Visits: 2
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump makes an appearance prior to the start of play during the final round of the World Golf Championships-Cadillac Championship at Trump National Doral Blue Monster Course on March 6, 2016 in Doral, Florida.
Mike Ehrmann | Getty Images
President Donald Trump on Saturday night bowed after two days of strong criticism and dramatically reversed his decision to have his Miami golf resort host next year’s G-7 summit.
“Based on both Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility, we will no longer consider Trump National Doral Miami as the Host Site for the G-7 in 2020,” Trump tweeted.
“We will begin the search for another site, including the possibility of Camp David, immediately,” he added.
Democrats had blasted Trump in recent days after acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Thursday revealed that the Doral would be the site of the meeting of an elite group of world leaders, claiming it was the best possible site out of about a dozen considered.
Those Democrats said it would be highly inappropriate, and potentially a violation of the Constitution, for Trump’s business to profit from foreign governments whose emissaries would be staying, eating and drinking at the Doral.
When he announced the pick of Doral, Mulvaney anticipated the blistering criticism that immediately ensued.
He said, “It was almost like they built this facility” to host the G-7, and said any concerns about the president profiting from the summit would be put to rest because the Doral would be offering its goods and services “at cost.”
Trump “doesn’t profit from being here, he has no interest in profiting from being here,” Mulvaney said.
However, Mulvaney did not detail how the “cost” of those goods and services would be determined.
The letter, from Gary Peters of Michigan, Oregon’s Ron Wyden, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, noted that Trump has traveled as president more than 20 times to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, “costing taxpayers millions of dollars with every trip.”
The senators called the Doral pick “another outrageous example of the President using his office funnel money from American taxpayers and foreign sources into his own pockets.”
And on Friday, a Democratic congressional staffer said the House of Representatives would be voting sometime next week on a resolution to condemn the pick of Trump’s resort.
Walter Shaub, a former director of the Office of Government Ethics who is often critical of Trump, said in a Twitter post on Thursday that the selection of the Doral was “the most overt corruption to date” of the Trump administration.
The Doral resort has seen its revenue plunge in the past several years as Trump has been in office. The Washington Post reported in May that from 2015 to 2017, revenue at Doral dropped 18%, from $92 million to $75 million, and that net operating income fell from $13.8 million to $4.3 million during the same time period.