President Donald Trump was only a half-hour into his nine-hour flight to the G20 summit here in the Argentine capital when he decided to pull the plug on the most hotly anticipated moment of his trip: a lengthy face-to-face with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But while Trump's abrupt decision quashed concerns that the President would repeat his cozy performance alongside Putin during their last meeting in Helsinki, Finland, new allegations by the President's former longtime attorney Michael Cohen revived questions about Trump's financial ties to Russia as he arrived for the international summit.
Trump's planned meetings with a half-dozen other world leaders -- combined with the possibility of diplomatic snafus -- offer little promise of clearing the smoke of suspicion that is once again following him abroad.
Eight minutes before he was set to meet with the summit's host on Friday morning, Trump began tweeting about the Cohen saga, saying his business dealings while a candidate were "very legal & very cool."
Trump arrived in Buenos Aires for the summit late Thursday night, marking the first time he has set foot in Latin America in his nearly two years in office and kicking off what promises to be a whirlwind 48-hour visit. Friday will amount to the President's busiest day of diplomacy, but his most important meeting of the summit -- his dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping -- doesn't come until a day later.
Trump's aides hoped a signing ceremony for the recently struck United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement would act as a centerpiece of the trip. At the Friday morning event, Trump hailed the revised NAFTA free trade deal, rebranded as the USMCA, as a "truly groundbreaking achievement" alongside his Canadian and Mexican counterparts.
Persistent disputes with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau -- including over US steel and aluminum tariffs -- led to questions about who precisely from the Canadian side would be doing the signing, but Trudeau stood next to Trump and touted the deal as a success for middle class workers.
Trump has hailed the agreement as evidence of his negotiating prowess and said the pact would benefit American workers. He's been unnerved in recent days by a shaky stock market and factory closures by General Motors, according to people familiar with the matter, and is hoping to be able to tout the new trade agreement in Argentina.
Aggressive schedule
Trump was darting from bilateral meetings to summit sessions and back, starting with an early morning breakfast alongside Argentine President Mauricio Macri, the summit's host. Trump has known Macri for decades, beginning when both were real estate developers.
"I want to just say I've been friends with Mauricio for a long time, many years," Trump said at the Casa Rosada, the presidential mansion. "He was a young man, a handsome man."
Trump recollected a deal with Macri's family to develop the West Side railroad yards -- one of the "largest jobs in Manhattan," in Trump's telling.
"That was in my civilian days," Trump said. "Little did you realize I would become president."
Trump said in their meeting, he'd discuss trade and military purchases with the Argentine president.
That session will lead into the large gathering of the G20, where Trump will find himself face-to-face with the collection of global leaders he has sometimes rebuffed. It's in these sessions that he's most likely to run across Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who most of the world has castigated after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Trump has taken the opposite approach, indicating he has no plans to cut ties to Saudi Arabia. And while he couldn't fit in a formal meeting with the crown prince in Buenos Aires, he indicated before he departed the US on Thursday that he would like to speak to the young leader.
A pull-aside chat is scheduled with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose government has pushed for greater punishment of Saudi Arabia for Khashoggi's killing, which occurred at a consulate in Istanbul. Trump is also slated to speak on the sidelines with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has acted as an avid cheerleader for Trump's diplomatic opening with North Korea.
Less enthusiastic has been Japanese President Shinzo Abe, who's expressed concern about easing pressure on Pyongyang without any corresponding steps from the North Korean regime. Trump will have a more formal meeting with Abe in the afternoon, where they'll be joined by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Trump was supposed to sit later in the day with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who hosted last year's G20 and has withstood sustained attacks by Trump over auto imports and trade. But Merkel's government plane suffered technical problems en route, and she was forced to turn back to Cologne. She was expected to arrive late to the summit, and the meeting did not appear on Trump's schedule for Friday.
Merkel recently announced that she will not run for another term as chancellor after acting as Europe's de facto leader for more than a decade.
Mueller cloud remains
Hanging over it all will be the questions sparked by the latest twist in special counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing investigation -- just the latest instance of the Mueller investigation following Trump outside the United States.
The President's international trips have been repeatedly marred by developments in the investigation, beginning with Mueller's appointment as special counsel just two days before Trump left for his first international trip. The President has publicly and privately groused that he thinks the investigation has hampered his diplomatic efforts on the world stage.
Trump's second foreign trip, in July 2017, became another key moment in the Mueller investigation as the President and his aides worked to craft a statement on behalf of his eldest son concerning the now-infamous meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower a year prior. A year later, as the President prepared to fly to Helsinki to meet with Putin, the Justice Department announced the indictment of Russian intelligence officers linked to election interference.
The Cohen plea agreement on Thursday became the latest example, and soon after the news emerged Trump moved to scrap his meeting with Putin. The White House said Trump had decided to cancel the get-together following a meeting with his top foreign policy advisers after boarding Air Force One, even though no new information had publicly emerged.
Scrapping the meeting with Putin, though, did not eliminate all of the President's flair for make-or-break drama. He is still scheduled to join Xi, the Chinese President, for a working dinner on Saturday to hash out a possible ceasefire to the trade war that has roiled their countries and threatens to wreak havoc on the global economy if the ratcheting-up persists.
Leaving the White House on Thursday, Trump kept the global suspense going.
"I think we're very close to doing something with China, but I don't know that I want to do it, because what we have right now is billions and billions of dollars coming into the United States in the form of tariffs or taxes. So I really don't know," the President said before departing Washington. "But I will tell you that I think China wants to make a deal. I'm open to making a deal. But, frankly, I like the deal we have right now."
