Day 949: Corruption in plain sight: Trump wants to hold next G7 summit at his golf resort

With the G7 wrapping up in France on Monday, eyes turned toward the 2020 iteration, which the U.S. is set to host.

Surprise, surprise but Donald Trump wants to line his own pockets by hosting it as his golf resort just outside Miami. It seems to be a pretty blatant violation of the emoluments clauses outlined in the Constitution, not that anyone on the GOP side of the aisle has raised a word about it.

The White House, against all sorts of precedent, is also chipping in. They’re actively helping a sitting president promote his private business. On top of that, they seemed to cement Trump’s announcement that his resort will host the 2020 summit.

As Vox noted, Trump is actively seeking to prop up a business that is currently hemorrhaging money.

[Jordan] Libowitz [communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington] told Vox that previous presidents might “have separated themselves from their assets, so the American people could never doubt that they were making decisions in the best interests of the American people as opposed to the best interests of their bottom line.” But Trump is “openly using American foreign policy to help prop up a struggling business of his.” (The Washington Post reported earlier this year that Doral’s net operating income has declined by nearly 70 percent since 2015, a decline experts attributed to the Trump brand’s toxicity.)

Trump’s blustering about the pros of his own resort hosting as compared to every other option ignores the fact that the U.S. has hosted many previous summits. For instance, when Barack Obama hosted in 2012, the summit was held at Camp David. As a retreat for presidents, it is of course available in 2020.

In addition to eyeing blatant corruption in 2020, at the 2019 version Trump pushed to add Russia back into the group. Russia was booted after they annexed Crimea in 2014. Trump’s idea that was quickly struck down by five of the other six nations.

949 days in, 513 to go

Follow us on Twitter at @TrumpTimer