Wow. This is one expensive family to pack around. According to an analysis published in The Hill, the Trump family not only “gets around,” they don’t travel light. This goes well beyond having the Secret Service staked out at Sidwell Friends Academy to protect Sasha and Malia at school:

According to data obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Trump family members took 4,560 trips, many of which were to Trump-owned properties, from which the president still profits. The group also found that 40 percent of trips taken in 2019 were distinct from those that Trump and the first lady took.

So 40% of those trips were by Ivanka, Qusay and Uday! I am sure Tiffany Trump gets Secret Service protection (I hope so), but she isn’t traveling around the world on “Trump business” – so I am sure her expenses are the normal, average, president’s family expenses. But that’s not the case for the troika.

“Every President and his family deserve Secret Service protection. But the President’s private business should reimburse taxpayers for money spent at Trump’s businesses or in support of them,” the watchdog group wrote in an announcement.

Damned right. Especially when it seems like some of the trips are taken precisely because they want the lodge/club whatever stuffed to the gills with Secret Service agents paying top room rates. I think we can safely assume that the Secret Service is not getting their room rates off Travelocity. They get a bill from the president, with an implicit dare to complain about the room rates.

And you just knew this paragraph was coming!

Trump was a vocal critic of former President Obama’s travel, saying Obama was spending too many days away from the White House. However, the data compiled by CREW showed that the Trump family far surpassed the number of trips the Obama family took, with 1,625 trips annually compared with the Obama family’s 133.3.

That is called ten times as many trips. But we all know Trump’s real issue with the Obamas. He could not stand the sight of a beautiful black family going up the stairs of Air Force One to fly nine hours to Hawaii for Christmas – that drove him nuts!

Granted, the Trumps have adult children, and two extra children (we don’t count Barron as he’s a minor and goes where mom goes). But a ten-fold increase? Ten?

You just know they’re making money off this. Remember Eric saying that if the Secret Service stayed elsewhere it would be “$400 a night, whereas we bill them “like” $50?”

Instead, as the indefatigable David Fahrenthold and three colleagues at The Washington Post chronicle in his latest scoop on the president’s business, the Trump Organization charged the Secret Service (in other words, the taxpayer) $400 to $650 a night to stay at Mar-a-Lago while guarding the president. At another Trump property, his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, the Secret Service was billed $17,000 a month for a small cottage, even when the president wasn’t present. These are just snapshots. Despite heroic public-records work by the Post, there’s still no complete picture of just what the Trump Organization is charging the Secret Service.

This is not small change anymore, even for billionaires. It sure sounds like the Trumps are making eight figures or more off their own travel!

Unbelievable, and yet – of course they do, that IS what the Trumps do, and always have.

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Peace, y’all

Jason

[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom