President Donald Trump said Tuesday he plans to hold the G-7 summit at Camp David next year, more than a month after reversing his decision to host the annual meeting of world leaders at his Doral golf resort in Miami, Florida.
Trump made the announcement in London during a bilateral meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting. He has previously hinted that the historic presidential retreat in Maryland was among the locations being considered.
“It will be at Camp David, which is a place that people like,” he told reporters Tuesday, adding he had plans for “some special things at Camp David.”
“It’s nearby, its close. We’re going to give really great access to the press, you’ll have great access.”
The president faced condemnation from both Democrats and Republicans when he announced Doral as the host site for the G-7 in October. Critics accused the president of using U.S. foreign policy for personal financial gain. Some Republicans also urged the president to change the venue.
Trump quickly reversed the decision, citing blowback from Democrats and members of the media.
“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 said in an October tweet. “We will begin the search for another site, including the possibility of Camp David, immediately.”
The move came during a rapidly developing impeachment inquiry into the president’s dealings in Ukraine and whether he withheld military aid from Kyiv in order to pressure officials to open investigations into his political rivals.
At the time of the announcement White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney dismissed Camp David as an option.
“I understand the folks who participated in it hated it and thought it was a miserable place to have the G-7,” he said in October, referring to when former President Barack Obama held the summit there in 2012.
“It was way too small. It was way too remote. My understanding is this media didn’t like it because you had to drive an hour on a bus to get there either way,” Mulvaney said.
The G-7 is a high-profile, annual gathering of leaders from the world’s largest industrialized economies: the United States, Italy, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Canada and Germany. The most recent meeting took place in August in the resort town of Biarritz, France.
The G-7 is set to take place June 10-12, 2020, less than five months before the U.S. presidential election in which Trump seeks a second term.
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