Donald Trump will have to rent more golf carts to the Secret Service, because still more charities are canceling events at his, ugh, “Florida White House.”
In the last five days — since President Trump said there were “fine people” among those marching in a violence-plagued “Unite the Right” demonstration in Charlottesville — the president’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida has been deserted by 14 charities that use its ballrooms for fundraisers.
Mar-a-Lago already had a lot of empty dates in its schedule. Donald Trump’s earlier statements had made many charities and other organizations leery of holding events at Trump’s premiere property. But Trump’s embrace of white supremacists has sent a lot of organizations who were previously tottering on the brink of whether it would draw more attention to stay or cancel, into the cancel camp.
Others canceling galas or dinner events include the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the American Cancer Society, American Friends of Magen David Adom, Leaders in Furthering Education, the Palm Beach Zoo, the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach, the Susan G. Komen breast cancer charity and the Autism Project of Palm Beach County.
An additional group of charities have cancelled other types of events, just as luncheons. But so far there are two groups hanging in there with Trump.
The Palm Beach Police Foundation — whose Policeman’s Ball is one of Mar-a-Lago’s largest events — is “continuing with its plans” to hold the gala there again in 2017, spokeswoman Maureen O’Sullivan said Sunday.
The same is true for the Palm Beach County Republican Party, which has held its annual Lincoln Day dinner at Mar-a-Lago since 2013. “We have no plans to switch venues,” the party's chairman, Michael Barnett, wrote Sunday.
That … seems about right.