The decision was immediately met with widespread backlash. The G7, an organization representing the world’s most developed economies, meets annually.
Trump later reluctantly changed the location to Camp David, though he maintained that the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution that prohibits Presidents from personally profiting from their office is “phony.”
He made the claim multiple times, including on Fox News and on the White House lawn to reporters.
He explained to reporters, “It was an illegal investigation…Everything about it was crooked — every single thing about it. There were dirty cops. These were bad people. If you look at McCabe and Comey, and you look at Lisa and Peter Strzok, these were bad people.” He continued, “And this was a — an attempted coup. This was an attempted takedown of a President.”
Since then, Trump’s own Department of Justice has determined that the FBI acted appropriately when they first launched the probe into election interference in July 2016, before Trump was elected, and that it was not tainted by political bias.
Trump gave no elaboration as to how the clause from the Constitution that he has sworn to uphold is phony. The clause, from Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution reads,
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State.
The claim was part of a larger statement that that evokes the infamous “having nuclear” speech. In it, Trump said no other President gave up his salary and boasted about his prowess at real estate and his financials, despite never having released tax returns as promised. He complained about Obama’s book and Netflix deals and claimed that being President has already cost him $2 to $5 billion dollars.
He then launched into a deviation about rallies that echoed other remarks on setting greater records than Elton John, attacked Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, and claimed that Obama failed to solve the North Korea problem because of a lack of respect, unlike what they had for Trump and he had for them.
“We’re building a wall in Colorado…We’re building a beautiful wall,” Trump said during a speech in Pittsburgh. He had been listening multiple states in which new walls were being erected. He later claimed that he was joking. Border officials also confirmed that no new segments of wall had been built, and that it only extended to areas where prior wall or fencing already existed.
Trump said, “this is the biggest there is. This is the worst ever. Osama bin Laden was big, but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center. This is a man who built a whole, as he would like to call it, a country.” He went on to repeat a past claim that he had warned of bin Laden a year before his attack on the World Trade Center, but never received due credit.
Trump defended the unusual decision to avoid telling any Congressional leaders about the raid by claiming that Washington DC too frequently leaks important information. Trump had repeatedly leaked sensitive information, including on spy satellites, covert operatives, and the methods used in this very raid on al-Baghdadi.
Some of the remarks Trump made about the raid had been classified, while others seemed too fantastical to be true. Trump said of the raid that the ISIS leader “died like a dog,” having been “whimpering and crying and screaming all the way,” though Department of Defense officials said it was made up, as the feed of the raid had no audio.
