Trump moves his Cabinet’s rare field trip to Camp David back to the White House over ‘bad weather’
President Donald Trump’s planned Cabinet meeting at Camp David on Wednesday was moved back to the White House only hours after being announced.
The monthly meeting is set to take place one day after his annual physical at Walter Reed Medical Center and during high-stakes peace talks with Iran that seemed on Tuesday to be breaking down once again.
A White House official confirmed to The Independent that the president’s entire Cabinet would be in attendance — including departing director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has taken a back seat in the administration amid the war with Iran and whom Reuters reported last week is being “forced out” of her position by White House staffers.
The official added that the meeting — which generally devolves into a fawning roundtable of the secretaries offering Trump their thanks and praise — would include discussions about “recent successes of the administration including economy and small business wins, Task Force to Eliminate Fraud highlights, and foreign policy updates.”
Hours later on Truth Social the president wrote that “bad weather” had forced the plans for a rare expedition to Camp David for the confab to be disrupted. The weather Wednesday at Camp David is forecast to be mild but rainy all day.
“Based on the possible bad weather conditions tomorrow, we will be having our Cabinet Meeting in the White House, and will be postponing the Cabinet trip to Camp David. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Over the weekend, chatter grew in Washington around the likelihood that the U.S. was finally within reach of a peace agreement to end the war that has now lasted nearly three months after initial projections from the administration suggested that it would be over in “days”, a prediction Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeated to journalists on Tuesday as he continued a trip to India.
“It’ll take a few days. The president’s expressed his desire to make it — he’s either going to make a good deal or no deal,” Rubio told reporters.
But a renewed round of U.S. strikes against Iranian boats and missile launch sites on Tuesday was met with condemnations from the Iranian government and accusations of ceasefire violations, which could mean that those talks are once again breaking down. White House officials have said for days that the sticking point remains the Strait of Hormuz, as well as Iran’s long-term nuclear ambitions — the latter of which has been a point of divide since before the war began.
The war with Iran now overshadows much of the president’s domestic policy agenda. Its unpopularity and the conjoined effects of the economic crunch caused by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz have become weights around the necks of Republicans as midterms approach in the fall and the White House attempts to achieve a few last policy wins on Capitol Hill before lawmakers are fully immersed in campaign mode.
The continued rising cost of oil threatens to put a massive damper on Americans’ summer plans, while also making prices in other sectors of the economy rise at precisely the worst time for Donald Trump.
With lawmakers coming back to the Hill next week, the White House and broader administration are set to re-engage Congress in an attempt to reset the relationship between Legislative and Executive branch officials.
Congress departed Washington at the end of last week in a state of open revolt: Republicans in both chamber were thumbing their noses at the White House, in some cases publicly, over a diverse set of issues including the Iran war and plans for a $1.776 billion “slush fund” set to be used by the administration to award “targets” of the Department of Justice’s prosecutions during Obama and Biden eras.
It’s a rough dynamic for any president, and one that comes for Trump as he is seeking passage of that “slush fund” and other priorities through Congress — including, most importantly, funding for ICE’s enforcement and removal efforts that was stripped out of legislation to reopen the Department of Homeland Security when it became clear that negotiations over ICE reforms between Republicans and Democrats were going nowhere, in large part due to Trump’s defiance.
