Yet, he wants to be lauded for not taking a salary....
Trump’s company has received at least $970,000 from U.S. taxpayers for room rentals
By David A. Fahrenthold and Joshua Partlow
May 14, 2020 at 5:05 p.m. EDT
The U.S. government has paid at least $970,000 to President Trump’s company since Trump took office — including payments for more than 1,600 nightly room rentals at Trump’s hotels and clubs, according to federal records obtained by The Washington Post.
Since March, The Post has catalogued an additional $340,000 in such payments. They were almost all related to trips taken by Trump, his family and his top officials. The government is not known to have paid for the rooms for Trump and his family members at his properties but it has paid for staffers and Secret Service agents to accompany the president.
The payments create an unprecedented business relationship between the president’s private company and his government — which began in the first month of Trump’s presidency, and continued into this year, records show.
The records show that taxpayers have now paid for the equivalent of more than four years’ worth of nightly rentals at Trump properties, including 950 nights at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., and 530 nights at the president’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, according to a Post analysis.
Trump still owns his business, though he says he has given day-to-day control to his eldest sons. Last year, Eric Trump said that when government officials visit Trump properties with the president, they are charged “like 50 bucks.”
But in the 1,600 room rentals examined by The Post, there were no examples of a rate that low.
Instead, the lowest room rate was $141.66 per night, for each of the rooms in a four-room cottage in Bedminster. The highest rate was $650 per night for rooms at Mar-a-Lago.
The Post asked the Trump Organization to provide an example where it had charged the government a rate low enough to match Eric Trump’s claim.
The company did not respond.
Trump has visited his own properties 250 times since taking office — though not since March 8, as the covid-19 pandemic shuttered many Trump properties and consumed his presidency. Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump administration has provided a full accounting of how much taxpayer money has been paid to Trump’s companies since Inauguration Day 2017.
The Post has attempted to compile its own accounting, using hundreds of pages of federal spending documents obtained from public-records requests. In recent weeks, The Post added new data on spending by the Defense and State departments, and newly released data on spending by the Secret Service in 2019 and 2020.
The data is still incomplete. But it makes clear that Trump has received an unprecedented amount of payments from his own government.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-company-has-received-at-least-970000-from-us-taxpayers-for-room-rentals/2020/05/14/26d27862-916d-11ea-9e23-6914ee410a5f_story.html
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