Donald Trump’s budget gets rid of Meals on Wheels. That’s a tough decision, but oh so necessary. After all, don’t think of Trump’s golf trip to Mar-a-lago this weekend as $3,000,000 of taxpayer funds. Think of it as merely meals for 419,000 seniors. Doesn’t that sound better? Of course, that’s not counting the 8,300 meals a day local police spend on overtime when he’s around. Absolutely worth it.
Trump was also forced to chop the National Endowment for the Arts. Understandable, since its annual budget would pay for the security at Trump Tower for almost five months. That leaves a lot of year to cover up at residence #3, but cutting all funds for National Historic Sites can give Melania a couple more months of blissful separation. What else? Well, PBS is really only worth about three weeks, but you can get to a month if you toss in NPR. The rest can be made up with just 14 EPA employees … per day, of course.
And you knew that wasteful things like job training had to die. How else are you going to free up the equivalent of job training for 80 people to cover taxpayer-paid security every day that Eric Trump is traveling on business. And the Defense Department would never make be able to rent space in Trump Tower unless 1,250 older workers a year were kicked out of training programs.
Everybody has to make sacrifices if the government is going to handle the important things.
The unusually elaborate lifestyle of America’s new first family is straining the Secret Service and security officials, stirring financial and logistical concerns in several local communities, and costing far beyond what has been typical for past presidents — a price tag that, based on past assessments of presidential travel and security costs, could balloon into the hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a four-year term.
By year’s end, Trump will rack up about 20 million meals worth of trips to Mar-a-lago.
Priorities. It’s all about priorities.