President Donald Trump took Friday’s Cabinet meeting on the road — to the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland, a rustic backdrop for sessions that have come to be known for being overly long and consumed by administration officials’ endless praise for their boss.
Trump began the meeting by noting it was “something very unique.”
“It’s Camp David, and this room is a very, very special room,” Trump said, as the White House spent Friday morning highlighting that the meeting was the first televised Cabinet meeting at the storied presidential retreat.
He then segued into his usual talking points about the economy, the border and Iran — but then referred to the recent surge of migrants into Cueta, a tiny territory of Spain, suggesting that the moment should be taken as a warning to voters ahead of the US midterms.
“You know I saw Spain yesterday, and I watched the catastrophe that took place. It looks like an invasion of a country by hundreds of thousands of people,” Trump said.
“And that same thing is going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected. Except worse, much bigger.”
It is the first Cabinet meeting at Camp David in Trump’s second term after an earlier attempt in May was scuttled because of bad weather. During his first term, Trump held a Cabinet meeting at the retreat.
The public portion of Trump’s Cabinet meetings has lasted as long as three hours, with the president letting everyone at the table update him on their departments or agencies — with added praise for him personally and his leadership thrown in.
In a departure from other presidents, he allows the news media to stay for the duration of the meetings, a move that Leavitt has said proves his commitment to transparency.
More recently, however, Trump has commented on how lengthy the meetings have become. He has begun urging speakers to keep their comments brief, and he has limited the number of oral reports.
