![]() 15 One Hump or Two?įrench President Francois Hollande received a camel in 2013 as thanks for his efforts in Mali. With the sheer amount of gift-giving, and the pressure added to everything by the world’s eyes, it’s no wonder world leaders sometimes present themselves with crappy, underwhelming, poorly-thought-through or simply bizarre gifts. (Well, not always - several presidents have accidentally forgotten to pass their gifts on, or pay the excess, and just kinda taken a whole load of shit.) anything worth more than $390 (unless the president wants to pay the difference themselves) is passed onto the Protocol Gift Unit and usually ends up in a museum somewhere. Official gifts, too, chronicled as matters of public record and scrutinized to a crazy degree - they can’t cross the line from “show of mutual respect” to “outright bribe,” you see, so in the U.S. However, they find themselves having to give each other gifts a lot. They spend hundreds of hours in one another’s company and know a lot about one another’s roles, but it’s not like they’re sharing a joint and watching Hot Rod together, or leaning up against a fence with a few beers, or any of the other things proper friends do. ![]() World leaders sometimes become genuinely good friends, but a lot of the time they’re more like managers of different departments who keep getting brought to the same meetings. It’s a hard question at the best of times, but made even harder when the “everything” in question includes nuclear codes. What do you get for the person who has everything?
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