President Trump said Friday that he saved taxpayers more than $999.5 million on construction costs for an embassy in Jerusalem, and that he may attend the official opening later this year.
Trump said during a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel that “I may go, I’m very proud of it.”
According to Trump, he nearly signed off on a $1 billion embassy, before calling U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who suggested a much less expensive renovation of an existing site.
“They came to me with a proposal for a $1 billion embassy in Jerusalem. And the papers, Mike Pence can tell you, the papers were put before me to sign an application for more than $1 billion to build an embassy. I said, ‘What are you talking about $1 billion? Most embassies are like a single story’,” he said.
“I had my name half signed,” he said. “I had Donald signed but I never got to the word Trump.”
Trump said that Friedman told him “I can build it for $150,000 … We have a building, we the site. We already own the site, we own the building. I can take a corner of the building and for $150,000 we can fix it up, make it beautiful, [and] open our embassy instead of three years from now, we could open it up in three months.”
Trump, recalling the conversation, said he told Friedman, “David, let’s not go from $1 billion to $150,000, lets go to three, four hundred thousand.”
“That’s what we did,” he said. “It will be somewhat temporary, but it could be for many, many years.”
“That’s the way government works,” he added. “They were going to spend $1 billion, and we are going to spend much less than a half a million – could have done it for much less than that, but I said lets make it really nice.”
