Donald Trump’s adult offspring have brought Trump’s private businesses at least an extra $238,000 in revenue, courtesy of the United States government. And all they have to do to make it happen is stay at the family’s properties—with their Secret Service agents in tow, needing rooms.
“We charge them cost, effectively housekeeping cost,” Eric Trump has said, denying that the Trump Organization is profiting off of its Secret Service detail, but with the rooms for which The Washington Post was able to obtain records costing a minimum of $175 a night and in some cases much more, that’s some dang expensive housekeeping.
“I joke all the time that I would like nothing more than to never have another person from the government stay at one of our properties because it displaces a true paying guest,” Eric also said, yet he and wife Lara have accounted for $151,000 of the $238,000 in Secret Service room expenses attributed to him, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Tiffany. On just one of Eric’s golf trips, the Secret Service spent $3,800 at the Trump Aberdeenshire, Scotland, property and $8,500 for rooms at Turnberry.
Don Jr. is in the habit of staying at the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C., rather than staying with his father and stepmother blocks away at the White House, and he makes frequent hunting trips to Canada with stopovers at a now-defunct Trump-branded property in Vancouver. That Vancouver hotel accounted for Tiffany’s one appearance in the records obtained by the Post, when she attended its grand opening with Don Jr. and Eric.
Ivanka put out a responsible message early in the coronavirus pandemic—“For those lucky enough to be in a position to stay at home, please, please, do so”—even as she or her husband, Jared Kushner, went to her father’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club 13 times between mid-March and mid-June.
About Bedminster: The Secret Service usually pays $567 per night for a four-room cottage, but on Ivanka and Jared’s pandemic trips, the cost was $630 per night, for some reason. And that reason probably wasn’t heightened demand, with travel down across the region. But this part is special: “Because of Trump’s spur-of-the-moment travel habits, officials have said that the Secret Service rents the Bedminster cottage every day from May to November, just in case he visits,” the Post reports. That’s just part of how Donald Sr. accounts for far more in Secret Service payments to his properties than his children do—but they are doing their part to keep the grift profitable.
