NEW YORK — Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump met with Bob Corker in New York on Monday, intensifying speculation that the US senator from Tennessee may be on Trump’s vice presidential shortlist.
Speaking to reporters following the meeting, Corker described the get-together at Trump Tower in Manhattan as ‘‘a meeting between two people who didn’t know each other except over phone calls getting to know each other.’’
He said he has no reason to believe he’s being vetted as a potential Trump running mate or for a Cabinet position should Trump win the general election.
‘‘I have no reason whatsoever to believe I am being considered for a position like that,’’ Corker told reporters who pressed him about various possible positions.
Corker is chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He also serves on the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.
In a statement, Corker’s chief of staff Todd Womack said the pair ‘‘had a good meeting ... in which they engaged in a wide-ranging policy discussion.’’
Corker praised a high-profile foreign policy speech that Trump delivered in Washington last month, saying in a statement that ‘‘in a year where angry rhetoric has defined the presidential race on both sides of the aisle, it is my hope that candidates in both parties will begin focusing not only on the problems we face but on solutions.’’
He said he believed the speech ‘‘could be an important step in that direction.’’
A Trump campaign spokeswoman did not immediately responded to a request for comment on the meeting.
In a separate development Monday, Politico reported that Trump wants to build another huge wall — this time to keep out the rising seas threatening to swamp his luxury golf resort in Ireland.
The Republican presidential candidate has called climate change a ‘‘con job’’ and a ‘‘hoax.’’ But in an application filed this month in County Clare, the Trump International Golf Links and Hotel cites the threat of global warming in seeking a permit to build a nearly two-mile-long stone wall between it and the Atlantic Ocean.
The beach in front of the 18th green is disappearing at a rate of about a yard each year.
Trump’s application cites local regulations pertaining to ‘‘rising sea levels and increased storm frequency and wave energy associated with global warming.’’ An attached environmental impact statement says that almost all the dunes in western Ireland are retreating ‘‘due to sea level rise and increased Atlantic storminess.’’
Trump campaign spokesman Alan Garten had no immediate comment.
Trump, who has roiled the immigration debate by proposing to build a massive wall along the Mexican border, has repeatedly taken to Twitter to express skepticism that human activity is causing the world to warm, raising sea levels as the polar ice caps melt.
He has also said he would seek to renegotiate the global accord to cut climate-warming carbon emissions backed by President Obama in December. ‘‘The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive,’’ Trump tweeted in 2012.
Environmental groups pounced on the application as evidence of hypocrisy.
‘‘Donald Trump clearly cares more about the fate of his golf courses than the health of the millions of families already affected by the climate crisis,’’ said Adam Beitman, a spokesman for the Sierra Club.
Also on Monday, Trump added eight delegates from the Virgin Islands, pulling him within 68 delegates of clinching the Republican nomination. Trump now has 1,169 delegates.
