“I’m an environmentalist,” Trump insisted, at a press conference on Monday, claiming that he knows more about the subject than most people. But earlier the same day he skipped the session on climate change, biodiversity, and oceans. The White House claimed that he had “scheduled meetings” with the leaders of Germany and India, even though both were in attendance at the climate session.
Trump’s tweets on trade with China have been causing confusion and instability in the markets. It seems that when Trump sees negative reaction to a trade tweet he follows up with another, even if completely false. In the latest example, the markets dropped when Trump announced new tariffs against China. Then he said he was having second thoughts. Then he had second thoughts about having second thoughts. To cap off the confusion, on Monday, Trump announced a surprise breakthrough. “You can say we’re having very meaningful talks, much more meaningful than I would say at any time, frankly,” he bragged. The Dow rose almost three hundred points. Then, somewhat baffled, China’s Foreign Ministry denied any such recent calls—or any such progress. And the market went down again.
To cap things off, Trump announced that his struggling Trump National Doral Miami resort in Florida is in the running to host the 2020 G7 conference. Hosting the G7 will cost American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Hosting the event at Doral, an 800-acre golf resort close to the Miami airport, which is losing money, would divert a a huge amount of taxpayer cash into Trump’s own coffers.