Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during the Outdoor Channel and Sportsman Channel's 16th annual Outdoor Sportsman Awards at The Venetian Las Vegas during the 2016 National Shooting Sports Foundation's Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show on January 21. | Getty Trump: Overseas trips don't register with voters

Traveling to other countries this summer ahead of the general election would not appear to be one of Donald Trump's top priorities, if his comments to The Wall Street Journal published Monday are any indication.

“I don’t think it registers with the voters to be honest with you. What I really want to do is focus on our country and the election, but I might,” Trump remarked, in an interview with the Journal on Sunday. “I’ve been invited by numerous countries to go.”


Trump said Friday that he had received an invitation to visit from the British prime minister’s office, a claim with which a spokesman for No. 10 Downing St. took issue. “It’s long-standing practice for the PM to meet with the Republican and Democrat Presidential nominees if they visit the UK. Given the parties have yet to choose their nominees, there are no confirmed dates for this,” a spokesman said in a statement later Friday. British Prime Minister David Cameron, while denouncing Trump’s call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States as “very dangerous,” on Sunday said that he would be “very happy” to meet with Trump if he were to visit, as is customary of U.S. presidential nominees.

The presumptive Republican nominee has been flirting with an overseas trip for months. He canceled a trip to Israel last December after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned his call to temporarily ban all Muslims from entering the United States. The Guardian reported on Friday that Trump’s deep-pocketed donors are laying the groundwork for a trip to Israel this summer. Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson recently suggested that he would contribute $100 million to helping the Republican nominee win in November.

Trump’s immediate predecessor as Republican nominee had little success with his overseas foray in 2012.

Mitt Romney traveled to Israel, Poland and the United Kingdom in July 2012, in a trip that generated mostly negative headlines. Romney, who often pointed to his success in rescuing the troubled 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, criticized London’s organization ahead of the city’s Summer Olympics, prompting derision and the press dubbing his trip “Romneyshambles,” a play on “omnishambles,” an informal British term for a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged. Romney’s traveling press secretary lashed out at the media in Warsaw, Poland, during the same trip as reporters sought to ask about the candidate’s “gaffes.”

