BUENOS AIRES, Argentina _ President Donald Trump, who normally revels in the spotlight at international summits, canceled a scheduled news Saturday on the final day of Group of 20 summit "out of respect" for the Bush family after the death of former President George H.W. Bush.
Trump said on Twitter that "we will wait until after the funeral to have a press conference."
Trump said he had looked forward to answering reporters' questions because of the "great success" he achieved at the two-day G-20 meeting.
He has little to show for his two days of meetings, however, beyond a ceremonial finalizing of a revised trade deal with Canada and Mexico that still requires legislative approval by the three countries. He also is expected to agree to a truce in the trade war with China, a reversal from his recent threats to add more tariffs.
Before a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Trump said he'd spoken by phone with two of the late president's sons, former President George W. Bush and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. He praised the elder Bush "as a terrific guy" and "family man" who "led an exemplary life."
Merkel also praised Bush, who helped engineer the peaceful end of the Cold War, calling him "one of the fathers of German reunification" after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1991.
Trump, who did not attend Barbara Bush's funeral this year, has been highly critical in the past of both Bush presidents.
Trump long has had fraught relations with the Bush family.
He disagreed with George H.W. Bush's call for a "kindler, gentler nation," telling Playboy in 1990 that "if this country gets any kinder or gentler, it's literally going to cease to exist."
He mercilessly mocked former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, as "low energy." He also slammed George W. Bush for leading America into the 2003 Iraq war _ which Trump initially supported.
Trump's cancellation of a news conference is a rarity for the former reality TV star. He enjoys sparring with reporters and has shown little compunction about turning past summits into one-man shows starring himself.
Trump held a rollicking 90-minute news conference at the end of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September; and he upended the NATO summit in Brussels in July with demands that member nations spend more on defense. He then held a last-minute news conference and took credit for their previous commitments.
In Argentina, Trump was unusually low key.
He left Washington Thursday two hours after his former longtime attorney Michael D. Cohen had pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about negotiations for a proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow.
Contradicting Trump's claims, Cohen told a federal court that he and other Trump emissaries had continued negotiations until June 2016, after Trump had locked up the Republican nomination.
The case, brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, is the first to specifically target one of Trump's business dealings. It spurred a furious denial by Trump of any wrongdoing and a new round of angry Twitter posts.
After arriving in Argentina, Trump was unusually terse before TV cameras, mostly offering brief platitudes and refusing, for the most part, to respond to questions from reporters.
On Saturday, he was notably deferential to Merkel, whom he's often publicly criticized, calling her "a friend" and that "she's highly respected by everybody, including me."
At the relatively quiet G-20 summit, Trump was overshadowed, to a degree, by two autocrats he sought to keep at a distance: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
A handshake here Friday between Putin and Mohammed was a remarkable illustration of their shared lack of concern over being somewhat marginalized by Trump and other leaders.
Trump also had what the White House called "a number of informal conversations" with world leaders "including Putin" at a dinner Friday night.
On Thursday, after Air Force One had taken off for Argentina, Trump abruptly canceled a planned one-on-one meeting here Saturday with Putin. He blamed Russia's refusal to release three Ukrainian vessels and 24 sailors that it seized in the contested Kerch Strait near Crimea last Sunday.
Trump has credulously accepted Putin's denials of election interference over the conclusions of U.S. intelligence officials and blamed President Barack Obama for Russia's illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea.
He insisted Friday that "what took place with the ships and the sailors" was the "sole reason" that he canceled the meeting with Putin, not the damaging revelations in Cohen's guilty plea about his efforts to do business in Russia during the 2016 campaign.
