Donald Trump canceled veterans health care meeting and played golf at Mar-a-Lago instead

| 7:20 pm EDT March 18, 2017
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For reasons known only to him, Donald Trump decided to schedule a meeting about veterans health care for Friday at his private Mar-a-Lago home in West Palm Beach, instead of holding it at the White House. But a bumbling Trump unwittingly revealed that his own VA Secretary wasn’t scheduled to be in attendance. Now it turns out the meeting was canceled entirely, and Trump is instead spending yet another weekend playing golf. Was that his plan all along?

It’s not clear if VA Secretary David Shulkin was being consciously excluded from the meeting, or if Donald Trump’s often inept White House simply forgot to include him on the Mar-a-Lago trip. But the matter came to a head when Trump held a meeting with Shulkin in front of the cameras early on Friday. Trump asked Shulkin if he would be attending the “major meeting” about veterans at Mar-a-Lago, and Shulkin — seemingly surprised to hear about it — shook his head no in a now infamous moment.

At that point one might have expected the White House to belatedly add David Shulkin to Air Force One’s flight to West Palm Beach so that he could attend the veterans health care meeting. But that didn’t happen. Instead Donald Trump traveled to Mar-a-Lago without him. And then on Friday evening, the Palm Beach Post appears to have been the first to report that the meeting had been canceled. The Hill has since confirmed that the meeting did not take place. There is no word of anything being rescheduled, meaning the meeting appears to now be dead.

That means Donald Trump is once again at his Mar-a-Lago golf resort simply to play golf and enjoy a social vacation. His announcement of a “major meeting” on veterans health care being held at Mar-a-Lago appears to have been little more than a flimsy excuse for making yet another golf trip. The meeting was canceled either because it was publicly exposed that the VA Secretary wouldn’t be there, or because the meeting was a ruse and was never going to happen to begin with. Trump is no longer even pretending he wants to be president. Contribute to Palmer Report