President Donald Trump is meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda at The Royal Castle in Warsaw Thursday morning, kicking off a trip that will see the President push energy infrastructure investment in Eastern Europe and later discuss trade, climate and migration at the G20 meeting in Germany.
Trump, after spending the night in Warsaw, will spend five working hours in Poland on Thursday, packing his schedule with multiple meetings with Duda and capped by a high-profile speech to the Polish people from Krasinski Square.
The speech, which will be delivered surrounded by a monument to Poles who fought against Nazi occupation in 1944, will feature Trump outlining his vision for transatlantic ties, particularly in the energy sector, White House officials said.
Trump is expected to receive a warm welcome in Poland, where American presidents have long been well received and whose conservative government, led by Duda, is more ideologically in line with Trump than his predecessor, Barack Obama.
“The main message is that America is with you, America understands that its interests align with the interests of the Polish people, and we are determined to do our best to work together on our common priorities and our common interests,” H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, said about the visit.
Thursday’s visit to Warsaw opens a trip that will see the President meet face-to-face with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russian meddling in the 2016 election and investigations into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russian operatives have hung over the White House for months.
The G20 meeting in Hamburg will be a contentious affair with a host of confrontations on the schedule.
Looming over the whole conference will be Trump’s meeting with Putin, which will likely be analyzed worldwide for changes in American policy to Russia.
After the day in Poland, Trump flies to Hamburg, where he will meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has maintained an icy relationship with Trump since they met at the White House in March.
Merkel all but ensured the G20 meeting in Hamburg will be combative when she put trade, climate change and migration on the agenda for the meeting, all topics about which she and other world leaders have publicly sparred with Trump.
