President Trump has been privately griping about attending the G7 meeting in Canada this weekend, telling aides it would be a distraction while he was preparing for his summit next week with Kim Jong-un, a new report said Thursday.
The president also told advisers that he thinks attending the Group of Seven summit in rural Charlevoix, Quebec, was not a good use of his time because other world leaders attending oppose his policies and he “does not want to be lectured by them,” The Washington Post reported, citing a trio of sources.
Trump also fumed about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as their differences on trade and tariffs have been publicly revealed.
In one phone call, the Canadian PM scoffed at the idea that Canada posed a national security threat to the US, the administration’s pretext for imposing the steep tariffs on imported aluminum and steel.
“Didn’t you guys burn down the White House?” the commander-in-chief replied, referring to an incident in the War of 1812, in which British troops burned down the White House at a time when Canada was still a British colony, and more than a century away from independence.
Trudeau, UK Prime Minister Theresa May, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron all oppose Trump’s trade policies, and along with Mexico vowed to impose retaliatory tariffs on US goods.
The DC paper reported that there had been discussions for several days about whether Trump might bail on the G7 and send Vice President Pence instead.
But White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said the report was wrong and that the president would be at the meeting.
“I saw some of those reports [and] we all kind of chuckled and laughed. We were in the meetings. He is going to the G7. There is no plan to pull out of that,” Gidley told Fox News Thursday morning.
And the president himself indicated he was going in yet another tweet attacking special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.
“Isn’t it Ironic? Getting ready to go to the G-7 in Canada to fight for our country on Trade (we have the worst trade deals ever made), then off to Singapore to meet with North Korea & the Nuclear Problem…But back home we still have the 13 Angry Democrats pushing the Witch Hunt!” he wrote Thursday morning.