “creation of a dedicated exhibit in Washington” for “the endangered Arabian leopard.”
The Smithsonian had spent months trying to get its paws on a pair of Arabian leopards, and now the Saudis are agreeing to send two of them to live at the National Zoo as part of a conservation program. A proper habitat will need to be constructed, and the exact pair of leopards has yet to be chosen, but if all goes according to plan, the cats will make it to the capital city while Mr. Trump is still in office.
Brandie Smith, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, spoke briefly with Mr. Trump about all this and said that he was “very interested in the leopards as a species.” Most of all, she said, he wanted to learn about the leopards’ “personality.”
Ms. Smith traveled to Saudi Arabia last month for the announcement. She was there at the royal palace in Riyadh when Mr. Trump arrived on the first day of his trip. Foreign dignitaries, business titans and muckety-mucks of various other stripes had lined up to shake hands with Mr. Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the kingdom. When the two leaders reached the end of this very long line, they met the zookeeper. She explained to them why she was there.
“As soon as I said leopards, I saw both of them, their attention popped,” she recalled in a recent interview from her office back at the National Zoo. She said that Mr. Trump had many questions about the leopards: “Like: ‘How big are they? What do they eat? How dangerous are they?’ That kind of stuff.”