Almost every Tuesday
Trump and Musk are slashing services, and meanwhile Trump costs us millions every time he takes his lardy ass down to Florida, which is nearly every damn weekend.
It has become a familiar routine for the Palm Beach county sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, and his deputies. Almost every Tuesday in recent weeks, the Federal Aviation Administration has posted to its website a formal “notice to airmen” advising of upcoming flight restrictions over south Florida, signaling once again to those who must protect him that Donald Trump is on his way to Mar-a-Lago for another weekend of golf.
The president is at his waterfront mansion again this weekend, his sixth visit to Florida and the beloved golf courses he owns since his 20 January inauguration.
His increasingly frequent and disruptive trips home are fast becoming a drain on county resources, obligating Bradshaw to put helicopters in the air, extra manpower on the ground, and boats on both sides of Trump’s opulent mansion sandwiched between the Atlantic and the Intracoastal Waterway almost continuously.
And this is a county, remember – not a state, let alone the feds, but just a county. Their pot of money is not infinite.
The Palm Beach bill, high as it is, pales against the federal costs of indulging the commander-in-chief’s wanderlust. That’s included his multimillion-dollar trip to the Super Bowl in New Orleans last month, and an appearance at Nascar’s Daytona 500 weeks later, which critics saw as little more than an extravagant and expensive photo op.
Whenever he wishes to roam, the presidential airliner Air Force One is fueled up and fully staffed, racking up an hourly operational cost approaching $200,000, according to a 2022 air force assessment.
How interesting that DOGE seems not to fuss about these here operational costs.
The most recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, meanwhile, calculated in 2019 that federal agencies spent an average of $13.6m on each of four Trump odysseys to Mar-a-Lago that it audited during his first term in office, with a chunk of that money going straight into Trump’s pocket.
In 2017, he spent four of the first seven weekends immediately after his inauguration golfing in Florida; this year the tally is already at six.
A big chunk of that money goes into Trump’s pocket. It’s a fabulous scam – he gets to vacation and he gets to pocket all the money from putting up his entourage at his hotel.
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said he had similar concerns, pointing to evidence of Trump excessively overcharging the Secret Service to stay at his properties during his first administration.
“As much as the waste of taxpayer resources for excessive vacationing is, there’s the self-enrichment from the payments made to Mar-a-Lago by agents who were there to provide security,” he said.
All this while he’s busy impoverishing millions of us.
Meanwhile, the University of Nebraska Kearney cut out its theatre program, saving the school $600,000 annually, because the legislature isn’t supportive. Meanwhile, ONE MAN costs a county a fortune, and the country a larger fortune.
Too many people cheer the cutting of what they see as unnecessary (theatre program, the only one in that part of the state), while ignoring what they see as business-as-usual, the president making money for his own golf club off taxpayers at all levels (the ones in Palm Beach county are hit twice).
While it would be interesting to do an actual study of the number of trips and the cost comparison across presidents, I think it would make no difference to the voters. I don’t remember any president besides Trump making this many recreation trips, and I also remember Trump complaining loudly about how many times Obama took a golf break. Obama took a total of 333 trips for golf in his eight years (which, IMHO, should NOT be at the expense of the taxpayer). Donald Trump took 428 trips TO HIS OWN PROPERTIES in his four year term.
Yes, the piece went into the Obama issue, pointing out that his golf took place in DC, so it was a whole lot cheaper. Also not as frequent.
Time for the county to raise property tax rates, specifically on leisure-oriented properties.
Fuck him. Fuck that lard ass. Check out this video, where this PhD candidate explains the horrors of cutting university funding;
https://youtu.be/6Pl62kCBax4?si=oGb_y1cwDIsJIIAx
IT’S A FUCKING HORRORSHOW
I think Vance has gone on record that Orban was smart for going after the universities first… unemploying the intelligentsia is the whole point of most of the shit they’re doing. Of course, what Hungary has had going for it is the whole of Europe being a safety valve. Americans find it a lot harder to leave so that’s an interesting wrinkle…
This is – I am afraid – off-topic, but since Ophelia’s post is about Trump, I should like to point out that Trump, always anxious to appear successful, wants to be seen as the person who brings ‘peace’ to Ukraine, and he is doing it by cutting off military aid as well as military intelligence to Ukraine and allowing Russians to launch attacks with virtual impunity, so that he can force Ukraine into accepting a ‘peace-deal’ on his (and, secondarily but necessarily, on Putin’s) terms. Trump, being a lover of the appearance of power (his own), is happy to bully what he perceives as the weaker party, since he knows he cannot bully Putin (being a malignant narcissist, he would if he could).
The Geneva Centre for Security Policy has recently published a serious plan for a sustainable peace between Ukraine & Russia, but the Trump regime will not be interested in it, since Trump wants the glory of peace-making, however unsatisfactory and tenuous such a peace would be, to go to Trump.