breathe deep and buy a sitar. Joe Biden isn't worth having a break down over. He'll be in assisted living by Christmas
Wake Up, America! Wake Up! PLEASE!!
- Thread starter Drillher4me
- Start date
- Status
Hatred is a liberal thing. I don't hate her I don't like her. She's a phony bitch who is in it for no one other than herself.
more of your right wing bullshit...…..still without a clue
5 years of hate: Trump’s history of encouraging violence ...
A timeline of hate: Trump’s history of encouraging violence, from 2015 to 2021
Trump has emboldened hate groups and political violence from the moment he announced his presidency.
www.vox.com
Trump is doing more to divide the country than unite it ...
Trump is a 'divider,' says Robert Gates, former CIA director and defense secretary
The U.S. is facing multiple competing and simultaneous challenges at home and abroad. How has the country dealt with similar periods in the past? Former defense secretary and CIA director Robert Gates has a deep familiarity with the topic. He joins Judy Woodruff to discuss that and his new book...
www.pbs.org
Trump is doing more to divide the country than unite it ...
Trump is a 'divider,' says Robert Gates, former CIA director and defense secretary
The U.S. is facing multiple competing and simultaneous challenges at home and abroad. How has the country dealt with similar periods in the past? Former defense secretary and CIA director Robert Gates has a deep familiarity with the topic. He joins Judy Woodruff to discuss that and his new book...
www.pbs.org
Trump and racism: What do the data say? - Brookings
08 bank capital requirements elliott
Doug Elliott explains new proposals that would ******* banks to fund themselves with less debt and more money from shareholders. While these measures would reduce the potential need for taxpayer bailouts, this added safety would come at the cost of more expensive loans and a slower economy.
Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent ...
Mar 22, 2019 · Afterward, Trump insisted that “there’s blame on both sides” for the violence. Then in October 2018, a gunman killed 11 congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.Why facts don’t matter to Trump’s supporters - The ...
Aug 05, 2016 · Why facts don’t matter to Trump’s supporters A Donald Trump supporter, left, plugs his ears while passing protesters waving signs and chanting against the …Why do Trump supporters refuse to accept the evidence that ...
Nov 09, 2017 · Trump supporters refuse to accept the fact that he’s a liar because “lying” is a false notion. All that is — is — The Plan. Such is the ultimate fact.Study Finds Trump Voters Have Drastically Lower IQ Than ...
“The test was 200 questions, and each completed test gave us an average IQ score based on answers. On average, a Trump voter would score in the 30th percentile, or have an average intelligence level of about 71, far below the 90 to 110 that is considered ‘normal.’ A non-Trump voter would score an average of
I never bet, gamble or buy lottery tickets, so that bet won't happen.
That's your argument is it? And you refer to others as idiots, look to yourself.
The Democratic Party is simply using Biden in a desperate attempt to gain back the White House. They have no intention of him actually being allowed to hold the office, in fact I doubt that if he should beat Trump, Nancy Pelosi and others have prepared away to find him unfit before he ever gets sworn in. Hopefully Trump will win and destroy Nancy's hopes again. Go Trump, we can do it.
As usual, empty words and projection.
Opinion | Sady Doyle: Without a way to reach women, the GOP is unlikely to survive
Women are recoiling from the GOP because of Trump, but the problem is not just Trump, and it never was.
www.nbcnews.com
So it's true: Republicans really do hate women
It's not just Trump. With the vote to move forward on Kavanaugh, the misogyny at the heart of the GOP is revealed
www.salon.com
Column: The GOP's misogyny problem is bigger than Trump
There's something almost sweet about the way Democrats and establishment Republicans are coming together over their shared disgust with Donald Trump.
www.latimes.com
Opinion | Why Do Republicans Hate Women?
Republican legislators have repeatedly denied that there is a war on women, and insist that this is a gimmick to influence women voters
It's amazing that the more you write, you expose yourself to be even more stupid than I exaggerate you to be.
I cannot build a floor fast enough before you go even lower. Wow.
ain't payback a bitch!
Trump's official campaign website briefly offline after hackers take control and claim they had 'full access to Trump and relatives'
The apparent hackers claimed that "multiple devices were compromised that gave full access to trump and relatives," purportedly giving them access to "classified information" showing that the Trump administration was involved in the "origin of the corona virus" and that the president had colluded with foreign actors to manipulate the 2020 elections.
Trump's official campaign website briefly offline after hackers take control and claim they had 'full access to Trump and relatives'
- Trump's official campaign website was taken offline briefly on Tuesday after hackers appeared to have accessed it, as earlier reported by KQED reporter Gabriel Lorenzo Greschler.
- The hackers posted a message claiming "multiple devices were compromised that gave full access to trump and relatives."
- They told visitors they might release damaging information on Trump while trying to convince people to send them cryptocurrency, in a potential scam.
The apparent hackers claimed that "multiple devices were compromised that gave full access to trump and relatives," purportedly giving them access to "classified information" showing that the Trump administration was involved in the "origin of the corona virus" and that the president had colluded with foreign actors to manipulate the 2020 elections.
Ballrooms, candles and luxury cottages: During Trump’s term, millions of government and GOP dollars have flowed to his properties
President Trump welcomed the Japanese prime minister at Mar-a-Lago, in front of a towering arrangement of roses. The two could have met in Washington, but Trump said his private club was a more comfortable alternative.
“It is, indeed, the Southern White House,” Trump said, greeting Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in front of the press in April 2018.
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.
© Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP The president and first lady Melania Trump sit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife, Akie Abe, at Mar-a-Lago on April 17, 2018.
The president brought taxpayer money to his businesses simply by bringing himself. He’s visited his hotels and clubs more than 280 times now, making them a familiar backdrop for his presidency. And in doing so, he has turned those properties into magnets for GOP events, including glitzy fundraisers for his own reelection campaign, where big donors go to see and be seen.
Trump says the reason is comfort. “People like my product, what can I tell you, can’t help it,” he told reporters last year.
But documents show that visits by Trump, his family and his supporters have turned the government and the Republican Party into regular customers for the family business.
In the case of the government, Trump’s visits turned it into a captive customer, newly revealed documents show. What the government needed from Trump’s properties, it had to buy from Trump’s company.
So the more he went, the more he got. 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 ******* for White House aides. And water.
Since Trump took office, his company has been paid at least $2.5 million by the U.S. government, according to documents obtained by The Post.
In addition, Trump’s campaign and fundraising committee paid $5.6 million to his companies since his inauguration in January 2017. Those payments — turning campaign donations into private revenue — continued even this year, as Trump fell behind in polls and his campaign ran short of money.
The combined total of these payments was more than Trump’s hotels in Vancouver and Hawaii brought him during the same period, according to financial disclosures.
The Trump Organization is not prohibited from accepting the payments. But the payments did break a key promise from 2016: Trump’s pledge that he would “completely isolate” himself from his business once in office, and put his voters’ interests above his own.
“If I win, I may never see my property — I may never see these places again,” Trump said on the campaign trail then. “Because I’m going to be working for you, I’m not going to have time to go play golf. Believe me.”
Trump still owns his businesses, but says he’s given day-to-day control to his eldest sons. There is no official total of what Trump’s company has been paid by the government and Trump’s campaign since he took office. The company and the campaign have both declined to say and did not respond to questions for this story.
White House spokesman Judd Deere also declined to give a total.
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.
“Any suggestion that the President has used his own official travel or the federal government as a way to profit off of taxpayers is an absolute disgrace and lie,” Deere said in a statement.
Without an official accounting of these payments, The Post has sought to compile its own.
It relied on public databases of campaign spending, and hundreds of pages of federal spending records — obtained via public-records requests, public-records lawsuits and other means.
The result is a never-before-seen portrait of the presidency as a revenue stream.
While Trump was publicly donating his $400,000 annual presidential salary, he was privately using his power to bring his businesses far more than that.
“Americans elect a president to serve the people, not profit off them. Yet President Trump exploits his office to line his pockets with taxpayer dollars,” said Ryan Shapiro of the group Property of the People, whose lawsuits and public-records requests helped bring to light some of the earliest details of this spending.
Much spending remains hidden, because some federal agencies — including the State Department, and the White House itself — have declined to release records. “The amounts we’re seeing are just the tip of the iceberg,” Shapiro said.
© Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP U.S. and Japanese journalists walk across the grounds of Mar-a-Lago during Abe’s April 2018 visit.
He was meeting Abe at the club. His aides would need rooms. According to federal policy, the most they could pay was $182.
But Mar-a-Lago was not charging $182.
“[There’s] a five bedroom house that three of the senior staff are staying in at $2,600 per night,” State Department employee Michael Dobbs wrote his colleagues, in an email later released to the public. “The two other Senior staffers (Bannon and Walsh) are expected to be charged $546 for their rooms.”
Within the State Department, emails show, officials did not seem inclined to fight. Federal rules allowed them to pay up to three times the normal limit — $546, in this case — with authorization. And the White House had authorized it. (Months later, Mar-a-Lago lowered the rate it charged the State Department to $396.15 per night, and provided partial refunds for some of the earlier charges above that.)
Within the White House, one former official said, some officials grumbled about holding the events at Mar-a-Lago. The events required dozens of staffers and enormous logistics, which had to be shoehorned into a private club on a narrow island full of other, nosy, paying guests. And there were some ethics concerns about the president repeatedly visiting his own properties.
“It’s a hell of a lot easier to do it at the White House, which is set up for it,” the former official said, speaking — like others — on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s a pain in the [posterior] having those guys down there for the staff.”
Foreign leaders also sought the prestige of visiting the president at his vacation home because they believed it showed a close bond with the United States, two former officials said.
Trump returned, two months later, with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“He was truly of the opinion that his property was better than anyone else’s property. And he wanted you to know it,” the former official said.
© Alex Brandon/AP Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping walk together after meetings at Mar-a-Lago on April 7, 2017.
© Provided by The Washington Post
© Provided by The Washington Post
And Mar-a-Lago’s bills only got bigger that time, according to State Department records newly obtained by The Post. Now, there were florist bills: When Trump visited with Xi Jinping of China in April 2017, the club had started charging for flowers, and $50 per palm for decorative palm trees.
That same weekend, a group of White House staffers gathered in a Mar-a-Lago bar adorned with a large portrait of Trump wearing tennis whites. They kicked out the bartender “so they could speak confidentially,” according to an email Mar-a-Lago’s catering director sent to the State Department later.
The group then helped themselves to the contents of the bar: 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, emails show. But ProPublica — which first revealed this bill — reported that the White House eventually did. (The White House has not responded to questions asking how much it has paid Trump’s clubs out of its own budget).
But the most expensive — and most famous — event of the weekend was the formal dinner for 30, where Trump informed Xi about U.S. missile strikes against Syria during dessert. “The most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen,” Trump later said in an interview with Fox Business Network.
Taxpayers likely paid for that: Mar-a-Lago charged $7,700 for that dinner, a charge that appears to have covered Trump’s food, as well.
Trump returned to the club a year later for another summit with Abe. The mood that time was more tense, with North Korean missile threats looming over the two leaders.
In preparation, Mar-a-Lago bought $6,000 worth of floral arrangements.
The list of preparations filled a full page: There were three kinds of candles (votive, floating, candelabra), centerpieces, vases — and a floral plan for even the smallest of meetings. Even “National Security Council pre-briefs” got their own centerpieces, the bill showed.
Taxpayers were billed for all of it, records show.
Mar-a-Lago’s florist, Julie Miner, declined to comment, citing a nondisclosure agreement.
A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, defended Trump, saying “the President has hosted near 100 head of state/government visits since 2017” and only a fraction were at his own properties.
© Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images Trump sits with Xi during a meeting at Mar-a-Lago.
But, last year, Trump sought to award his own company a much bigger event: the massive Group of Seven summit, which Trump gave to his Doral golf club in Miami. That event would have brought hundreds of foreign and U.S. officials to that property. Trump reversed the decision days later, retreating under public pressure — and resistance from his own aides.
His visits brought another customer: The Secret Service.
When Trump visited Mar-a-Lago for two weeks at Christmas last year, for example, the club charged the Secret Service $32,400 for guest rooms.
In addition, Trump’s adult children have brought their *******’s company another $260,000 in taxpayer revenue on their own, records show, by taking solo trips to Trump properties with their own Secret Service agents in tow.
And, in some cases, Trump’s properties even got paid on days when no Trumps were present at all.
In Bedminster, N.J., for instance, Trump’s club has charged the Secret Service $17,000 per month to rent a cottage from May to November — even on days when the family is absent. That’s an unusually high rate for the area, but a former Trump administration official said they had to pay it — to be ready, if Trump suddenly decided to visit.
Defense Department records recently obtained by The Post show a similar pattern of $17,000 payments to Trump’s club in Bedminster in recent years. Pentagon officials declined to answer questions about whether they have a cottage there, too.
In the past, the Trump Organization has defended its actions with two arguments. One is that — even if it wanted to — it couldn’t do all this for free.
“Legally, by law, you have to charge the federal government something, otherwise you get into all sorts of gift laws,” Eric Trump told Fox News in February. Eric Trump has not specified what laws he is referring to.
© Alex Brandon/AP The table is set for a dinner hosted for Xi at Mar-a-Lago in 2017.
Ethics experts said they were baffled by that claim, since the agencies that the Trump Organization is known to have charged the most — the departments of Homeland Security, State and Defense — all have policies allowing them to accept gifts under some circumstances.
“There’s nothing that would prohibit any government employee, including the president, from offering the government something for free” if those circumstances are met, said Don W. Fox, who was acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics under President Barack Obama.
The Trump Organization’s second argument has been that — though it must charge the government something — it charges only enough to cover its costs. “If my ******* 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.”
Among the hundreds of transactions reviewed by The Post, there were about two dozen payments that came close to that description: On three occasions when Trump visited his hotel in Las Vegas, for instance, the Defense Department reported paying just $74.51 per night for rooms. The Defense Department declined to comment about those payments.
But, in cases where The Post could determine what room rate was charged, the Trump Organization mostly appeared to charge the maximum allowed under federal spending rules.
Or more.
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.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime “fixer” and attorney, said he saw no sign of a discount in those rates.
“That’s what anybody coming in would pay,” said Cohen, who worked at the Trump Organization through the beginning of Trump’s term. This year, he was released early from federal prison, after pleading guilty to campaign-finance violations and lying to Congress.
© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post A worker walk along a road at Mar-a-Lago.
In the 2020 campaign, he’s done the opposite.
Trump has donated a mere $8,020 to his 2020 campaign as of Oct. 14, records show. But his campaign and affiliated fundraising committees paid at least $5.6 million out to his companies. The two committees spent nearly $1 million from Sept. 1 through Oct. 14, including $97,000 for lodging at Trump hotels and nearly $800,000 for catering and ballroom rentals, records show.
RNC and campaign officials have said Trump has never ordered them to visit his clubs — but it was understood that he is more likely to attend if an event is at one of his properties.
In those two months, Trump held five campaign events at his properties — including two in the same day. On Sept. 25, he held a “Latinos for Trump” event at his Doral resort in the morning and a fundraiser at his D.C. hotel in the evening.
Trump had planned another campaign event at his D.C. hotel, but it was canceled after he tested positive for the coronavirus. His campaign is expected to mark election night there next week.
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.
© Biz Herman for The Washington Post Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
The Trump campaign and the Trump Organization both declined to answer questions on the record about what happens now in the Trump Tower space.
Trump’s campaign and joint fundraising committee have also paid $3.2 million to rent banquet space for fundraisers at Trump properties. Campaign officials have said this is a decision that pleases both Trump and his big donors, who feel at home inside Mar-a-Lago and the Trump hotel in Washington.
In recent months, something unexpected happened to Trump’s campaign — once called a “Death Star” by former campaign manager Brad Parscale. Several campaign officials have said they could use more money for television ads in the final stretch.
It started to run short of money. The campaign’s cash on hand shrank down to $43 million, far less than that of Democratic rival Joe Biden. That was surprisingly little for a campaign that started raising money far earlier than past incumbents seeking reelection: Trump’s 2020 campaign had been fundraising since before Trump took office in 2017. The campaign has canceled TV ad buys in key states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio. In emails to prospective donors, Trump asked for money in capital letters.
“You’ve never let me down before and I know you won’t start now,” Trump wrote on Sept. 23. “Contribute ANY AMOUNT RIGHT NOW.”
The next day, Trump’s campaign paid Trump’s business $40,000 in rent, for that space in Trump Tower.
© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post Trump Tower during sunset in Manhattan on Jan. 12, 2017.
Joshua Partlow and Philip Bump contributed to this report.
Continue Reading
President Trump welcomed the Japanese prime minister at Mar-a-Lago, in front of a towering arrangement of roses. The two could have met in Washington, but Trump said his private club was a more comfortable alternative.
“It is, indeed, the Southern White House,” Trump said, greeting Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in front of the press in April 2018.
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.
The president brought taxpayer money to his businesses simply by bringing himself. He’s visited his hotels and clubs more than 280 times now, making them a familiar backdrop for his presidency. And in doing so, he has turned those properties into magnets for GOP events, including glitzy fundraisers for his own reelection campaign, where big donors go to see and be seen.
Trump says the reason is comfort. “People like my product, what can I tell you, can’t help it,” he told reporters last year.
But documents show that visits by Trump, his family and his supporters have turned the government and the Republican Party into regular customers for the family business.
In the case of the government, Trump’s visits turned it into a captive customer, newly revealed documents show. What the government needed from Trump’s properties, it had to buy from Trump’s company.
So the more he went, the more he got. 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 ******* for White House aides. And water.
Since Trump took office, his company has been paid at least $2.5 million by the U.S. government, according to documents obtained by The Post.
In addition, Trump’s campaign and fundraising committee paid $5.6 million to his companies since his inauguration in January 2017. Those payments — turning campaign donations into private revenue — continued even this year, as Trump fell behind in polls and his campaign ran short of money.
The combined total of these payments was more than Trump’s hotels in Vancouver and Hawaii brought him during the same period, according to financial disclosures.
The Trump Organization is not prohibited from accepting the payments. But the payments did break a key promise from 2016: Trump’s pledge that he would “completely isolate” himself from his business once in office, and put his voters’ interests above his own.
“If I win, I may never see my property — I may never see these places again,” Trump said on the campaign trail then. “Because I’m going to be working for you, I’m not going to have time to go play golf. Believe me.”
Trump still owns his businesses, but says he’s given day-to-day control to his eldest sons. There is no official total of what Trump’s company has been paid by the government and Trump’s campaign since he took office. The company and the campaign have both declined to say and did not respond to questions for this story.
White House spokesman Judd Deere also declined to give a total.
“Any suggestion that the President has used his own official travel or the federal government as a way to profit off of taxpayers is an absolute disgrace and lie,” Deere said in a statement.
Without an official accounting of these payments, The Post has sought to compile its own.
It relied on public databases of campaign spending, and hundreds of pages of federal spending records — obtained via public-records requests, public-records lawsuits and other means.
The result is a never-before-seen portrait of the presidency as a revenue stream.
While Trump was publicly donating his $400,000 annual presidential salary, he was privately using his power to bring his businesses far more than that.
“Americans elect a president to serve the people, not profit off them. Yet President Trump exploits his office to line his pockets with taxpayer dollars,” said Ryan Shapiro of the group Property of the People, whose lawsuits and public-records requests helped bring to light some of the earliest details of this spending.
Much spending remains hidden, because some federal agencies — including the State Department, and the White House itself — have declined to release records. “The amounts we’re seeing are just the tip of the iceberg,” Shapiro said.
Taxpayer payments
The payments from taxpayers to Mar-a-Lago started in Trump’s first full month on the job, February 2017.He was meeting Abe at the club. His aides would need rooms. According to federal policy, the most they could pay was $182.
But Mar-a-Lago was not charging $182.
“[There’s] a five bedroom house that three of the senior staff are staying in at $2,600 per night,” State Department employee Michael Dobbs wrote his colleagues, in an email later released to the public. “The two other Senior staffers (Bannon and Walsh) are expected to be charged $546 for their rooms.”
Within the State Department, emails show, officials did not seem inclined to fight. Federal rules allowed them to pay up to three times the normal limit — $546, in this case — with authorization. And the White House had authorized it. (Months later, Mar-a-Lago lowered the rate it charged the State Department to $396.15 per night, and provided partial refunds for some of the earlier charges above that.)
Within the White House, one former official said, some officials grumbled about holding the events at Mar-a-Lago. The events required dozens of staffers and enormous logistics, which had to be shoehorned into a private club on a narrow island full of other, nosy, paying guests. And there were some ethics concerns about the president repeatedly visiting his own properties.
“It’s a hell of a lot easier to do it at the White House, which is set up for it,” the former official said, speaking — like others — on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s a pain in the [posterior] having those guys down there for the staff.”
Foreign leaders also sought the prestige of visiting the president at his vacation home because they believed it showed a close bond with the United States, two former officials said.
Trump returned, two months later, with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“He was truly of the opinion that his property was better than anyone else’s property. And he wanted you to know it,” the former official said.
And Mar-a-Lago’s bills only got bigger that time, according to State Department records newly obtained by The Post. Now, there were florist bills: When Trump visited with Xi Jinping of China in April 2017, the club had started charging for flowers, and $50 per palm for decorative palm trees.
That same weekend, a group of White House staffers gathered in a Mar-a-Lago bar adorned with a large portrait of Trump wearing tennis whites. They kicked out the bartender “so they could speak confidentially,” according to an email Mar-a-Lago’s catering director sent to the State Department later.
The group then helped themselves to the contents of the bar: 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, emails show. But ProPublica — which first revealed this bill — reported that the White House eventually did. (The White House has not responded to questions asking how much it has paid Trump’s clubs out of its own budget).
But the most expensive — and most famous — event of the weekend was the formal dinner for 30, where Trump informed Xi about U.S. missile strikes against Syria during dessert. “The most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen,” Trump later said in an interview with Fox Business Network.
Taxpayers likely paid for that: Mar-a-Lago charged $7,700 for that dinner, a charge that appears to have covered Trump’s food, as well.
Trump returned to the club a year later for another summit with Abe. The mood that time was more tense, with North Korean missile threats looming over the two leaders.
In preparation, Mar-a-Lago bought $6,000 worth of floral arrangements.
The list of preparations filled a full page: There were three kinds of candles (votive, floating, candelabra), centerpieces, vases — and a floral plan for even the smallest of meetings. Even “National Security Council pre-briefs” got their own centerpieces, the bill showed.
Taxpayers were billed for all of it, records show.
Mar-a-Lago’s florist, Julie Miner, declined to comment, citing a nondisclosure agreement.
A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, defended Trump, saying “the President has hosted near 100 head of state/government visits since 2017” and only a fraction were at his own properties.
But, last year, Trump sought to award his own company a much bigger event: the massive Group of Seven summit, which Trump gave to his Doral golf club in Miami. That event would have brought hundreds of foreign and U.S. officials to that property. Trump reversed the decision days later, retreating under public pressure — and resistance from his own aides.
His visits brought another customer: The Secret Service.
When Trump visited Mar-a-Lago for two weeks at Christmas last year, for example, the club charged the Secret Service $32,400 for guest rooms.
In addition, Trump’s adult children have brought their *******’s company another $260,000 in taxpayer revenue on their own, records show, by taking solo trips to Trump properties with their own Secret Service agents in tow.
And, in some cases, Trump’s properties even got paid on days when no Trumps were present at all.
In Bedminster, N.J., for instance, Trump’s club has charged the Secret Service $17,000 per month to rent a cottage from May to November — even on days when the family is absent. That’s an unusually high rate for the area, but a former Trump administration official said they had to pay it — to be ready, if Trump suddenly decided to visit.
Defense Department records recently obtained by The Post show a similar pattern of $17,000 payments to Trump’s club in Bedminster in recent years. Pentagon officials declined to answer questions about whether they have a cottage there, too.
In the past, the Trump Organization has defended its actions with two arguments. One is that — even if it wanted to — it couldn’t do all this for free.
“Legally, by law, you have to charge the federal government something, otherwise you get into all sorts of gift laws,” Eric Trump told Fox News in February. Eric Trump has not specified what laws he is referring to.
Ethics experts said they were baffled by that claim, since the agencies that the Trump Organization is known to have charged the most — the departments of Homeland Security, State and Defense — all have policies allowing them to accept gifts under some circumstances.
“There’s nothing that would prohibit any government employee, including the president, from offering the government something for free” if those circumstances are met, said Don W. Fox, who was acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics under President Barack Obama.
The Trump Organization’s second argument has been that — though it must charge the government something — it charges only enough to cover its costs. “If my ******* 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.”
Among the hundreds of transactions reviewed by The Post, there were about two dozen payments that came close to that description: On three occasions when Trump visited his hotel in Las Vegas, for instance, the Defense Department reported paying just $74.51 per night for rooms. The Defense Department declined to comment about those payments.
But, in cases where The Post could determine what room rate was charged, the Trump Organization mostly appeared to charge the maximum allowed under federal spending rules.
Or more.
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.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime “fixer” and attorney, said he saw no sign of a discount in those rates.
“That’s what anybody coming in would pay,” said Cohen, who worked at the Trump Organization through the beginning of Trump’s term. This year, he was released early from federal prison, after pleading guilty to campaign-finance violations and lying to Congress.
Campaign donors
The use of campaign donations to pay Trump’s businesses is not new: During the 2016 race, his campaign paid them about $12.5 million. But that time, Trump put in far more money than he got out, contributing $66 million to his own campaign.In the 2020 campaign, he’s done the opposite.
Trump has donated a mere $8,020 to his 2020 campaign as of Oct. 14, records show. But his campaign and affiliated fundraising committees paid at least $5.6 million out to his companies. The two committees spent nearly $1 million from Sept. 1 through Oct. 14, including $97,000 for lodging at Trump hotels and nearly $800,000 for catering and ballroom rentals, records show.
RNC and campaign officials have said Trump has never ordered them to visit his clubs — but it was understood that he is more likely to attend if an event is at one of his properties.
In those two months, Trump held five campaign events at his properties — including two in the same day. On Sept. 25, he held a “Latinos for Trump” event at his Doral resort in the morning and a fundraiser at his D.C. hotel in the evening.
Trump had planned another campaign event at his D.C. hotel, but it was canceled after he tested positive for the coronavirus. His campaign is expected to mark election night there next week.
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.
The Trump campaign and the Trump Organization both declined to answer questions on the record about what happens now in the Trump Tower space.
Trump’s campaign and joint fundraising committee have also paid $3.2 million to rent banquet space for fundraisers at Trump properties. Campaign officials have said this is a decision that pleases both Trump and his big donors, who feel at home inside Mar-a-Lago and the Trump hotel in Washington.
In recent months, something unexpected happened to Trump’s campaign — once called a “Death Star” by former campaign manager Brad Parscale. Several campaign officials have said they could use more money for television ads in the final stretch.
It started to run short of money. The campaign’s cash on hand shrank down to $43 million, far less than that of Democratic rival Joe Biden. That was surprisingly little for a campaign that started raising money far earlier than past incumbents seeking reelection: Trump’s 2020 campaign had been fundraising since before Trump took office in 2017. The campaign has canceled TV ad buys in key states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio. In emails to prospective donors, Trump asked for money in capital letters.
“You’ve never let me down before and I know you won’t start now,” Trump wrote on Sept. 23. “Contribute ANY AMOUNT RIGHT NOW.”
The next day, Trump’s campaign paid Trump’s business $40,000 in rent, for that space in Trump Tower.
Joshua Partlow and Philip Bump contributed to this report.
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still trying to censor the news....so these mindless trumptards believe only what he wants them to know
13 hours ago · "Fox, Fox is very disappointing. ... This would not have happened with Roger Ailes, I can tell you that," Trump added, referring to the former chairman of Fox …
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12 hours ago · President Donald Trump called Fox News "disappointing" for airing Obama's speech for the Biden campaign, saying the broadcast "would not have happened with Roger Ailes." Tue, Oct 27, 2020 Subscribe
Trump calls Fox 'disappointing' for airing Obama speech ...
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/523002...13 hours ago · "Fox, Fox is very disappointing. ... This would not have happened with Roger Ailes, I can tell you that," Trump added, referring to the former chairman of Fox …
Trump Fumes Over Fox News' Live Coverage of Obama Speech ...
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-fumes-over-fox-news...1:22
12 hours ago · President Donald Trump called Fox News "disappointing" for airing Obama's speech for the Biden campaign, saying the broadcast "would not have happened with Roger Ailes." Tue, Oct 27, 2020 Subscribe
- Author: Katherine Fung
they surely do not expect sympathy.....
19 hours ago · Seven Republican lawmakers in Arkansas have tested positive for the coronavirus in the past several days as the state reports an increase in infection and hospitalization rates.
7 GOP lawmakers in Arkansas test positive for COVID-19 ...
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/522909-7...19 hours ago · Seven Republican lawmakers in Arkansas have tested positive for the coronavirus in the past several days as the state reports an increase in infection and hospitalization rates.
Talk about being "wayyyyyy out there on your opinion" .... There is absolutely no comparison of Biden to Trump ... of course you know that, you're just scared of the BS the Fox News & Republicans have fed you regarding the liberal agenda, which also is "wayyyyy out there".
Most mainstream Democrats & Republicans want one thing, to bring the politics of the parties back to sanity and moderation. Both sides have let the extremists in their own party's "power play" their respective parties in order to get their support. Republicans and "Tea Party" experienced it first hand ... we see what happened to them. My *******, who's in his 70s says he can't ever remember the Republicans being so corrupt.
Its likely extremists in the Democrat party will try the same thing. Its how we all react to these extremists. But I can firmly say, the moderates are working their way back in both parties. I damn well know Joe Biden is a moderate, I feel fairly good about Harris as a VP, but that's to be seen. I don't think Biden would have purposely chosen a far-left liberal as a running mate.
Biden was chosen because of his politics and the fact that he DOES HAVE experience working across party lines. You should be hoping and praying the moderates get back into the fray or we ARE going to lose our democratic processes to extremists.
But as it stands, Trump is wanting to hijack the constitution and our democracy, and I believe you're not that stupid not to see that. Now he's put a far-right POTUS in place to make a decision after the election that unprocessed mail-in ballots won't get processed, and that they can not start counting those millions and millions of mail-in ballots until the day OF the election. They his chosen biased judge is going to agree with his recommendation and Trump will attempt to hijack the election ONCE AGAIN. If you can't see that, you're simply a biased FOOL, and it will come around to bite you and all the Republicans in the ass down the road, as the Hispanic population is growing, and the Black population is pissed off and organizing.
NYT : How Trump Made Millions by Being Our President
Oct 11, 2020 · $12 million: During Trump's first two years in office, his family business earned nearly $12 million from a mere 60 customers who brought interests …Trump Family Has Gotten Much Richer Since President Moved ...
Jun 14, 2018 · President Donald Trump's family appears to have grown richer since he entered the White House. The wealth is coming in because Trump, unlike past …A Look At President Trump's History Of Profiting Off His ...
A Look At President Trump's History Of Profiting Off His Presidency
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post about President Trump's history of profiting off his presidency.
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