Washington Post: Ballrooms, candles and luxury cottages: During Trump’s term, millions of government and GOP dollars have flowed to his properties
Washington Post: Ballrooms, candles and luxury cottages: During Trump’s term, millions of government and GOP dollars have flowed to his properties
For Trump, there was another, hidden benefit. Money.
At Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s company would get paid to host his summit.
In the next two days, as Trump and Abe talked about trade and North Korea, Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., club billed the U.S. government $13,700 for guest rooms, $16,500 for food and wine and $6,000 for the roses and other floral arrangements.
Trump’s club even charged for the smallest of services. When Trump and Abe met alone, with no food served, the government still got a bill for what they drank.
“Bilateral meeting,” the bill said. “Water.” $3 each.
Those 2018 payments, revealed here for the first time, are part of a long-running pattern whose scope has become clear only in recent months.
Since his first month in office, Trump has used his power to direct millions from U.S. taxpayers — and from his political supporters — into his own businesses. The Washington Post has sought to compile examples of this spending through open records requests and a lawsuit.
In all, he has received at least $8.1 million from these two sources since he took office, those documents and publicly available records show. …
Paul Seamus Ryan, of the nonprofit group Common Cause, said it was legal for candidates to rent things from their own business — as long as they appeared to be paying market rates and not overcharging.
But, Ryan said, he had never seen anyone do it at the scale Trump has.
“It’s extremely unusual. Unprecedented, in my experience — 20 years or so, watchdogging money in elections,” said Ryan, an election-law expert.
Trump’s campaign spends about $40,000 per month to rent office space in Trump Tower in Manhattan, which in 2016 served as its campaign headquarters. But this year, the campaign headquarters is not in Trump Tower. It’s in Arlington, Va. None of Trump’s key staff is in New York, and Trump no longer regularly visits there.