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    While Trump slashes jobs, his golf trips are costing taxpayers millions | Mohamad Bazzi

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    It’s no secret that Donald Trump loves to golf, especially at his own resorts. But Trump’s habit is costing US taxpayers tens of millions of dollars – even as he decries fraud and claims to slash waste in federal spending.Since he took office, Trump has fired tens of thousands of federal workers and tried to shut down agencies, part of his effort to unilaterally dismantle the government. He has also made seven trips to Florida and the golf courses he owns there.This weekend, Trump made his seventh visit to Florida and his sixth to his waterfront mansion and private club at Mar-a-Lago since his inauguration on 20 January. As Richard Luscombe noted in the Guardian last week, Trump’s frequent trips to his own properties not only cost taxpayer funds, but they benefit him directly – his businesses have charged the US government to house Secret Service agents and other White House staff. In other words, American taxpayers pay the Trump Organization for the right to protect Trump and his family.During Trump’s first term, his properties had a history of overcharging the Secret Service, by as much as 300% beyond the authorized government hotel rates, according to a report issued by Democrats in Congress last year. The report found that the Trump Organization charged the Secret Service as much as $1,815 a room per night to stay at the Trump International hotel in Washington DC – billing the US government significantly more than the hotel did for “rooms rented by the Qatari royal family and Chinese business interests”.It’s difficult to gauge exactly how much the Secret Service and other agencies spent at Trump properties, since various reports and audits focus on specific time periods instead of his full four years in office. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) estimated that the Secret Service paid nearly $2m to Trump-owned properties. Trump visited his properties an astounding 547 times during his first term, according to an analysis by Crew. That included 145 trips to Mar-a-Lago, 328 visits to Trump’s various golf courses and 33 visits to the Trump hotel in Washington, which his company sold in 2022 but is now negotiating to buy back.The cost to US taxpayers for Trump’s jaunts to Mar-a-Lago, which he calls his “winter White House”, far exceeds renting rooms for the president’s security entourage. A 2019 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which examined four trips that Trump took to his Palm Beach resort during his first term, put the total cost at $13.6m, or about $3.4m for each visit. That includes flying Air Force One, along with a separate cargo plane that carries the presidential motorcade, between Washington and the Palm Beach international airport. With seven trips so far into his current term, the US government has likely already spent more than $23m on Trump’s golf outings.And that estimate doesn’t capture the full costs to taxpayers. The GAO report does not account for additional federal funds to reimburse local law enforcement agencies for protecting Trump while he’s in Florida. The Palm Beach county sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, has said that his department spends $240,000 a day to help the Secret Service protect Trump. Bradshaw recently asked county commissioners for $45m in additional funds to provide security for Trump’s visits through the rest of this year – and the county is asking Congress to reimburse those costs.Trump often conducted official business and brought other senior US officials on his golf-focused trips to his properties – and he is repeating this pattern early in his second term, when he has visited Mar-a-Lago nearly every weekend. Trump’s frequent trips to his golf clubs send the message to foreign leaders, business executives, lobbyists, Republicans in Congress, and others who want to curry favor with the Trump administration that his properties are open for business. Throughout his first term, Trump dodged accusations that he was violating the US constitution’s emoluments clause as his businesses accepted money from foreign governments or lobbyists connected to them. Trump’s businesses received $7.8m from at least 20 foreign governments during his first administration, according to a report issued by congressional Democrats last year, although a later analysis by Crew estimated that payments from foreign governments reached $13.6m.At Mar-a-Lago, business leaders were recently offered one-on-one meetings with Trump for $5m, while others paid $1m a seat for a small-group candlelight dinner with the president. Those funds seem to be going to Make America Great Again Inc, a Super Pac that spent more than $450m on Trump’s presidential campaign last year, and is now expected to raise funds for a presidential library that would be built after Trump leaves office.Previous US presidents enjoyed playing golf, including Barack Obama and George W Bush. In fact, as a private citizen, Trump mocked Obama dozens of times for leaving Washington to play golf during his presidency. In August 2016, during his first presidential campaign, Trump pledged he wouldn’t have much time to hit the greens. “I’m going to be working for you,” he told a rally in Virginia. “I’m not going to have time to go play golf.”Of course, Trump ended up spending far more of his first term as president playing golf than Obama had. And Trump’s problem is not how often he plays or how many weekends he takes off. Because Trump refuses to divest from ownership of his family business, his frequent golf outings go beyond questionable government spending – the president is enriching himself through payments that US agencies make to Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties.The president is exempt from conflict of interest laws that ban federal employees from taking actions that would directly benefit them. Since the 1970s, US presidents have voluntarily abided by these laws, and put their financial holdings in a blind trust. But Trump refused to divest from his extensive business interests during his first term, creating a web of conflicts and potential corruption. Today, Trump is more emboldened to ignore US laws and norms set by past presidents, partly thanks to last year’s supreme court ruling that concluded that Trump has “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts”.Since taking office in January, Trump and his allies, especially the billionaire Elon Musk, rushed to dismantle many of the safeguards put in place after the Watergate scandal to monitor government corruption and punish officials involved in ethics violations. Trump fired 17 inspectors general who served as watchdogs over federal agencies, and he gutted a unit at the justice department that was created in 1976, after Watergate, to prosecute public corruption cases.In his first term, Trump did not suffer any consequences for playing a lot of golf – and using the presidency to enrich himself and his family. Now, he seems determined to spend even more time shuttling back and forth to his golf courses at taxpayer expense, with a chunk of that money going to his businesses.

    Mohamad Bazzi is the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern studies, and a journalism professor at New York University More

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      Secret Service Shoots Armed Man Near the White House

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      President Trump was in Florida at the time of the episode, during which a man held a gun and a confrontation ensued, the agency said.The Secret Service shot a man near the White House early Sunday after an “armed confrontation” with law enforcement officers, the agency said in a statement.President Trump was not at the White House at the time. He is spending the weekend in Florida at his Mar-a-Lago Club.Earlier on Saturday, the local police shared information with the Secret Service about a suicidal person who may have been traveling to Washington from Indiana. Around midnight, members of the Secret Service encountered the person’s parked vehicle near 17th and F Streets, about a block from the White House. A man was outside of the vehicle, the agency said.As officers approached, they saw that the man had a gun and then a confrontation ensued, during which the Secret Service shot the man, the agency said.He was transported to a hospital, and his condition was unknown, the Secret Service said. There were no reported injuries to anyone with the Secret Service.The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington is investigating the shooting. More

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      US House hearing with Secret Service descends into screaming match

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      A hearing examining the Secret Service’s response to the assassination attempts against Donald Trump went off the rails on Thursday, when a screaming match broke out between the agency’s acting director, Ronald Rowe, and a Republican representative.The hearing, hosted by the House taskforce established shortly after the first assassination attempt against Trump in July, was meant to explore the steps that the Secret Service has taken to improve security measures of protectees, but Pat Fallon, a Republican of Texas, took the questioning of Rowe in a different direction.Fallon displayed an enlarged photo from a commemoration of the September 11 attacks in New York, which both Joe Biden and Trump attended earlier this year. Fallon accused Rowe, who was standing directly behind Biden and Kamala Harris in the photo, of taking the place of the special agent in charge that day and endangering the president’s security for the sake of a photo op.Rowe replied that the special agent in charge had been just out of the picture’s view, and he attacked Fallon for politicizing the September 11 attacks.“I actually responded to Ground Zero. I was there going through the ashes of the World Trade Center,” Rowe said.“I’m not asking you that,” Fallon interrupted, raising his voice. “Were you the special agent in charge?”Rowe yelled back: “I was there to show respect for a Secret Service member that died on 9/11.”Fallon suggested that Rowe, who is not expected to stay on as director once Trump takes office in January, had placed himself in better view to “audition” for the role in case Harris won the presidency.“Do not invoke 9/11 for political purposes,” Rowe told Fallon.“I’m not,” Fallon replied. He accused Rowe: “You endangered President Biden’s life, Vice-President Harris’s life, because you put those agents out of position.”Rowe denied that charge, telling Fallon: “You are out of line.”The chair of the committee, Republican Mike Kelly, repeatedly banged his gavel until the shouting subsisted. The heated exchange came as the Secret Service faces intense scrutiny over its security practices, which attracted widespread condemnation following the assassination attempt against Trump.The agency was pilloried for failing to ensure proper safety precautions at Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman wounded the then presidential candidate and fatally shot an attendee named Corey Comperatore. Rowe’s predecessor, Kimberly Cheatle, resigned amid bipartisan criticism of her agency’s handling of security at the rally.At the hearing on Thursday, Rowe described the events surrounding the assassination attempt as an “abject failure”.“July 13 was a failure of the Secret Service to adequately secure the Butler Farm Shows site and protect president-elect Trump,” Rowe said. “That abject failure underscored critical gaps in Secret Service operations, and I recognize that we did not meet the expectations of the American public.”Rowe offered his condolences to Comperatore’s family and outlined a series of changes his agency had pursued since the July attack, including creating an aviation unit for drone surveillance of protection sites and streamlining communication with local authorities.“Let me be clear: there will be accountability, and that accountability is occurring,” Rowe told the taskforce. “It is essential that we recognize the gravity of our failure. I personally carry the weight of knowing that we almost lost a protectee and our failure cost a father and husband his life.”Since its formation in July, the taskforce has conducted 46 interviews and reviewed roughly 20,000 pages of documents, Kelly reported on Thursday. The taskforce is expected to release a final report on its findings in the coming days. More

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      Panel Calls for Secret Service Overhaul in Report on Trump Shooting Attempt

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      The findings of a review of the attempted assassination of Donald J. Trump in July are stark but familiar, underscoring the challenge of overhauling the agency.An independent panel reviewing the failures that led to the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump in July called on the Secret Service to replace its leadership with people from the private sector and focus almost exclusively on its protective mission.The recommendations, part of a report released on Thursday and commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security, outlined deficiencies that had already been identified in the months after the rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13. Those include the failure of the Secret Service to secure a nearby building where a would-be assassin stationed on the rooftop fired eight shots toward Mr. Trump. That and other security lapses, members of the panel said, resulted from an absence of “critical thinking” among agents and supervisors.The panel was particularly struck by a “lack of ownership” conveyed by the agents it interviewed. Those involved in the security planning did not take responsibility in the lead-up to the event, nor did they own failures in the aftermath. And, the report added, they “have done little in the way of self-reflection in terms of identifying areas of missteps, omissions or opportunities for improvement.”The findings are stark — this is the first assessment to bluntly identify failures on the part of senior agents on Mr. Trump’s personal detail. Yet the conclusions are also familiar.A panel convened in 2014 after a man scaled the White House fence and entered the mansion made similar proposals. That the issues persist a decade later underscores the challenge of overhauling an agency with such an entrenched culture.“The service has become insular and stale,” Janet Napolitano, a member of the four-person panel, said in an interview. Ms. Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service’s parent agency, from 2009 to 2013, added, “It is time for the service to kind of break out and to reach out beyond its own agency to bring in talent that can really take a fresh look at what it is they do, and how they do it.” In the past century, the agency has had only one director not promoted from within.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      With Trump Facing Threats, Security and Politics Intersect as Never Before

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      He has been the target of two would-be assassins in a matter of months. The intelligence agencies have told him that Iran is still threatening to kill him, and Iranian hackers got into the email accounts of his aides.Those developments have left former President Donald J. Trump and his staff fearful, frustrated and dependent for the candidate’s safety on federal agencies at the heart of what Mr. Trump has long portrayed as a hostile “deep state.”But Mr. Trump and his team have also seized on his predicament for political ends, suggesting without evidence that the situation is at least partly the fault of the Biden-Harris administration for being unwilling to provide him the protection he needs to travel the country freely and meet voters on his terms.Mr. Trump approaches Election Day as simultaneously a subject of federal prosecution, a candidate who has threatened to fire much of the federal bureaucracy and a target dependent for information and protection on the same agencies likely to endure his retribution should he take office again.Interviews with people close to Mr. Trump and officials across the federal government reveal how deeply unnerved the Trump campaign has been by the assassination attempts and the Iranian threats and hacking — and how the American security apparatus has responded.At the same time, as Mr. Trump attacks and politicizes the agencies charged with both investigating the threats and protecting him, officials in the Biden White House and at the Secret Service worry that he is laying the groundwork to blame them should he lose the election.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Man arrested near Donald Trump’s California rally with loaded guns, police say

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      A man armed with guns and false press and VIP passes was apprehended by authorities at a campaign rally in California on Saturday being held by Donald Trump.The suspect, identified as Las Vegas resident Vem Miller, was intercepted by police at a checkpoint about a half-mile from an entrance to the rally in Coachella Valley, California, soon before it began, police said Sunday.Police said Miller was carrying a loaded shotgun, handgun and high-capacity magazine and is believed to be a member of a rightwing anti-government organization.Miller was booked for possessing a loaded firearm and a high capacity magazine – and was released after posting $5,000 bail, police records show.“The incident did not impact the safety of former president Trump or attendees of the event,” the Riverside county sheriff’s office said in a press release.The Secret Service put out a statement saying it was apprised of the arrest: “The incident did not impact protective operations. The Secret Service extends its gratitude to the deputies and local partners who assisted in safeguarding last night’s events.”The US Attorney’s Los Angeles office, in a statement on Sunday, also said Trump was not in danger, citing the US Secret Service. The statement added that while no federal arrest had been made, an investigation was ongoing.Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco said he believed at a press conference on Sunday that Miller was plotting to kill Trump, but acknowledged that was “speculation”. “What we do know is he showed up with multiple passports with different names, an unregistered vehicle with a fake license plate and loaded firearms,” the sheriff said at a news conference on Sunday afternoon.The suspect later told US media that he was a Trump supporter who bought the guns for his own safety and notified police at a checkpoint that they were in the trunk of his car. “These accusations are complete bullshit,” Miller said. “I’m an artist, I’m the last person that would cause any violence and harm to anybody.”He said he was surprised by his arrest, and had been detained for about eight hours.Miller holds a UCLA master’s degree, and in 2022 ran for Nevada state assembly. Bianco said Miller considers himself a so-called sovereign citizen, a group of people who do not believe they are subject to any government statutes unless they consent to them.Bianco said Miller’s identity card was enough to raise suspicion with local rally security. “They were different enough to cause the deputies alarm,” he said, according to the Riverside Press-Enterprise.Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July, when a gunman’s bullet grazed his ear during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. In September, another man was charged with trying to assassinate Trump after Secret Service agents discovered him hiding with a rifle near Trump’s Palm Beach golf course. He has since pleaded not guilty.Bianco said US Secret Service officials said his department went “above and beyond” in their efforts to protect Trump and others who attended the rally.Bianco also said the FBI is questioning another man after bomb-detecting dogs “repeatedly” identified him as possibly dangerous. That man was not allowed in the rally, Bianco said.Miller is scheduled to appear at the Indio Larson justice center on 2 January 2025, according to the Riverside county sheriff’s department inmate database.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Secret Service made numerous errors before first near-assassination of Trump, Senate report says

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      The breadth of known Secret Service errors that led up to Donald Trump’s first near-assassination in July widened on Wednesday with the release of a report by the US Senate that found there was no one clearly in charge of decision-making for security at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, that day – causing “foreseeable, preventable” failings before the former president was shot.The catalogue of security errors that allowed a would-be assassin to fire seven rounds at Trump at the election rally include failing to set up sight-line barriers around the outdoor rally area, the absence of a plan to secure the building the shooter took aim from and general communication chaos.A bullet clipped the former president’s ear, while one rally-goer was killed and two others were badly wounded.An agent with only informal training with drone equipment called a toll-free tech support hotline for help, delaying security operations involving surveillance drone equipment, according to a preliminary summary of findings made public on Wednesday.A request ahead of time for additional unmanned security assets was denied, the report said. Thomas Crooks, 20, fired at Trump before being killed by government snipers.“Multiple foreseeable and preventable planning and operational failures by [the Secret Service] contributed to Crooks’ ability to carry out the assassination attempt of former president Trump on July 13,” the preliminary report said.“These included unclear roles and responsibilities, insufficient coordination with state and local law enforcement, the lack of effective communications, and inoperable C-UAS systems, among many others,” it continued, referring to equipment such as drones, or counter-unmanned aircraft systems.The Secret Service chief of communications, Anthony Guglielmi, said: “The weight of our mission is not lost on us and in this hyper-dynamic threat environment, the US Secret Service cannot fail.“Many of the insights gained from the Senate report align with the findings from our mission assurance review and are essential to ensuring that what happened on July 13 never happens again,” Guglielmi added.The Secret Service has already openly admitted failures, both to the US Congress and in press conferences, and the head of the service at the time quit after the Butler shooting.The bipartisan Senate homeland security and governmental affairs committee found that key resource requests were also denied, and some were not even made. Secret Service advance agents did not request a surveillance team for the rally’s 15,000 attendees.About 155 law enforcement officers were at the Butler rally on 13 July, compared with 410 security personnel dispatched to guard the first lady, Jill Biden, who was in the state about an hour away.The report found that many of the problems identified by the committee “remain unaddressed” by the Secret Service.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Overall, the lack of an effective chain of command, which came across clearly when we conducted interviews,” said the Connecticut Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal on Tuesday. “It was almost like an Abbott and Costello farce, with ‘who’s on first?’ finger-pointing by all of the different actors.”But the central failure to secure a roof of a nearby factory within shooting distance of the rally stage, from where the shots were fired, remains unanswered. The first reported sighting of would-be assassin Crooks was at 4.26pm, more than 90 minutes before Trump would begin speaking.At 5.38pm, a Beaver county sniper, stationed inside the building from which Crooks would later shoot atop its roof, sent photos of Crooks to the local team’s group chat, but Secret Service counter-snipers on a roof close to where Trump was due to speak were not notified.“What I saw made me ashamed,” said the acting Secret Service director, Ronald Rowe Jr. “I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured.”The report was released as investigators investigate a second domestic assassination attempt on the former president, as well as an apparent Iranian plot to kill him.In the second domestic attempt, Ryan Routh, 58, was arrested on 15 September, suspected of pointing a rifle through the fence at Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the former president was playing.On Tuesday, federal prosecutors filed a charge of attempted assassination against Routh, on top of previous charges. More

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      Trump Golf Course Suspect Is Charged With Attempted Assassination

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      The new federal indictment in Florida comes on top of two gun charges against Ryan W. Routh, an itinerant contractor with an extensive criminal record.The man accused of lurking with a gun near former President Donald J. Trump at one of his Florida golf courses was charged on Tuesday with the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.The indictment was returned by a federal grand jury in Miami and filed in Federal District Court in southern Florida. The case was randomly assigned to Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge who recently dismissed the case related to Mr. Trump’s retention of classified documents after he left office.The new charges against the suspect, Ryan W. Routh, 58, were expected. They come on top of two gun charges against Mr. Routh, an itinerant contractor with an extensive criminal record who exhorted Iran to assassinate Mr. Trump.In addition to the assassination charges, Mr. Routh was charged with possessing a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence, along with assaulting or intimidating a Secret Service agent — possibly referring to reports of his pointing the rifle in the direction of the agents before fleeing the perimeter of the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach.Earlier on Tuesday, a federal magistrate judge ordered Mr. Routh held until trial, citing his “lengthy criminal history with over a hundred arrests,” a history of weapons violations and his recent travel to Ukraine and Taiwan, which made him a flight risk.Just hours before that, federal prosecutors in North Carolina unsealed charges against Mr. Routh’s son, Oran A. Routh, accusing him of buying and possessing child pornography. An F.B.I. search of his apartment for evidence in his father’s case uncovered “hundreds” of sexual images on his phone involving children as young as 6, according to a court filing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Congress Unveils Short-Term Spending Deal

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      Speaker Mike Johnson dropped his demands for proof-of-citizenship voting requirements to strike a deal that includes more money for the Secret Service and funds the government through Dec. 20.Congressional leaders from both parties unveiled a short-term agreement to fund the government on Sunday, after Speaker Mike Johnson abandoned demands for a longer-term deal that also included new proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration.The deal, which extends federal appropriations through Dec. 20, includes an additional $231 million to help the beleaguered Secret Service protect candidates during the upcoming presidential election and into next year. According to the Treasury Department, the United States has spent about $6.3 trillion in fiscal 2024, which ends on Sept. 30.The timeline of the deal allows Congress to sidestep a government shutdown during the campaign season, but it all but ensures that spending disputes will dominate the lame-duck period between the election and the inauguration of a new Congress in January.“While I am pleased bipartisan negotiations quickly led to a government funding agreement free of cuts and poison pills, this same agreement could have been done two weeks ago,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said in a statement heralding the temporary spending patch — known as a continuing resolution — and blaming Republicans for dragging their heels. “Instead, Speaker Johnson chose to follow the MAGA way and wasted precious time.”In a letter on Sunday to his colleagues explaining why he was forced to take the deal, Mr. Johnson wrote, “A continuing resolution is the only option that remains.” He promised to put it to a floor vote this week.Mr. Johnson had made it a personal crusade to include in the spending package legislation requiring people to prove their U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, arguing it was necessary to prevent fraud, despite scant evidence of noncitizens voting. That requirement, known as the SAVE Act, was also supported by the hard right and by former President Donald J. Trump, who called on Congress not to pass a spending plan without “every ounce” of the proposal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More