Rumors had swirled for months that he was planning to host the G7 at one of his properties. In August, Trump himself said he was considering hosting the summit at his Doral golf resort — a prospect critics promptly deemed one of the most transparently corrupt and self-interested stunts the president could pull while in office.
Today Mulvaney let it be known Trump is going ahead and doing it anyway.
"We are announcing today that we are going to do the 46th G7 Summit on June 10 through June 12 at the Trump National Doral facility in Miami, Florida," the chief of staff declared from the lectern. "The focus of the event will be global growth and challenges to the global economy."
If Trump pulls it off, the summit will draw a colossal carnival of media people and diplomats to Miami. Of course, the president is already being sued by the State of Maryland and the District of Columbia for refusing to divest himself from his own businesses — and there's ample evidence that world leaders and other interested parties love buying up hotel rooms at Trump properties whenever they want something from the president. Many of those payments — for instance, the 500 rooms a Saudi-funded lobbying firm booked after 2016 — appear to run afoul of the Emoluments Clause of the U.S Constitution, which bans a sitting president from taking outright payments from foreign countries.Mick Mulvaney announces that the next G20 will be at a resort that Trump still owns and profits from in Doral, Florida. #grifting pic.twitter.com/wHFHzYjx6k
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 17, 2019
But here we are!
Trump has devoted his career to enriching himself, but he might have had a special reason to select his Doral property for the 2020 summit: The place is reportedly in dire financial straits. In May, the Washington Post reported the resort's business has tanked since Trump took office. His family seems to have responded by booking as many political events as possible there; last weekend, Trump Doral hosted the American Priority Conference, a pro-Trump political event that infamously showed a video of Trump's face superimposed over footage of someone gunning down caricatures representing journalists.
