The blizzard of Trump lies, hypocrisies and swindles have pretty
much obscured the nation’s ability to navigate through them or
even recognize any given one of them for what they are as as they occur.
The Trump visits to Trump properties are a case in point. The initial
and continuing narrative about these visits focused almost exclusively
on the hypocrisy of the trips, namely that Trump’s pre-election
criticism of Obama’s vacation days has been belied by the number Trump
has himself taken since his inauguration.
Trump seems to prefer this narrative to the underlying swindle that
is the true scandal. On any given weekend and on any given
holiday, Trump can order the government to book one of his resort
properties for costs averaging about $100,000 a day. This amount does
not include the collateral bookings generated by a presidential visit
for members of the media or political operatives, or from Trump’s VIP
donors.
And this amount does not include the costs to the government for guest
services provided to the secret service detail that accompany
Trump family members to Trump properties on their vacations or
for their business promotions.
Nor does this amount include the government’s payments to Trump
Tower in New York when Melania and Barron stayed there until June of this year.
The Trump faithful are particularly taken in by the widely
publicized donation of his salary to various charitable causes.
The media has been diligent in reporting the costs of
Trump’s holiday trips but only reports the overall cost of the trips and
does not break out the specific amount paid to Trump properties, which
of course obscures the conflict of interest at the heart of this
particular scandal qua swindle.
To be fair, the specific amount paid to Trump properties has not
been reported because the administration refuses to disclose
it, despite the efforts of Elijah Cummings at the House Oversight
Committee, who has specifically requested the amount.
For this reason, the amount specified in the title to this diary is an
estimate, and that in any event does not represent the actual net amount
that goes into Trump’s personal pocket, which is further complicated
by Trump’s refusal to disclose his income tax returns, which would make
the calculation of the exact amount of Trump’s profiteering from
Government largesse much easier.
Fact-free opinions are the coin of the realm in Trump World, a tactic I
find particularly loathsome and I am therefore loathe to allow myself
the same tactic, so I now offer the facts on which I base the
statement in the title.
First I looked at the break down of costs the federal government
incurred for a four-day, February 2013 trip by Barak Obama to Chicago
and Palm beach, calculated by the GAO, which listed the cost of food
and lodging for the presidential party at $400,00 or about $100,000 a day, exclusive of costs classified for security reasons. https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/680399.pdf.
Assuming Trump properties charged the federal government a similar per diem amount for a Trump presidential party visit, we can multiply the number of days the president has spent at his resorts in 2017 (110 and counting) by the per diem spent by Obama in 2013, and we reach the $10 million dollar enrichment to Trump properties simply because Trump is president. www.cnn.com/...
The exact net amount by which the president personally profits from
these trips is impossible to know because the president conceals these figures
from us (another minor dimension of this scandal, but oh well), but
an understanding of the resort property business can be a guide.
Net profit on the sale of a single round of golf (or the rental of a room)
does not emerge in the resort business until the resort’s overhead is
covered, but the net profit after that point can reach 75% of the fees
charged (for food and liquor, it may be about 40%).
Because the Trump resorts would not ordinarily book a
presidential visit, all the money paid by the government to those
properties during a Trump visit must be considered profit at
the rates listed above (assuming of course that the trump properties
are profitable without the presidential visits).
So the president has personally profited, in this year alone, to the
tune of about $7 million. Not bad as swindles go: I give you
$400,000 and take back $7 million. About the same deal he gave 99% of
the American taxpayers under his new tax bill.
For those who wish to quarrel with my factual analyses, I refer them to
a principle known in the law as res ipsa loquitur, (“the thing speaks
for itself”) which is invoked to shift the burden of proof from the
accuser to the accused when the facts about the wrongdoing are known
only to the accused and when the accused has a duty to disclose the
facts to the accuser.
J’accuse, Mr. Trump. Prove me wrong.
