■ Six
American states reported their highest-ever infection totals on Saturday as the
U.S. announced more than 78,000 new cases nationwide, one day after the country
shattered its single-day record with more than 85,000 new cases.
Oct. 28, 2020
Trump Businesses making money off of the government. I am not surprised. Again, facts are facts.
it is documented. It reveals his character, I think.
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.
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 liquor 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.
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.
Trump speaks during
his meeting with Abe in April 2018. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
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.
Trump sits with Xi
during a meeting at Mar-a-Lago. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
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.
And, in some cases, Trump’s properties even got paid on days when no
Trumps were present at all.
Secret Service pays rates as high as $650 a night for rooms at Trump’s
properties, documents show
New documents obtained under the
Freedom of Information Act reveal the rates the Secret Service paid at
President Trump's properties. (Zach Purser Brown/The Washington Post)
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 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.”
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.
A worker walk along a
road at Mar-a-Lago. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
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.
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.
Trump Tower on Fifth
Avenue in Manhattan. (Biz Herman for The Washington Post)
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.
Saturday, October 24, 2020
Oct. 24, 2020
I apologise to
all you non-American readers of this Blog, even though the US election result
will touch all of you in one way or another, negatively or positively, at least
in part. The last 4 years have had a dramatic effect on most of our European
friends that have strained our friendship, but there have been other Asian
countries and Middle Eastern countries that have been deeply affected by the
decisions of the American administration (I may add, under Trump). My sincere
apologies to you all for taking such a turn in my blog but it seems to me to be
a unique election, certainly in my lifetime and I want to share what I think
the Americans should be thinking about and weighing up as they decide which way
to choose. I have already made my choice and sent in my vote (absentee ballot,
way back in July).
I received
this next article from a friend in New Jersey. I don’t mean it to denigrate Amy
Barret because I believe that she could not help it that she was quite rich and
was just being treated lly the system as they normally treat people, favoring people
with money. It is the way the system works. Perhaps we need more men and women,,
from a justice point of view who are willing to forgo the perks of the system
for them and work for a better and fairer deal for all, e..g. to change the
system. That is difficult because money is power and if you are beginning to
irritate those who are already entrenched in the system, and who have money, and,
to put it mildly, you will have an uphill battle.
My Experience as a Working Mother at Notre Dame Was
Much Different From Amy Coney Barrett’s
This proudly Catholic institution did not make it possible for me to
have a family of the size I wanted.
Notre Dame
University.Don & Melinda Crawford/Education Images/Universal
Images Group via Getty Images
Amy Coney Barrett has impressed
congressional Republicans by “redefining feminism” through balancing a high
power career with a large family. She received congratulations on the size of
her family from senators on both sides of the aisle during her hearings. Mike
Pence approvingly noted it during the vice presidential debate. Sen. Joni Ernst
lauded Barrett as “an example to girls and young women in Iowa, and across
America, that they truly can do it all.” But the silence of what is left unsaid
is deafening. A more accurate statement would be that she is an example to
young women across America of what they can do if they have enough money, or
enough capable adults around them to share in the caretaking responsibilities.
I delivered my child via C-section. Eight days
later, my husband drove me to campus to teach my last classes.
Like Amy Coney Barrett, I studied
and taught at Notre Dame, and I became a mother during my time there. I, too,
labored to “have it all,” a promising professional life and a growing family at
this Catholic, life-affirming institution where I studied and worked for 12
years. But among the complicated reasons my husband and I have only one child
looms large this fact: Notre Dame offered no maternity leave to graduate
students when I was a doctoral student and an instructor there. Nor did they
offer adequate health insurance. I was covered under my husband’s employer’s
plan, which meant that giving birth to our daughter cost us $10,000 and branded
me with a preexisting condition.
In Week 13 of my pregnancy, I was
diagnosed with placenta previa. This meant I had to follow physical
restrictions, so for the next five months, all I did was teach my classes,
study for my comprehensive exams in our apartment, and attend Sunday Mass. My
husband did everything I couldn’t do, so that I could protect the pregnancy. We
couldn’t afford extra help, nor did we have family close by.
When I had troubling signs of
labor at Week 35, my doctor told me I could no longer walk the mile from my
student parking lot to my classroom. My request for permission to park next to
the classroom building was denied, despite my plea that my pregnancy—my
baby—was at risk. I would still have to park in the far lot designated for
commuting students, and then I could call security and request a ride to the
building. But I was told there was no guarantee the rides would be available or
on time, in either direction. Faced with a choice between endangering my baby’s
health and mine, or abandoning my professional obligations, I wound up asking
other grad students to cover my classes for three weeks while I went on
modified bed rest. I delivered my child via C-section. Eight days later, my
husband drove me to campus to teach my last classes, because I was not yet
cleared to drive. This was life as a new mother without maternity leave—at a
proudly Catholic institution. (When Slate reached out to Notre Dame for
comment, a spokesperson for the university said that he could not comment on individual
situations.)
I became a faculty member at
Notre Dame when our daughter was 3. But the scenario I would have faced would
have been only marginally better had I gotten pregnant again. Under federal
labor laws, Notre Dame didn’t have to provide me with any paid time off during
the time I was on their faculty contract—and they did not. While the Notre Dame
spokesperson said that faculty don’t accrue traditional paid time off because
they work on an academic calendar and have “more flexibility of schedule,” I
was what’s known as “special professional faculty” during my tenure from
2010–16—meaning I was part of the 35 percent of faculty members with a
non-tenure-track position. My contract ran from July 1–June 30 each year,
without the flexibility of schedule that the spokesperson referenced. Those of
us with SPF appointments had significant administrative responsibilities beyond
teaching; we did not “work an academic calendar” (though some of my colleagues
had only a 10-month or 11-month contract). I never had official, paid time off.
Any day that I didn’t work, I had to make up on another day. I had no sick days
that I could bank for future use to cobble together some maternity leave. Had
we tried to have another child, my only option would have been eight weeks’
unpaid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act. With my work
responsibilities tripled as a faculty member, I could only contemplate with
horror undergoing another pregnancy, birth, and recovery with such minimal
leave. While the spokesperson noted that Notre Dame’s current policy includes
four weeks of paid leave for nonteaching faculty and staff (and teaching
faculty are relieved of teaching obligations for the entire semester
surrounding the birth or adoption of a child), those four weeks were not
offered to me.
Top of Form
Get Slate Parenting in Your Inbox
Featuring the best of Care and Feeding, Mom and Dad Are Fighting, and
Slate's family coverage.
All of this might help explain
why I have found it frustrating to hear Students for Life of
America president Kristan Hawkins call Amy Coney Barrett the antithesis of the
“false narrative that we so often hear from the left, and the mainstream media,
that women have to choose one or the other: They have to choose their career,
their education or having a family.”
That is how
she does it: more than 10 times the median household income and a third adult
to assist with the caretaking.
My experience at Notre Dame is
not a “false narrative.” The truth is: I had to choose between my career and my
family. I had to choose because my alma mater and employer made it impossible
for me to, as Hawkins put it, be “a woman at the top of her field, who was the
top of her education […] do all this, while being a wife and a mother, and
remaining devout to our faith.” I, too, was an award-winning graduate student
and professor. But my efforts didn’t result in the kind of financial security
that could have offered my husband and I the option of having another child.
Barrett’s financial disclosure
reports show
that Notre Dame paid her more than five times what they paid me. Even now, they
continue to pay her $28,264.45 to teach
two courses as
an adjunct, with none of the other responsibilities faculty and staff members
bear for the university—just about $12,000 shy of what I made working there
full time.
Barrett is being used the same
way that Sarah Palin was used by those who care
more about making abortion illegal than working to make it less necessary. Look
at her large, diverse family, and feel the shame and self-blame when you can’t
match those achievements. Barrett and Palin did it; why can’t you? Always left
unspoken, though, are the ways that these icons availed themselves of options and
tangible resources that are not meant to be available to all women. Saying “I
don’t know how she does it” absolves society from supporting mothers and
children. These proclamations come with no acknowledgment of howshe
does it, but it’s simple: Barrett and her husband have a combined income that
must be roughly half a million dollars in a really low cost-of-living town (the
median income in South Bend is $34,656 and the median selling price of houses
is $104,900). His aunt also moved in to help them. That is how she does it:
more than 10 times the median household income and a third adult to assist with
the caretaking.
Considering Barrett as a model of
a new “conservative feminism” leaves me asking so many questions: Why is it
that when politically conservative women balance large families and demanding
careers (usually thanks to other women providing paid care for their children),
they’re trotted out as modeling a “new feminism that tells women they can have
it all”—but when poorer, politically liberal, and/or less educated women
outsource care, they’re criticized for not being a “hands-on mother”? Why don’t
we extend this same
adoration to mothers of color? When Black mothers lovingly and successfully
embrace a village-oriented
approach to child rearing, why are they labeled “deficient,” or worse “deviant,” even as they
follow global and historical child-rearing norms? How is a stance that
accepts—even embraces and actively upholds—the status quo, in which the United
States ranks worst among all other wealthy
nations in providing maternity leave and more than 75 percent
of working women do
not have access to paid family leave, “feminist” or “family friendly” or
“conservative”? Being “pro-life” means more than preventing women from
obtaining abortions.
And it’s poor mothers who end up getting
abortions: 59 percent of women who get abortions have already carried at least
one prior pregnancy to term (and 75 percent lived at 200 percent of the poverty
level or below). I don’t know how many of those are women who want another
child but are caught in a system that makes us choose between family or career,
another desired child or food on the table for the already existing children
sitting around it. If this is conservative feminism—with enough money, you can
have what you want and need, but without enough money, your needs don’t even
enter the conversation—count me out.
Republicans are weaponizing
Barrett’s motherhood against those who advocate for reproductive justice, which
seeks greater social support for all mothers, like the paid
maternity leave I desperately needed while at Notre Dame. Their praise of her
accomplishments activates an illusion of power that obscures the actual absence
of power most women have. But ultimately, she is the exception that proves the
rule, not proof that women don’t have to choose between family and career.
When I was offered my current
position at a public flagship institution, I submitted my resignation to the
director of my Notre Dame program. She asked if she could go to the dean to
seek a counteroffer for me. I thanked her—but very definitely said not to waste
anyone’s time. What could he offer me? I was 42. Nothing could give me back the
years when I might have had more children.
