Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s four-month stay in the lap of luxury at Trump’s D.C. hotel came with a $33,154 bonus for the Trump family, courtesy of the taxpayer-paid Secret Service.
As The Washington Post explained, Mnuchin spent several months in the Trump hotel’s 2,000-square-foot Franklin Suite. During the pandemic, the Post notes the suite was listed at $8,300 a night, presumably a big markdown. Mnuchin claims he got an undisclosed discounted rate.
Mnuchin footed the cost of that wet kiss to Trump. The Secret Service, which traditionally protects treasury secretaries, moved into the room next door to screen Mnuchin’s visitors and packages - at taxpayer expense.
For that room, the Trump hotel charged the maximum rate that federal agencies were generally allowed to pay in 2017: $242 per night, according to the billing records. The Secret Service checked in Jan. 25, according to billing records obtained by The Washington Post, and didn’t make its last payment until June 12.
But that $33,000 is dwarfed by the total amount we taxpayers have shelled out to Trump’s businesses via the Secret Service. Since the "most transparent president in history" hasn't revealed how much he's lined his own pockets from the Secret Service, the Post crunched some numbers and they're eye-popping:
Neither the Trump administration nor the Trump Organization has provided an accounting of how much federal agencies have paid to Trump’s company since Inauguration Day in 2017. The Post has sought to compile its own, using documents obtained via public-records requests.
The Post has identified more than 170 payments from the Secret Service to Trump properties, totaling more than $620,000. In many cases, the Secret Service was paying to rent hotel rooms at Trump’s properties to accompany the president while he traveled. The actual total is likely to be higher, because the records released so far largely date from 2017 and 2018.
At $310,000 a year, there's little doubt Trump will have raked in $1 million or more on Secret Service payments, alone, by the time he leaves office.
