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| Donald Trump admires his favorite person. Photograph via Creative commons |
Donald Trump and family have greedily reached into the U.S. Treasury's bin of money armpit-deep. They’ve scooped up, or are planning to scoop up, large wads of cash for their personal enrichment. And the complaints from Congress? Barely a squeak
Just one example of the president's use of his office for self-enrichment: Trump is currently negotiating with both the Secret Service and the Department of Defense to rent office space in his super-luxurious, super-expensive office building, putting about $1,500,000 into his own corporate pockets so that he can hang out in New York instead of working in Washington. Both government agencies could find cheaper space a short distance away, but that discussion evidently hasn't come up.
Bottom line: Trump makes money off the taxpayers so he can feel more comfortable. That’s the very definition of corruption, but it doesn’t stop there.
As I wrote recently, Trump’s personal security at Trump Tower is costing just the city’s taxpayers about a million dollars a day. The city has been offered $7 million by the Federal Government, , leaving us in a triple-digit-millions hole. And we've heard not a peep out of Trump about this. But it gets even worse.
In a newsletter, snail-mailed to his constituents, my local New York City Councilman, Dan Garodnik, reports on the cost to any business trying to survive in the neighborhood of Trump Tower thanks to Trump's security arrangements.
Garodnik says:
“The impact on small businesses near Trump Tower has been severe. In particular the block of 56th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues was a disaster — a mess of barricades, security checkpoints, and giant press vans lining the sidewalks.
Pedestrians, during peak tourist season, had no interest in patronizing the businesses there. To make matters worse, business could not get important deliveries or regular garbage pickups. Surveys found profits by plummeting by 30-70 percent.
When a business loses income and profits, who’s the first to suffer? Right, the employees who get thrown out of work because there’s no money coming in to support them.
Thanks, Donald. Glad to know it’s still all about you and your self-enrichment at taxpayer expense.
1 comment:
And still this national calamity is unaddressed - wonder how this would have been handled under any other president. Reagan would have been embarrassed. And I was not a Reagan fan.
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