President Donald Trump has canceled his scheduled trip to multiple South American countries originally planned for this week, the White House said Tuesday.
In a statement, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president “will not attend the 8th Summit of the Americas in Lima, Peru or travel to Bogota, Colombia as originally scheduled.”
Vice President Mike Pence will make the trip in Trump’s stead, Sanders said.
The White House said Trump will stay in the U.S. in order to “oversee the American response to Syria and to monitor developments around the world.”
The surprise change to an event scheduled for later this week came amid Trump’s continued effort to negotiate trade deals — and his continued anger over the special counsel’s Russia probe and a recent raid on his personal lawyer’s residence and office.
Trump met with military officials in the White House Monday evening to deliberate over the administration’s response to an alleged chemical weapons attack carried out by Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government against its own people.
In comments to the press before the round-table meeting began, however, Trump focused much more on the warranted search of lawyer Michael Cohen’s office and residence that morning by the FBI, which had reportedly received a referral from special counsel Robert Mueller.
