Since 2017, Trump’s company has charged taxpayers for hotel rooms, ballrooms, cottages, rental houses, golf carts, votive candles, floating candles, candelabras, furniture moving, resort fees, decorative palm trees, strip steak, chocolate cake, breakfast buffets, $88 bottles of wine and $1,000 worth of liquor for White House aides. And water.
Water when no meals were served at a cost of $3 bottle.
The payments are not illegal. But, remember that Trump pledged in 2016:
...he would “completely isolate” himself from his business once in office, and put his voters’ interests above his own.
The Post reports these payments from the Government and his campaign are more than the revenues Trump Organization received for his hotels in Vancouver and Hawaii.
Trump's spokesman denies he misused taxpayer funds. But the Post shows a copy of a check as an example:
A check from the State Department to Mar-a-Lago showing payments for catering and flower arrangements during Abe’s visit. The club also charged the government for hotel rooms used by Abe, Secret Service agents and Trump’s staff — these were paid for with separate checks.
The Post reports Trump began the funding spree in February, 2017, a month after he got his desk in the Oval Office. Documents obtained by the Post show, for example: When Trump visited with Xi Jinping of China at Mar-a-Lago in April 2017, a bunch of staffers flew in for the weekend. They took over the bar and asked the bartender to leave. Here's what they ordered and the White House (not the State Department this time) paid to Mar-a-Lago:
26 servings of Patron and Don Julio tequila, 22 Chopin vodkas, and 6 glasses of Woodford Reserve bourbon, documents show. The bill to the government: $1,005.60, including service charge.
The State Department refused to pay the bill so the White House paid it. Here is an email from a Trump aide discussing the bill.
Not surprisingly, according to the WaPo report, Eric Trump defended the spending with false figures:
“If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free. Meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” Eric Trump told Yahoo Finance last year. “If they were to go to a hotel across the street, they’d be charging them $500 a night, whereas, you know we charge them, like 50 bucks.”
The documents obtained by the Post show:
At Mar-a-Lago, the government was charged rates ranging from $396.15 to $650 per room, according to documents obtained by The Post and people who have seen other, unredacted receipts. The rate for the cottage at Bedminster worked out to $566 per night. Once, when Donald Trump Jr. stopped at the Trump hotel in Vancouver, the Secret Service was charged $611 per night for his agents’ rooms. The Trump Organization has not commented on these higher charges.
Why go on? Read the Post report for yourselves. And remember, none of his supporters will care a whit about this. Which is why it's up to us, the voters, to knock Donald Trump, the Grifter-in-Chief, off his undeserved privileged perch.
