Trump scrawled his reply in Sharpie. “Look forward to meeting you when things calm down,” he wrote. The meeting never happened. By Drollinger’s own account, his support for Trump dates to earlier conversations with Sessions, another soon-to-be sponsor, with whom Drollinger agreed that the United States needed a president with “a strong businessman background.” The lack of direct access to Trump did not dissuade Drollinger from buttonholing his newly-anointed-cabinet-member contacts about founding a study during the transition, and the first Bible study was held a few weeks later, in March.
This summer, Drollinger’s study intersected once more with Trump’s orbit, during one of his chaotic all-hands cabinet meetings. On live TV, Perry opened the meeting by leading the group in prayer. After thanking God for the birth of his grandson on the Fourth of July, Perry called Drollinger’s study “one of the great privileges for me, in this administration.” When Perry began his formal prayer, Trump assumed a posture of piety — eyes closed, bowed head, clasped hands — but began to twiddle his thumbs and briefly opened his eyes. Finally, as Perry extended his umbrella of prayer over the cabinet, the military and the president himself, Trump achieved a few seconds of stillness. “That was very good,” Trump said when Perry had concluded. “Well done.”
“Just because he’s the president of the United States doesn’t mean I’m not going to try to share with him a little bit of biblical wisdom from time to time,” Perry told me later. “My bet is that the vice president and other members of the cabinet do that as well.”
Managua’s international airport is named for Augusto César Sandino, who fought a six-year guerrilla war against the United States, “the colossus of the North,” starting in 1927. Murillo, Ortega’s wife, is one of his descendants. A 59-foot steel silhouette of Sandino in his baggy trousers and Stetson hat looms atop a hill overlooking the capital city. Nicaraguan officials received the Drollingers as dignitaries, ushering them directly from the gate to a V.I.P. lounge, where they were served coffee and their passports were taken to be stamped. Oscar Zamora, Drollinger’s Peru-based Latin America director, was waiting for them with his wife. A gracious, soft-spoken man with a neatly trimmed beard carried the Drollingers’ bags to a waiting Ford Excursion. He was Oscar Obidio Cubas Castro, Nicaragua’s newly appointed ambassador to Israel.
On the way to the hotel, Drollinger, shifting into jock mode, told some icebreaking jokes.
“How’s the coffee here?” he asked Cubas. The question is one of Drollinger’s standard openers when he finds himself on foreign soil.
“Very good,” Cubas replied.
“Juan Valdez — do you know who he is?”
“Yes.”
“Is he from Nicaragua?”
“No.”
Drollinger’s questioning turned to more practical subjects, like the length of the Nicaraguan election cycle (five years) and the number of chambers in its Legislature (one). Cubas pointed out the empty plaza where Drollinger was scheduled to speak. Along the sides of a wide boulevard leading away from the plaza were mounted screens and speakers that would carry Drollinger’s words to the crowd, all the way up to the enormous metal sculpture of Hugo Chávez’s head. The hotel where Drollinger would be staying, a Crowne Plaza shaped like a perforated ziggurat, squatted up on the hill just beyond it. After dropping off his luggage, he was whisked to a meeting with Gustavo Porras Cortés, the head of the National Assembly, a portly man wearing a navy blue windbreaker, who sat across from Drollinger with his arms crossed and wearing a stone-faced frown. Like Murillo, Porras had been singled out for economic sanctions by the Treasury Department. Drollinger did his best to lighten the atmosphere. He asked whether the glass of orange juice he was served came from Nicaragua. “This is not Peruvian, is it?” he asked. Porras cracked a smile.
As the meeting drew to a close, a man with a video camera entered. Porras stood up, with six Nicaraguan flags behind him, with the clear expectation of an official handshake. Drollinger did not hesitate to oblige, though he improvised a bit of patter, words that would make it difficult to read the moment as a wholehearted endorsement of the Ortega regime. “All my little Nicaraguan friends,” he said, addressing the camera, “I just want you to know, I’m really in this for the coffee beans.”