Trump Cancels Trip to Latin America, Citing Crisis in Syria

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump canceled a trip to South America that was to have begun Friday, the White House announced Tuesday, citing the crisis in Syria as Trump fumed publicly about FBI raids targeting his personal lawyer.

In a brief statement, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said the president would stay in the United States and oversee the response to a suspected and deadly chemical attack in Syria, “and to monitor developments around the world.”

But when the president himself spoke, it was not about Syria but of his outrage that federal agents in New York on Monday raided the office and hotel room of Michael D. Cohen, his longtime lawyer and fixer. The FBI seized documents in what Trump called “a disgraceful situation” and an “attack on our country.”

“Attorney-client privilege is dead!” Trump tweeted before Sanders’ announcement. Minutes later, the president wrote, “A TOTAL WITCH HUNT!!!” — an apparent reference to the continuing investigation into Russia’s 2016 election meddling and possible coordination with some of Trump’s associates. He has previously called the investigation a witch hunt.

Trump was to have traveled to Lima, Peru, on Friday for the Summit of the Americas, and then to Bogotá, Colombia, for meetings Sunday with President Juan Manuel Santos. Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago compound in Palm Beach, Florida, last year when he ordered missile strikes in Syria in response to a chemical attack by government forces.

And in 2011, former President Barack Obama went ahead with a trip to Brazil while U.S. forces were striking Libya.

On Monday, the president promised a quick response to Syria and met with his military leaders to consider options. He opened the meeting venting his outrage at the targeting of his lawyer, musing aloud about the prospect of firing the special counsel in the Russia investigation, Robert Mueller.

The tirade, which included lashing out at the FBI and the Justice Department, raised the prospect for a consequential confrontation between the president and top U.S. law enforcement officials.

In her statement Tuesday, Sanders said Trump had asked that Vice President Mike Pence attend the meeting of the leaders of countries in the Western Hemisphere in his place. Pence was honored to go, the vice president’s office said in a separate statement.

The decision appeared to have taken even some senior White House officials by surprise. Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, was not aware of the president’s new plans when he told a conservative radio host Tuesday morning that he would be traveling with Trump to Latin America this week. He said Trump would be able to “compartmentalize.”

There were plenty of reasons for Trump to dread the trip to South America, which promised to include considerable behind-the-scenes friction and little of the flattering pomp and ceremony that he relishes — and to which he was treated during visits to Saudi Arabia and China last year.

The president’s approval rating in Latin America is extraordinarily low, and leaders there have been insulted by his rhetoric against immigrants and alarmed by his threats to use military force in Venezuela. The White House had already scaled back the scope of Trump’s travels to the region, trimming what was initially planned as a five-day visit to one that involved fewer than three days on the ground for the president.

Trump had planned to use that brief time to seek consensus on how to handle the crisis in Venezuela and press his case for better trade deals with Latin American nations. The president’s advisers had played down expectations for major advances during the trip, including saying it was unlikely to produce any breakthroughs on the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

They had left open the question of whether Trump would meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico, with whom he has had a tense relationship. The two have clashed over the phone over Trump’s promises to build a border wall and force Mexico to pay for it, and the latest such altercation led them to cancel a tentatively planned visit by Peña Nieto to the White House in March. More recently, Peña Nieto has taken umbrage at Trump’s decision last week to send National Guard troops to patrol the southern border.

Last week, Trump said he was eager to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, where they are fighting the Islamic State group. But, under pressure from military commanders who implored him not to beat a hasty retreat, he later said he would keep the 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria, while ordering the military to wrap up the four-year operation within a few months.

On Monday, Trump said his national security team was weighing options for a U.S. response to the suspected chemical attack in Syria, which the president has called a “barbaric act,” warning in Twitter posts that there would be a “big price to pay.” But at a meeting with his military commanders at the White House, Trump reserved his harshest words for the FBI and top Justice Department officials, railing against the raids in which he said agents “broke into” Cohen’s office.

Federal prosecutors in New York City obtained a search warrant after receiving a referral from Mueller. Agents seized business records, emails and documents related to several topics, including a payment to a pornographic film actress.

Monday’s FBI raid was separate from the special counsel’s Russia investigation.