Step right up, only $200 k per customer
Another nice little angle for Trump, it appears – selling tours of Air Force One. Nothing at all tacky about that, no indeed.
Four Democratic senators are calling for an investigation into who has received Air Force One tours under the Trump administration, following reporting by BuzzFeed News that found that some members of the president’s private Florida clubs appeared to have received those tours.
In a letter to the inspectors general of the Air Force and Department of Defense, Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Tom Carper of Delaware, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island cite the BuzzFeed News report as “particularly troubling.”
“If true, these reports could mean that the President or his family have used government property for private gain — giving tours of Air Force One as a perk for club membership — or that some citizens have potentially been able to buy access to Air Force One via their personal payments to the President’s private club,” the letter states.
The whole thing is just a big Adventure Playground to them.
BuzzFeed News first reported last month that some Mar-a-Lago members appeared to have received Air Force One tours, based on heavily redacted records received through a Freedom of Information Act request.
A spokesperson for the White House previously said in an email, “It is common for friends/family of the President to receive tours of Air Force One,” pointing out that “Mar-a-Lago has been the President’s home for many years.”
But customers are not the same thing as friends (and I’m not sure I believe it is all that common).
Has Mar-a-Lago been Trump’s home for many years? I thought it was a commercial rather than residential resort, but if it is residential, does that mean that Trump pays state and local taxes as a resident of Florida? If not, this one official e-mail could give local and state officials just cause to hit him with some large back-dated tax bills.
Ugh.
Did you know that the lowly state working in this state can get fired if a vendor takes them to an expensive lunch (over $25, I believe) or if they get some kind of gift or incentive to take a survey?
Rank has its privilege, I guess.
I can easily imagine that Trump does not understand the distinction between “friends” and “people who pay money to him or his businesses in order to spend time in his vicinity”.
He might have had some real friends back in his 20s, but I suspect that those that didn’t spend money to be around him probably just fell off his radar, and any new people who did probably fit right in with the group of people he already knew. Why would he even maintain a distinction between the two groups?
And when have you ever heard anyone assoicated with him be referred to as a friend? He’s got employees, customers, and suppliers coming out of his ears. Friends?
It almost makes you start to feel a teeny tiny twinge of pity for him. Almost. Until, you know, you remember how much of a raging asshole he is.
Well, er, just because I haven’t does not mean nobody ever has.
And anyway, if we just extend the definition of ‘friends’ to include cronies, the problem disappears.
Well, I’m pretty sure it would.
In at least one interview I read, Trump basically admitted that he has nobody he considers a friend. Not that he was lamenting it; he seemed to regard it as a strange concept.
If I hadn’t already realized how loathsome he is, I might have felt sorry for him.