‘The Event’

Peter Jamison, Carol D. Leonnig, and Paul Schwartzman, reporting for The Washington Post on how Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s refusal to allow their Secret Service detail to use any of the bathrooms in their home forced the agents to look elsewhere in the neighborhood:

The porta-potty was the agency’s initial solution to the protective detail’s dilemma, but it was removed in the face of the neighborhood’s protests. After that, according to the law enforcement officials, the agents began using a bathroom in a garage at the Obamas’ house, which the former president’s protective detail had turned into a command post.

The Obamas did not use the garage, so the extra traffic to and from the command post caused no problem. Yet this solution, too, was short-lived after a Secret Service supervisor from the Trump/Kushner detail left an unpleasant mess in the Obama bathroom at some point before the fall of 2017, according to a person briefed on the event. That prompted the leaders of the Obama detail to ban the agents up the street from ever returning.

This, as they say, is a metaphor.

★ Saturday, 16 January 2021