President Donald Trump announced one final $1 trillion deal on the last day of his Middle East trip and then said he was headed home to see his new grandson.
Trump’s daughter Tiffany gave birth to a baby boy – Alexander Trump Boulos – on Thursday. It’s her first child and the president’s 11th grandbaby.
‘It’s been a tremendous time. Now it’s time to go back home. My daughter had a baby. I’m going to go back home and see that little baby,’ Trump said at a business roundtable in Abu Dhabi.
‘I probably should have left yesterday,’ he conceded. ‘But I couldn’t disappoint you,’ he told Crown Prince Khaled Bin Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan. ‘Your father would have been extremely upset with me, and you would have been more upset.’
With the announcement Trump confirmed he would not be headed to Turkey for talks on a Russia-Ukraine peace deal. The president had dangled the possibility of a drop-in but Russian President Vladimir Putin decided not to go to Istanbul to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
President Trump said he’s leaving the Middle East to go home and see his new grandson
‘My daughter had a baby. I’m going to go back home and see that little baby, and then we get back to a lot of work. We’ll see what happens with Russia and Ukraine,’ Trump said.
He noted he’d meet with Putin ‘as soon as we can set it up. I was gonna, I would actually leave here and go, I do want to see my beautiful grandson.’
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is in Turkey but won’t sit in the talks, noting the United States doesn’t ‘have high expectations’ for a deal.
Trump said on Thursday he doesn’t expect a deal to be done until he and Putin can meet.
In the meantime, the president and UAE leaders announced a $1.4 trillion investment pledge, which includes plans from the UAE’s Etihad Airways plans to purchase dozens of American-made Boeing aircraft powered by GE engines.
Trump even had kind words for Boeing – a marked change from his recent criticism about its delay in delivering two 747s to serve as the new Air Force Ones.
‘It’s just my opinion but Boeing makes the best planes. They’ve had some headaches over the last few years, but they make the best planes,’ he said.
But his own issues with the aerospace giant remained on his mind.
‘I leave now and get on a 42-year-old Boeing,’ he said of the current Air Force One. Trump’s acceptance of a $400 million luxury jet from the Qatari Royal Family – which he plans to use as an Air Force One – has been one of the controversial issues of the trip.
But, in his four-days in the Middle East, Trump has wracked up an astonishing number of deals.
Those include a $200 billion order from Qatar Airways for Boeing jets and a $600 billion investment from Saudi Arabia — including nearly $142 billion in weapons, which the White House described as the largest-ever arms deal.
President Donald Trump looks at a display during a business forum in Abu Dhabi
Tiffany Trump gave birth to a baby boy on Thursday
Trump said it was important that Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates be the stops in the first major foreign trip of his second term.
‘Coming to Saudi Arabia, Qatar was very important to me because of personal relationships that I had, maybe more than anything else. So it’s been an amazing period of time,’ he said. ‘We’re developing a lot of fans.’
‘People have said they’ve never seen anything like taking place over the last four days, in terms of investment,’ he added, ‘in terms of the kind of money coming back into the United States. And all that money, the money is a nice word, but it’s really jobs. We have jobs that are at a level that we very soon will not be able to nobody can duplicate it.’
In addition to the massive investment totals, Trump met with Syria’s president and offered renewed optimism for an Iran nuclear deal.
There was no breakthrough on the Gaza war, but Trump did suggest turning the area into a ‘freedom zone’.
