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Trump allies encourage Mar-a-Lago visits with foreign leaders months before election
Former President Donald Trump’s allies have been encouraging foreign countries to send diplomats and official emissaries to Mar-a-Lago to reconnect ahead of another potential Trump stint in the White House, sources with direct knowledge of the meetings confirmed to CBS News.
Trump advisers and allies believe he’ll be able to capitalize on the decline in Americans’ approval of President Joe Biden’s foreign policy decisions. An April CBS News poll found that only 33% of Americans approve of Mr. Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict, down from 44% in October.
It is rare for foreign ambassadors and ministers to meet with the presumptive GOP presidential nominee half a year before the presidential election and suggests that they’re laying the groundwork for another Trump administration.
“The biggest handle Biden had on Trump was that this guy is unpredictable, especially on the world stage,” said Terry Sullivan, who ran Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. “When you take your opponent’s strength and your personal weakness and turn them on their head, that’s a big move.”
The 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Sen. Mitt Romney, implemented a similar strategy of meeting foreign leaders shortly before he won the GOP presidential nomination in 2012. On a trip to London for a fundraiser that year, Romney met with several British leaders. At the time, CBS News chief political analyst John Dickerson told “CBS This Morning” that Romney’s campaign had calibrated his talking points about the meetings to project a presidential aura.
“It’s something every campaign does to some degree if they can get away with it and show they have gravitas and can handle major foreign policy situations,” said Sullivan, who also worked on Romney’s earlier presidential bid in 2008 and is now a CBS News contributor.
Foreign leaders have made stops at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Florida club, too. The former president recently hosted British Foreign Secretary David Cameron, whose spokesperson said it was “standard practice for ministers to meet with opposition candidates as part of their routine international engagement.” The two spoke about the war in Ukraine, NATO spending and upcoming elections, according to the Trump campaign.
But unlike recent presidential nominees, Trump has also hosted controversial foreign leaders. The willingness by some Trump advisers to contact these foreign governments reflects the approach another Trump administration could take on foreign policy.
Last month, the former president hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the closest European Union ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, at Mar-a-Lago. The two also discussed the war in Ukraine, Orban later told state media.
Screenshot from Orbán Facebook video
Mr. Biden reacted swiftly, criticizing the rendezvous on the day it took place.
“You know who he’s meeting with today down at Mar-a-Lago? Orbán of Hungary, who stated flatly he doesn’t think democracy works. He’s looking for dictatorship,” Mr. Biden said at a rally near Philadelphia. “That’s who he’s meeting with.”
Trump also spoke recently with Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Salman, The New York Times reported, who was found by U.S. intelligence to have signed off on killing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” a longtime U.S. resident and Washington Post journalist.
The former president has also spoken with government officials from other Western countries, including Finland last year, a source familiar with the conversations told CBS News.
The outreach by Trump’s allies to foreign dignitaries was first reported by Politico.
In a CBS News national poll in March, Trump was leading Mr. Biden, as voters remembered the economy under Trump as being better than it is under the president. The Biden campaign and Democratic National Committee are trying to close the gap by exploiting their considerable financial advantage over the Trump campaign and Republican Party, placing multimillion-dollar ad buys in key battleground states.
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Houston — Donna Thomas is a pollution warrior in Houston, Texas. She wears a mask because she believes a lifetime of breathing polluted air in her community contributed to a stroke four years ago.
Near her home, Thomas points out Texas’ largest coal-fired power plant.
“It’s the oldest thing you can be burning in our neighborhoods. It’s dangerous,” Thomas said.
To respond to communities like hers, the Environmental Protection Agency under President Biden created a new Office of Environmental Justice. It is staffed by 200 people and funded by more than $2.8 billion that goes directly to “disadvantaged, marginalized, and over-polluted communities,” including support for projects that allow neighborhoods to monitor their own air quality.
But Project 2025, a possible roadmap for President-Elect Donald Trump, recommends “eliminating the EPA’s stand-alone Office of Environmental Justice.”
“We already know that everybody’s concerned. We want our EPA to be stronger,” Thomas said.
But that is unlikely, as Trump has vowed to “cut ten old regulations for every one new regulation.”
Many business and industry leaders say environmental regulation is anti-competitive and costs them money. In his first term, Trump cut 100 environmental regulations. Just last week, he posted on social media that “any person or company investing one billion dollars… in the United States, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including…all environmental approvals.”
Daniel Cohan, a professor and researcher at Rice University, sits on one of the EPA’s scientific advisory boards and is skeptical of the claim that environmental regulations stifle business.
“We’ve seen the oil and gas industry prosper and produce more oil and gas than ever before, even with EPA regulations,” Cohan said.
Since the EPA first started regulating clean air in the 1970s, emissions of the most common air pollutants have dropped by almost 80%. But around Houston, there’s still a long way to go. Each year, the pollution from that power plant is responsible for 177 premature deaths, a 2018 Rice University study found.
In a statement to CBS News, the plant owner, NRG, wrote: “…We have a strict policy of complying with all environmental rules and regulations and proud of our environmental record.”
Thomas believes that protecting the environment isn’t a partisan issue.
“Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, you should be protected from all the environmental issues, but you’re not because there’s no justice out here for people,” Thomas said.
And she’s convinced over the next four years that environmental regulation and enforcement will be harder to come by.
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