Donald Trump convened a cabinet meeting on Friday at Camp David, making it his third trip there in his second term. The meeting came as Trump grappled with the war against Iran and with gasoline prices that had been moving higher.
Karoline Leavitt said last week that the meeting would be the 13th cabinet meeting of Trump's second term and “a lot of fun and something different for the cabinet to experience together.” The agenda was expected to focus heavily on foreign policy, with each cabinet secretary set to give an update on activities in their departments.
Camp David and foreign policy
Trump's cabinet meetings tend to run well over an hour, and this one carried the added weight of a war that had already lasted five months. Trump was engaged in tit-for-tat strikes against Iranian targets, while a -Ipsos poll this week found that just one in three Americans supported the war, the lowest reading in the poll since the conflict's early days.
The setting also fit Trump's own habits. He had largely stayed away from Camp David and preferred to spend time at his golf resorts when not at the White House, so the retreat meeting stood out as an unusual venue for a cabinet session tied to foreign policy and domestic pressure at the same time.
Republicans and midterm elections
Republicans were looking uneasily ahead to November midterm elections as Democrats sought to break Republicans' control of the US Congress in November. Rising gasoline prices kept the war from being only a foreign policy problem; it had also become a political problem for Trump and his party.
After the meeting, Trump was scheduled to go to his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club for the weekend. The trip left the cabinet discussion as the central event of the day, with the war, fuel costs, and the coming midterms all sitting in the same frame.
