President Trump spoke several times and at length on Monday about how he wants to host next year's Group of Seven summit at the financially underperforming Doral golf club he owns and he still profits from, and now the White House is spinning that rampant conflict of interests as a fait accompli.
"It’s ethics violation squared," Kathleen Clark at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis told The Associated Press. Nevertheless, AP notes, Trump "was in full sales mode Monday, doing everything but pass out brochures as he touted the features that would make the Doral golf resort the ideal place for the next G-7 Summit — close to the airport, plenty of hotel rooms," and even ample parking.
Parking? "Trump touted his club as if he were trying to attract a convention of visiting dermatologists," The Washington Post adds. Along with the legal and ethical red flags, Trump is trying to pitch "a golf club set among drab office parks near the Miami airport" as the perfect spot for a G-7 summit, usually held in scenic, isolated resort areas like Biarritz, France — or Camp David and a Georgia resort island, the locations of the past two U.S.-hosted summits.
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George Washington University political scientist Todd Belt explained to AP how a Doral G-7 summit would almost certainly violate the Constitution's emoluments clause, or prohibition against presidents profiting from their decisions, and he predicted that White House lawyers or other staffers would talk Trump out of it.
Some aides, "concerned that Trump would appear to be using the power of the presidency to direct taxpayer money into his own pockets," have "pushed Trump to consider other sites for the 2020 summit that are more remote and easier to secure," the Post reports. "He was not convinced, aides said."
