For this week’s Letter from Trump’s Washington, Antonia Hitchens is filling in for Susan B. Glasser.

The endless motorcades and wail of sirens in Washington this week made it seem as if the President were travelling non-stop around the city, or receiving a bevy of foreign dignitaries. As it happened, it was National Police Week, and the ceremonial convoys were carrying the families of police officers who had been killed in the line of duty. Donald Trump was leaving for China. Some supporters expressed concern for his safety. (“I don’t feel good about President Trump going to China tomorrow,” Glenn Beck wrote on X. “I pray everything goes well, but I wish I trusted the Secret Service.”) Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s counterterrorism chief, announced that Trump kept a letter in the Resolute Desk in which, in the President’s words, he provided “very firm instructions” for what Vice-President J. D. Vance should do if a foreign nation like China were to “take him out.”

Quotidian rhythms continued. On Tuesday evening, on the steps of the Capitol, House members made their way down the stairs after casting their votes, some alone, others flanked by staff or trailed by a Hill reporter. Cars had materialized to collect them; it had the feel of a school-pickup line. “How was your recess?” I heard someone ask. (Congress was on break last week.) “Where do you normally pick the congresswoman up?” a staffer said into her phone, trying to find her boss’s driver. One member lit a cigar.

Air Force One took off from Joint Base Andrews, carrying Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Sean Hannity, and Elon Musk, among others accompanying the President to a two-day summit with China’s President, Xi Jinping. Hegseth had started his day on the Hill, facing questions in a budget hearing about the cost of the war in Iran. Rubio was travelling in a tracksuit called the Nike Tech Venezuela, an homage to Nicolás Maduro’s outfit when he was captured, in the middle of the night, by U.S. forces in Caracas and taken to a jail in Brooklyn. The culinary team on Air Force One served beef stir fry and fortune cookies to the delegation.

Outside the Capitol, House Speaker Mike Johnson descended the stairs to a lectern. He and the House Law Enforcement Caucus were holding a candlelight vigil for the fallen police officers. “At this moment in our country and its history, it’s not lost on anyone that we’re living through some troubling times,” Johnson said. Behind him, members of Congress held plastic candles for the cameras. “There is a battle right now between good and evil,” Johnson continued. “We all feel it.” He called up a teen-ager named Chloe Rice-Timmins, who talked about the day she found out that her stepfather, Tyler, had been shot and killed while trying to recover a stolen car; he had never missed one of her soccer games. A family playing with their kids on the Capitol lawn stopped to watch the vigil. Chloe’s mother went up to the lectern and described taking Tyler off a ventilator in the hospital. Two staffers next to me whispered to each other, catching up about their week off. A Capitol Police officer with a long gun stood in the background, in between the columns outside the entrance to the House chamber, looking out over the Hill. As the sun set, Johnson quoted Proverbs 28:1. “The wicked flee when no man pursueth,” he said. “The righteous are as bold as a lion.” At a bar a few blocks away, Senator Rand Paul’s son got drunk and tried to start a fight with the congressman Mike Lawler, whom he misidentified as Jewish before remarking that “you Jews” could cause Thomas Massie to lose his primary next week.

On the National Mall, where Trump’s new tinge of paint made its way up the basin of the Reflecting Pool, three video-game consoles had been installed with an interactive game called Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell. It allowed players to simulate the Iran war. A few National Guard members took turns trying out the arcade game for a couple of minutes. I made my way downtown as one of the Police Week convoys sped in the opposite direction. Outside night clubs on Connecticut Avenue, girls hung out of the sunroofs of idling cars, cheering on the cops. Dozens of classic police cars from various departments were parked in front of the White House. A few men in red “MAKE COPCARS GREAT AGAIN” hats posed with the vehicles.

Inside the White House complex, a slightly languid mood, typical during a President’s foreign trip, prevailed. “I had lots of weird week-long, empty, ghostly West Wing days,” an official from a previous Administration recalled to me. “The structuring principle of everybody’s day is gone. Getting decisions out of the travelling crew is extremely difficult.” These were days for doctors’ appointments, haircuts, long lunches, coming in late and leaving early. “There’s also the question of, actually, can the government function normally for a week because the chaos has gone elsewhere?” the former official said.

On Wednesday, Vance and Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, were in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building talking about hospice. They invited reporters to the Indian Treaty Room, an ornate space where Dwight Eisenhower hosted the first televised Presidential press conference, in 1955; the walls are lined with panels of French and Italian marble, interspersed with cast-iron moldings of dolphins. “As you know, the President just landed in China a few hours ago,” Vance said. “I don’t travel outside of the country with the President. So, on days like today, I sometimes feel like Macaulay Culkin in ‘Home Alone.’ I walk into the White House and it’s very quiet and no one’s there, and it takes me a second to realize exactly what’s going on.” He paused, expecting laughter.

A dozen staffers from Vance’s fraud task force, a recently instated committee purportedly aimed at sniffing out misuse of federal funds, filed in. Oz announced a national moratorium on new hospice and home-health-care agencies, where, he said, “we see a lot of fraud.” I stood next to Gorka, the counterterrorism official, who was on his phone, tweeting and looking at responses to the posts regarding his comments on Trump’s “if I die” letter. “It’s hard to get the whole machinery of government moving,” Andrew Ferguson, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, who, with Vance, runs the fraud task force, said. Oz applauded the group’s “spirit and desire to harness a group of stallions”: they were saving his vulnerable department, which he described as “a large rhino that can be stabbed effortlessly by foreign governments, syndicated criminal entities, and smaller-time operators who can take advantage of a system.” The group took questions on topics such as how many dead Americans were fraudulently receiving food-stamp benefits.

The night Trump left for China, he had posted on Truth Social about all the business leaders travelling there with him. “It is an Honor to have Jensen, Elon, Tim Apple, Larry Fink, Stephen Schwarzmann, Kelly Ortberg (Boeing), Brian Sikes (Cargill), Jane Fraser (Citi), Larry Culp (GE Aerospace), David Solomon (Goldman Sachs), Sanjay Mehrotra (Micron), Cristiano Amon (Qualcomm), and many others journeying to the Great Country of China where I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinction, to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic, and help bring the People’s Republic to an even higher level!” Jensen Huang, the founder and C.E.O. of Nvidia, was reportedly added to the trip at the last minute; he boarded Air Force One during a refuelling stop in Alaska, carrying his own bag. Brett Ratner, who directed “Melania,” a recent documentary about the First Lady, came along in part to scout locations for “Rush Hour IV.” (The project of turning Melania into a celebrity in China is also apparently under way. “Maybe releasing the movie there will be a deliverable?” the official mused.) Trump’s son Eric, who runs the Trump Organization, also joined; Trump owns dozens of trademarks in China. When one former diplomat commented on X that there appeared to be no China experts on the plane to advise the President ahead of his meetings with Xi, the White House communications director, Steve Cheung, responded, “You have no idea what you’re talking about you slope-brained, mouth breathing moron. Stop calling yourself an expert in anything, aside from sucking.” Upon arrival at Beijing Capital International Airport, some C.E.O.s got off the plane with the Cabinet members, descending from stairs that led out onto a red carpet, as opposed to following the convention of exiting from the back of the plane, with staff. There were other questions of protocol. China is one of the hardest settings for secure communication. Those on the travelling delegation are expected to leave their personal devices at home; they get burner laptops and phones. U.S. digital-lockdown practice requires even the President to leave his normal phone behind. Had Trump really handed his in?

When Trump landed in Beijing, the House unanimously passed a resolution calling on him to demand the release of political prisoners such as Jimmy Lai, who published a pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong, and was sentenced earlier this year to twenty years in prison for allegedly colluding with foreign forces. When asked about Lai before his departure, Trump said, “It’s like saying to me, ‘if Comey ever went to jail, would you let him out?’ Might be a hard one for me—because he’s a dirty cop.” Lai “isn’t that way,” he went on, but “he caused lots of turmoil for China.” There were other things to focus on. “He’s been salivating over this trip for months and talking about what a great time he had in 2017,” Julian Gewirtz, a senior researcher on China at Columbia University, who is writing a book on the evolution of U.S.-China relations, told me. “He tells this story about the perfectly even heights of the helmets of the Chinese honor guard that you could send a billiard ball down. He has clearly been excited for the pageantry and the dealmaking—a boatload of Fortune 100 C.E.O.s walking into the room behind him, inking deals that he gets credit for, in a setting of extraordinary grandeur.” Trump had originally been scheduled to travel to Beijing in March, but the visit was derailed by his and Israel’s war with Iran. The timing was inopportune. “He and his advisers knew that, politically, the optics of him doing all of that would be damaging right as the war was getting under way,” Gewirtz told me. Now Trump and Xi were said to be mulling over a deal in which China would invest a trillion dollars in America.

No matter the stakes of the bilateral relationship, the trip was something of a respite from what the President faced at home. Upon his arrival at the Great Hall of the People, hundreds of Chinese schoolchildren greeted him, jumping up and down and waving flowers and small flags, both Chinese and American. He stood on a red-and-gold dais as cannon fire rang out across Tiananmen Square, and a Chinese military band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” At the state banquet, another military band played “Y.M.C.A.,” one of Trump’s favorite songs. His delegation sat, “Dr. Strangelove”-style, opposite their Chinese counterparts, at a round table. The meetings were “wonderful,” Musk said. Gewirtz told me, “Historically, Chinese leaders came to the United States as China was rising, because they wanted to stand on the White House lawn, or in the Rose Garden, with the American President.” Such setups, he said, were understood as helping to burnish China’s image, and the images of its leaders. “The profound irony of Trump going to China at this particular moment is that it does appear that the tables have turned, and he is there, in part, because he wants the lustre and swagger of being on that particular stage as a dealmaker. He is going to draw attention to himself in this setting that he sees as enhancing his persona.” Back in D.C., the House celebrated National Scam Survivor Day; the Congressional-Executive Commission on China held a hearing on forced organ harvesting. ♦