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Tangential to this, but I've always figured that if somehow the US government is in contact with extraterrestrials, this is probably a big reason why the president probably isn't in the loop
Unless FTL travel or communications are on the table, or the aliens are based in or near our solar system, it would just take too long to have a back-and forth conversation between the president and the alien home planet.
The nearest star is proxima centauri, at about 4¼ light years away. That means it would take at least 8½ years to receive a reply to a message sent to their home planet
Imagine if, on the day he took office, Bill Clinton sent a message to the Centaurians to initiate negotiations of some kind, he'd be into his second term by the time they even got his message, and he'd be out of office and we'd be about half a year into Dubya's first term, if they took a couple months to think about their reply we may have even received it on 9/11.
Bush fires off another reply, probably with a very different viewpoint from Clinton, different goals, coming from potentially a wildly different political climate.
Aliens receive it in late 2005, meanwhile we're getting a new Pope, hurricane Katrina happens, all kinds of bullshit is going on in our world.
We receive their reply about a year into Obama's first term, again things are wildly different. They get our reply in 2014.
Donny boy receives their reply in probably mid to late 2018. The aliens receive his orange smudged, sharpie-scrawled reply in late 2022 or early 2023. Biden doesn't even get to take part in this particular conversation.
We won't get a reply to whatever trump told them until 2027. The aliens would probably also be surprised that they got two messages from the same president when he replies again if he hasn't croaked by then, and may begin to wonder if our democracy has collapsed and been replaced with a trump dictatorship (and they may be right)
So if they intend to have any sort of actually productive conversation, it probably needs to stay out of the president's hands and instead fall to maybe some unelected government officials or career military types who might hold their position for decades and have more of an opportunity to choose and groom their successors.
I came to a similar conclusion during Trump’s first term but for a slightly different reason - Trump isn’t being told anything about aliens other than “nope nothing here” because if he was, he would have blasted it on Twitter.