Whenever Trump goes on vacation, he chooses one of his properties that require billing for the room and board of the Secret Service and the golf cart rental fees for them to keep up with him on the links, along with the money made from the price of meals of members and guests who want to whisper in his ear or be present in case he blurts out something juicy.
While the taxpayers pay for the trips and trappings, we don’t see any of the money his properties rake in.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump told us that he would “rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done”, but since he took office he has regularly spent long weekends at Trump-branded properties, in 2019 spending one of every five days at a golf club.
We paid about $96 million on travel by President Obama and his family over the course of eight years, and when Trump brought that up on the campaign trail his rally crowds cheered when he called those trips unnecessary and said he would go to fewer place and spend less money.
However, estimates are that Trump may have cost the taxpayers more than that in his first year in office alone.
Year to date he has spent 114 days at Mar A Lago with plane flights costing $51,400,000, and 75 days at Bedminster with plane flights costing $18,375,500.
He has gone to his own properties every 4.5 day on average.
If he keeps this up, he will have visited these properties 323 times in his first term, and potentially 646 in total by the end of his second.
For the What Aboutists who will want to defend Trump by comparison to his predecessor, as of this writing, from 2017 to 2020 he has surpassed Obama’s golf trips in 8 years by 17 in three.
We pay for the Secret Service each time, so it stands to reason that we taxpayers should know how much money we are spending on them for these trips.
Yet, the White House has refused to share information about the costs of Trump’s travel with the Government Accountability Office.
Democratic senators are demanding the Secret Service disclose the cost of these trips within 120 days, but Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin wants to delay the reporting until after the 2020 election preferring an annual report to Congress beginning in 2021.
Trump promised to release his taxes once he was elected, but then didn’t.
Will people fall for that again as he runs for reelection?