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| Trump at a MAGA themed wedding ay his Bedminster Golf Club in July |
While Trump spread misinformation and panic between rounds of golf, Vice President Mike Pence went to Poland in Trump’s stead. His team decided that it would make sense for him to stop over in Ireland on his way back, stay two nights, and do a day of meetings in Ireland between. The meetings are, of course, in Dublin, which is both the capital of Ireland and by far its largest city.
But Pence, curiously, is not staying in Dublin. Instead, his two nights will be spent at a Trump-owned luxury resort that’s about a three-hour drive away from the capital city — the plan is to commute cross-country by air to make the meetings work.
In distance terms, this is like staying at a hotel in Baltimore for your business trip to New York.
Except, of course, that the scandal here is not bad transportation logistics but the theft of public funds. The true analogy to what Pence is doing would be something like stealing money from the office expense account and using it to bribe your boss to give you a good performance review. Then to make it three, this week we also learned the news that Attorney General Bill Barr is paying $30,000 for the privilege of hosting a party at the Trump hotel in DC.
But I’m hung up on the Pence story and on Trump’s habit of staying at his own clubs at taxpayer expense because in comparison to the bribery side of Trump’s corruption, the outright theft is just so straightforward. There is no holder of any office in America who would be allowed to steer public funds directly to entities he controls. It’s not that this kind of corruption is unheard of by any means. What’s so shocking about it is that it’s common enough that we have tons of precedent for the idea that it’s unacceptable. The Pugh case happened to be recent and relatively high profile, but the IRS’s list of public corruption prosecutions is littered with examples of relatively minor officials going down for this sort of thing. But in Trump’s Washington it’s become kind of routine.
Democrats could use some creativity
Looking back on the Robert Mueller era, one of the oddities of the special counsel’s investigation was the allure of secrecy. We didn’t know whether there was some explicit quid pro quo between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, so uncovering one would have been big news. By the same token, if an investigator discovered that a president had been secretly steering thousands of dollars into companies he secretly owned that would be a major scandal.
But Trump has been stealing public funds out in the open from the beginning of his presidency which has tended to somewhat diminish the impact of the story relative to potentially secret scandals. There’s nothing secret about his push to host the next G7 summit at his own luxury resort in Florida, for example, but it’s extraordinarily scandalous.
There have been some worthy attempts in the media at tracking this abuse. NBC calculated that Trump spent 295 days of his first 956 days in office at his own hotels. HuffPost put the overall tab on the president’s golf outings at $102 million as of May, with a majority of that seemingly going directly to clubs he owns.
Yet public officials are not stepping up. Any other official at any other level of government would be fired if not prosecuted. It’s so obviously worthy of impeachment — the president can’t just grab public money and stuff it into his pockets — that there’s barely anything to investigate.