Trump, under pressure on Iran, takes his Cabinet to the woods
By Kevin Liptak, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump is not, historically, a Camp David guy.
The wood-wrapped rooms of the Laurel Lodge are not his happy place. His predecessors have chosen the retreat as an escape from cameras and formality; Trump rarely objects to having his picture taken or an extra chandelier or two.
There have been no reports of Trump ordering up new varnish on the rustic woodwork, no requests for his gold guy to apply a layer of gilt on the hand-carved wooden signs.
Instead, he’s mostly avoided going at all.
But there he was Friday, under the watchful gaze of his predecessors, convening his Cabinet amid the pines.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, pictured recovering from a heart attack in 1955, was over his right shoulder as Trump warned about “gender mutilation of your children.”
On the far wall, a photo of President Gerald Ford discussing campaign strategy in 1976. Trump, at the table, was discussing an “invasion” of migrants in Spain.
Summoning his senior-most officials to the presidential redoubt at a moment of difficulty — an Iran war without end, polls with no bottom — Trump seemed to be looking for something different. He had originally scheduled the group trip in May but had to cancel when it rained.
The meeting, Trump announced as it began, would be “something very unique.”
And it was, at least for him. The White House’s cream-and-gold china service was replaced by bright red diner mugs. Instead of a black suburban, he was driven to camp in a golf cart.
Instead of asking everyone around his table to offer rave reviews of his tenure, he called only on a select few to deliver reports. The meeting did not stretch past three hours, as one at the White House did last year. He did not appear to doze off.
The red button Trump uses to summon a Diet Coke had made the trip to Maryland. And the glowing portrait he painted of his administration was unchanged.
Before reporters began asking questions, he largely avoided mention of the war, which has consumed his time and energy, often leaving him angry.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has not played a major role in negotiations with Iran, tried to divert attention to greener global pastures.
“We follow the news, obviously, the events in the Middle East,” he said. “Not that they’re not important, but there’s some other issues happening around the world, Mr. President, that you’ve shown great leadership in that have not gotten nearly as much attention.”
He cited, as one, efforts to bring the International Criminal Court “to heel.”
“By the way,” Trump interjected on the Hague body that investigates war crimes, “there’s no information that they’re after me. It could happen.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose department has been preparing options for Trump to intensify the war, used his time to praise Trump’s “courage,” a word he used 10 times to describe various international endeavors.
“Frankly,” he said, it takes “courage to negotiate with people that have shown no willingness to do so,” a reference to the Iranians, who Trump said in the same meeting “always want to talk.”
When Trump did address Iran, he did not offer a clear picture of his plan to get out of the war.
“They’ll get weaker. They’ll get a little stronger maybe now, but they’ll get weaker and then they peter out,” he predicted, vaguely.
Is he planning to “go big?” a reporter asked, referring to a reported plan drawn up by US Central Command for a heavy two-week bombardment of Iran’s missile sites.
“We’re going big,” Trump said. “We’ve already gone big.”
And what about the talks, which he said last week Iran “desperately” wants to restart?
“They break their word so often,” the president said. “All they do is make me angry. You know? They just make me angry.”
Middle East diplomacy has a history at Camp David, both of victory and defeat. President Jimmy Carter brokered peace there between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978, and the accords bear the retreat’s name.
A 13-day summit convened by President Bill Clinton in 2000 between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat was less successful. It failed to yield the final Middle East peace agreement Clinton had been hoping for as his term wound down.
Carter also used Camp David for a 10-day retreat in 1979, also meeting with citizens and business leaders amid crippling energy shortages and surging inflation driven by the Iranian revolution. It’s not a moment Trump wants to repeat.
Neither former president’s photograph was in the room where Trump was speaking Friday. Nor was George W. Bush’s, who made the decision there, on October 6, 2001, to order the first wave of bombers from Missouri to Afghanistan, launching a two-decade war. Again, not what Trump is going for.
Before he ever became president, Trump seemed to have his mind made up on Camp David.
“It’s nice, you’d like it,” he told a reporter once. “You know how long you’d like it? For about 30 minutes.”
Trump’s become a little less reluctant since then. He took family there in June for Father’s Day. During his first term, he tried to invite the Taliban there in 2019, before canceling.
Still, he has visited less than his predecessors. Often he allows Vice President JD Vance or other members of the Cabinet to use it instead.
Before reporters were ushered in on Friday, Trump asked his group how many had been before.
“I raised my hand, but I haven’t been here for 62 years,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said afterward, recalling the weekends spent in the Catoctin Mountains when his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was in the White House.
“He was resentful at Dwight Eisenhower for renaming it Camp David,” Kennedy reminisced. “If he had made it into his second term, he was going to rename it Shangri-La.”
That was the name, drawn from James Hilton’s 1933 novel “Lost Horizon,” that Franklin D. Roosevelt chose for the camp in 1942, when the property was selected as a tranquil, wooded remedy to the stresses of World War II.
Eisenhower changed the name for his son, David. He often wondered himself why Kennedy did not change the name, though he believed his successor would choose Camp Caroline, after his daughter.
“Perhaps public familiarity with the name Camp David caused the Kennedys to hesitate,” Eisenhower wrote in the foreword to a history book about the retreat.
In truth, it took a few years for the Kennedys to warm to Camp David. Like Trump, they often preferred weekends at their own compound in Hyannis Port or at the family home they built in Virginia horse country.
It was only as the pressures of the White House grew, as they are now mounting on Trump, that he and his family took to the Maryland mountains regularly.
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