Here’s a deep dive into Trump’s White House grift from NBC:
On Wednesday night, when President Donald Trump addressed supporters from behind a Trump Hotels lectern in a room at his Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C., one of his company’s most faithful customers accompanied him.
The U.S. Secret Service.
The government agency charged with protecting the president has paid his businesses at least $471,000 to fulfill its congressional mandate, according to documents The Washington Post recently obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. That’s money from U.S. taxpayers flowing to the Trump Organization, with a venerable 155-year-old law enforcement organization being used like one of Michael Cohen’s Delaware shell companies and serving as a conduit for presidential profit. And that $471,000 figure? It’s only through April 2018.
That’s money from U.S. taxpayers flowing to the Trump Organization, with a venerable 155-year-old law enforcement organization being used like one of Michael Cohen’s Delaware shell companies.
In an interview with Yahoo Finance in October, Trump Organization Executive Vice President Eric Trump claimed his company charged the government only enough to recoup its costs when hosting the president. (Eric Trump also denied the new Washington Post reporting.) But the rates the new documents detail — $650 per room at Mar-a-Lago! $17,000 to rent a cottage for a month at Trump Bedminster! payments to the D.C. hotel despite Trump’s never having spent a night there as president! — seem a bit higher than what it costs to clean a room and freshen the linens.
These formerly federal funds can and do reach the president’s pocket, albeit through another conduit: Trump’s 400-plus business interests are held in a revocable trust that is not blind and can “distribute net income or principal to Donald J. Trump at his request,” as ProPublica reported. (Maybe the president withdrew $1 from it to buy a Coke while you read that last sentence — we simply don’t know.)
I’m going to guess it went to paying off some of his massive debt. He doesn’t need pocket money in the White House which must be a huge thrill for him.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the chair of the House Oversight Committee sent a letter asking the Secret Service to detail all of its spending at Trump properties. But the agency is just one of the executive branch entities that have rendered unto Trump the money that had once belonged to taxpayers.
A complete accounting of how much taxpayers have forked over to the Trump Organization since its CEO’s election is as likely as a Trump pardon for Cohen. The Post’s recent scoop, however, follows a microtrend of the government’s occasionally releasing a little information about some expenditures at Trump businesses months or years after they occurred. What the government has allowed Americans to see demonstrates that the corruption is real: Substantial amounts of your money are, in fact, being spent at Trump properties, many of which are reported to be floundering otherwise.
Trump always said that he could make money from running for president. Why would anyone think he wouldn’t pocket as much taxpayer money as possible as president?
This piece goes into the many different ways in which we already know he’s been personally benefitting and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.