WASHINGTON — President Trump, trying to dig out from political holes of his own making, held forth for 71 minutes Monday during what was ostensibly a Cabinet meeting, but ended up being a familiar torrent of grievance, defensiveness and expansive statements about his view of his own powers.
However familiar Trump’s brash hyperbole has become, his statements to a room filled with Cabinet members, aides and reporters were still eye-catching: Trump asserted his selective regard for the Constitution to which he’d sworn an oath and casually dismissed a clause he appeared to violate in trying to award next year’s Group of 7 summit to his own Doral, Fla., golf resort.
“You people with this phony Emoluments Clause,” Trump said, rhetorically dispatching the portion of the Constitution that bars federal officials from taking emoluments, or forms of payment or profit, from any “king, prince or foreign state.”