Trumps' Travel Expenses Matter

JEREMY VENOOK
11:10 AM ET

In early January, President Donald Trump’s son Eric flew to Uruguay for a business trip. While he was there, Eric visited the unfinished Trump Tower in the resort town of Punta del Este, snapping pictures of the property with which to commemorate the visit on Twitter. To provide security for the trip, Eric Trump took along with him a retinue of Secret Service agents, as is customary for members of the first family traveling abroad with or without the president. According to The Washington Post, the bill for the trip—or at least, the amount of taxpayer dollars spent—totaled $97,830.

That Eric Trump left the country is not unusual; every first family has taken vacations while in office, although President Trump is the first in a generation whose children are old enough to jet-set on their own. The response is typically a textbook case of partisanship at work: The opposition party and its affiliated media outlets vociferously object to this use of taxpayer money; the president’s supporters respond with classic whataboutism, wondering where all this outrage was when the last guy did the same.

But Eric Trump’s trip is different. It’s not just about the cost of the trip, or the partisan hypocrisy at play given his father’s vociferous condemnation of his predecessor using taxpayer money for vacations. It’s not even that the Trumps will likely take international trips on their own fairly frequently compared to previous first children. The problem is that the $97,830 charge was for all intents and purposes a business expense, one of what will likely be many instances of the federal government paying to effectively subsidize the Trump Organization. Not only that, it’s yet another reminder of the president’s refusal to divest from his businesses, a situation that continues to create a multitude of conflicts of interest.

In an alternate universe in which Donald Trump did not become president, Eric’s trip is on the Trump Organization’s dime. The charge, which, according to The Washington Post, went mainly toward covering the costs of hotel rooms for the Secret Service members and embassy staff who accompanied Eric, may never have been incurred in the first place, as the need for a security detail would not have been nearly as high for a private citizen as for the son of the president. In our universe, though, the expense came out of the federal government’s budget, de facto subsidized by the American taxpayer ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/trump-family-travel/515874/