 |
| 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:
