Trump Awards 2020 G7 Summit To His Own Miami Golf Resort, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Annual Gathering Of World Leaders Was Being Held At Venues With No Financial Connection To The President

WASHINGTON. Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney announced Thursday that the 2020 Group of Seven summit, the annual gathering of the leaders of the world's largest advanced economies, would be held at Trump National Doral Miami, a golf resort whose ownership by the sitting President the administration characterized as a logistical detail rather than an obstacle.

Officials said Doral had emerged from a competitive review of roughly a dozen properties as the clear and obvious choice, citing its proximity to Miami International Airport, its generous acreage, and the President's months of personal advocacy on its behalf. The summit, the White House stressed, would be hosted "at cost," an arrangement under which the United States government would pay money to a business owned by the President of the United States while producing, officials emphasized, no profit beyond the money.

The selection resolved a matter the President had been raising publicly since August, when, at the close of the previous G7 in France, he described the Doral property to reporters at length, praising its hundreds of acres and proposing that each visiting nation be given its own villa or bungalow on the grounds. It was a vision in which the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom would convene at a resort the President owns to manage a global economy he separately governs. Financial records reported over the preceding year had shown Doral's operating income falling sharply, a trend administration officials declined to link to the booking and left reporters to link on their own.

Members of both parties cited the Constitution's emoluments clause, the provision barring the President from accepting payments from foreign or domestic governments, which the hosting of a federally funded international summit at his personal resort appeared engineered to test under laboratory conditions. The White House responded that the criticism was politically motivated, an answer that did not engage the clause but did relocate the conversation for roughly 48 hours.

On Saturday, two days after the announcement, the President reversed himself by tweet, citing "Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility" and noting that he had generously offered to host the summit "at NO PROFIT or, if legally permissible, at ZERO COST" to taxpayers. Having flagged the legal permissibility of the arrangement as a genuinely open question, the President declined to wait for anyone to resolve it.

At press time, the President was reviewing a list of replacement venues, every one of which he was disappointed to learn he does not own.