The Trump Doctrine: I Only Care About Big Stuff

Beach at Biarritz, via en.plages.tv.

Everything you assumed was true is going to turn out to be true. Most outlets don't even have time for this one tonight, on top of the Marie Yovanovitch testimony and the Roger Stone verdict, but I just love it. Especially in the summer.

Remember how Trump announced in August at the Group of Seven meeting in Biarritz that he thought next year's summit should be held at the Doral Golf Resort in Miami? And on October 17th it turned out to be true, in a bravura press conference performance by Mick Mulvaney?

So we use the same set of criteria that previous administrations have used.  We started with a list of about a dozen, just on paper.  And we sent an advance team out to actually visit 10 locations in several states.  We visited California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Michigan, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah.  Now, we got that list down to just under 10, and the advance team went out to visit those.  And from there, we got down to four finalists that our senior team went out to look at.  They looked at — I think it was one in Hawaii, two in Utah, and then the Mar-a-Lago facility in Florida.

And it became apparent at the end of that process that Doral was, by far and away — far and away — the best physical facility for this meeting.  In fact, I was talking to one of the advance teams when they came back, and I said, “What was it like?”  And they said, “Mick, you’re not going to believe this, but it’s almost like they built this facility to host this type of event.”

Actually, no, according to emails sourced by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and reported in the Washington Post. Starting in late May, by early July the Secret Service had whittled the list down to four sites in Hawaii, California, Utah, and North Carolina, and were preparing to send senior staffers for a final trip, when something happened to make them chop the California and North Carolina sites and add Miami:

The "challenges" posed by the Doral seem to have been redacted, don't they? And then a final decision doesn't seem to have been made after all, for another three months, which seems strange.

But a couple of things did happen, which Fahrenthold and Dawsey are maybe too polite to put together: on 24-26 August the Biarritz summit, and Trump's cheerful suggestion on Monday the 24th that he wanted to invite the banished President Putin to the next one and wanted to hold it at his own place; and The New York Times publishing on Wednesday the 26th that according to Doral's mayor, Juan Carlos Bermúdez, the town's police force had indeed been notified the resort was under consideration "two months ago", meaning late June or early July. But that can't have been more than a simple phone call, because CREW's FOIAs found no communication between Doral and the Secret Service. It seems clear that the Secret Service hadn't in fact vetted the place at all.

Oh, and although the administration dropped the idea of using this important international meeting to fill the Trump coffers after a couple of days of public howling, they still haven't come up with an alternative:

No new site has been announced for next year’s Group of Seven summit, a massive event that involves many world leaders and hundreds of diplomats, media and security personnel. One official close to the search, who was not authorized to speak about it publicly, described it as a “mad scramble” to find another site.

I just can't do other than see Trump demanding this from the Secret Service at the last minute at the beginning of July, meeting resistance because of the obvious unsuitability of the place, and just not giving up. I mean that the Secret Service refused to consider the Doral (for the reasons that are obvious to us and the technical security ones we don't even know about, but aside from the bedbug question there's the Florida Man story from May 2018 about the 41-year-old former porn actor Jonathan Oddi who rushed the Doral lobby at 1:30 AM and draped a gigantic American flag from somewhere on the property over the reception desk and responded to police with a gun) and Trump refused to consider the alternatives, and Trump tried to force the issue by making his announcement in France, and Mulvaney spent time over the next six weeks trying to make it happen, which he almost did.

Not only did Trump make this obviously idiotic suggestion, he wouldn't let it go. In fact you can assume that he still hasn't let it go, since he still hasn't come to a decision.

And this is in the light of what we might want to start calling the Trump Doctrine we've been learning about from the testimony of David Holmes:

After the call ended, Mr. Holmes asked if it was true that the president did not care about Ukraine, the people said. The ambassador replied that Mr. Trump cared only about the “big stuff.” Mr. Holmes noted Ukraine had “big stuff” going on, like a war with Russia. But Mr. Sondland had something else in mind. 

Mr. Sondland told Mr. Holmes he meant “‘big stuff’ that benefited the president,” like the “Biden investigation” that his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was pushing for, because they affected him personally.

It's clear that having the G7 meeting at his club, and the money it could mean, is some of that Big Stuff too (to get a picture of the kind of sums involved, we're told that the Biarritz summit cost the French government 36.4 million euros, and the French bragged that they'd done the thing cheaply). And Big Stuff can be incredibly petty.