Trump cancels trip, focuses on Syria

President Donald Trump will stay home from a planned visit to South America to oversee the U.S. response to escalating tensions in Syria, the White House said Tuesday. Instead, Vice President Mike Pence will attend the Summit of the Americas in Lima, Peru, which begins Friday. It will be the first time a U.S. president has not attended the summit since it began in 1994. Trump has promised to respond “forcefully” to an apparent chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government that killed and injured civilians in a rebel-held enclave outside Damascus last weekend. The governments of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his chief ally, Russia, deny poison gas was used in the attack and have invited the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to investigate. The United States is urging the UN Security Council to condemn Syria’s actions in the strongest possible terms and is considering its own military response. On Monday, Trump said anyone involved in the attack would face tough ramifications, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, if implicated: “Everybody’s going to pay a price. He will. Everybody will.”