Impeached president Donald Trump has been pocketing taxpayer dollars through his businesses, charging Secret Service agents $2,000 a day to follow him around on golf carts at his resorts at “the low, low price of $650 a night” to stay there, Daily Kos’ Mark Sumner wrote last week. If $650 a night sounds like a fuckton of money, that’s because it is a fuckton of money. But The Washington Post reports one of the impeached president’s sons, Eric Trump, last year claimed agents are charged only “the cost for housekeeping.”
So, the Trumps are really insisting to U.S. taxpayers that housekeeping—while very tough work carried out by domestic workers every day across the U.S.—costs the Trump Organization that much daily? That seems like … a lot, even assuming restocked toiletries, for example, were top-notch, hotel industry experts told The Post. So, the paper went straight to someone who would know about this subject better than Trump, his sons, and probably most at the Trump Organization: a former housekeeper who worked for the impeached president.
“Victorina Morales, a former Trump Organization housekeeper who cleaned the Bedminster cottage that the Secret Service has rented for $17,000 per month, said that she did not clean the house as regularly as some of the other Bedminster villas because the Secret Service agents tended to be protective of their space,” The Post reports. “The agents often even took out their own trash.”
Not that Morales didn’t labor during the five years she worked for the Trump Organization. She was in fact given special recognition from the White House for her skills, and, despite his ongoing efforts to make immigrants look scary for votes and political gain, worked so closely to Trump that she made his bed. She and other immigrant workers have known these places back and front, and Eric’s math just doesn’t seem to add up.
”Morales, who was undocumented, estimated she would tidy up the ‘Sarazen Cottage’ one to three times per week,” The Post continued. “Sometimes these sessions would be very brief—five to 10 minutes—and other times the supervisors would ask for a more extensive cleaning, so Morales would spend 30 minutes to an hour. She would change sheets, vacuum, clean bathrooms and bring in fresh towels.” Must be some expensive towels—and fancy golf carts.
“By August of 2019, the Secret Service had given Donald Trump over half a million dollars for the privilege of driving golf carts around his courses,” Sumner wrote last week. “Check that again. Trump plays golf, then charges the Secret Service rental on the carts they drive while protecting him—a rate of $2,000 dollars a day.” Trump has repeatedly boasted about not keeping the taxpayer-funded salary he gets to occupy the White House, when in reality he’s just getting it in a different way, and trying to lie to us all about it. And, in the process, exploiting the same immigrants he demonizes.
“He knows immigrants, many undocumented, kept his businesses running for decades,” Morales’ former colleague, Sandra Diaz, said in response to his gross, immigrant-bashing State of the Union address earlier this month. “We did many tough jobs. We cooked, fed and cared for him, his friends, White House staff, and his family.” As always, these brave immigrants are serving as some of the truth-tellers in these lying times.
