Ever since he first took office, President Donald Trump has been charged with using his position to profit off the presidency, as foreign leaders stay at Trump Organization properties while the president himself ferries back and forth to the “winter White House” and Trump properties around the world. And while the Trump administration has been understandably cagey about just how much taxpayer money is funneling into the Trump Organization’s pockets, we now have a somewhat better idea when it comes to one major charge. Following reports earlier this year that the Trump Organization has charged the Secret Service as much as $650 a night to stay at Trump properties when accompanying the president, the Washington Post reported Thursday that those hefty hotel bills have so far added up to nearly a million dollars—at least.
According to reports obtained by the Post, American taxpayers have paid the Trump Organization at least $970,000 for more than 1,600 room rentals since Trump took office—which amounts to “the equivalent of more than four years’ worth of nightly rentals at Trump properties.” “Almost all” of the payments have been for trips taken by the president, his family members, and top officials, and have paid for rooms for Secret Service agents or staffers, rather than the Trump family themselves. The payment total marks a sharp increase from the $628,000 the Post had found as of March, after the publication found an additional $340,000 in room payments. And the number still could be an undercount, as in the absence of publicly-reported information on the charges from the federal government or Trump Organization, the Post notes that their data is “still incomplete.” “It’s not just that there’s a huge amount of money being spent: we have no idea how much the actual figure is,” Jordan Libowitz, of the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told the Post. “We don’t know what’s happening … only that the taxpayers are footing the bill for it.”
The expensive bill is a far cry from what the Trump Organization claims it charges the federal government, with Eric Trump—who’s running the business while his father occupies the White House—claiming the company charges the government “at cost” for their hotel rooms. “If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free,” Eric Trump said at a Yahoo Finance summit in October 2019. “So everywhere that he goes, if he stays at one of his places, the government actually spends, meaning it saves a fortune because 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.” Those supposed $50 charges were nowhere to be found by the Post, however, whose reporting found no per-night charges less than $141.66, which was to rent a cottage at Trump’s Bedminster property. The figures found by the Post run far higher than the typical operating cost of hotel rooms at luxury hotels, hotel industry experts told the publication. “I wouldn’t expect it to be north of $100,” Cornell School of Hotel Administration professor Chris Anderson told the Post.
The Trump Organization’s room charges are out of the ordinary when it comes to the presidency, the Post notes, with the only past president or vice president to have charged the government rental costs being former Vice President and current Trump opponent Joe Biden. The former vice president charged the Secret Service a total of $171,600 over the course of six years for a cottage near Biden’s Delaware home—an amount that Trump had exceeded by March 17, 2017, less than two months after he took office. And the room rentals are just one of many costs when it comes to Trump’s trips to his properties, which the Post notes he’s visited 250 times since taking office. (Thanks to the coronavirus, the president has stayed put since March 8, though the Trump Organization still hasn’t managed to totally escape possible conflicts of interest in the meantime.) Though the full extent of how much the president’s trips cost the federal government is still largely unknown, the Government Accountability Office found that Trump’s first four trips to Mar-a-Lago in February and March 2017 alone cost government agencies approximately $13.6 million, and the Post projected in February 2019 that the president’s Mar-a-Lago trips to that point had likely cost taxpayers more than $64 million. (For comparison, former President Barack Obama racked up nearly $97 million in total travel costs over the span of eight years.)