Politico reports:

President Donald Trump was sitting beside Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in the Oval Office in March when he fondly recalled his luxury golf resort on Ireland’s west coast.

He gushed about his two tony Scottish resorts months later while standing next to French President Emmanuel Macron in France.

And in August, while meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he first suggested that he just might bring the G-7 summit of world leaders to one of his own Florida resorts in 2020. “We haven’t found anything that could even come close to competing with it,” he said.

Trump constantly brags about his properties around the globe when he speaks with foreign leaders in person or by phone, even more than the public instances witnessed out in the open, according to three people familiar with Trump’s conversations with foreign officials. The remarks are permeating every membrane of his presidency so much that they’ve left aides and allies mastering verbal jiu-jitsu to defend his unprecedented approach to fusing personal business interests with his position in high office.

The interactions have led House Democrats — who have already launched an impeachment inquiry into whether Trump is illegally profiting off the presidency — and sometimes even his own staff to question whether his namesake businesses are influencing U.S. foreign policy. [Continue reading…]