"Financial super disaster": The outrageous cost to protect Donald Trump and his family
Washington DC - Has former President Donald Trump left a financial disaster in his wake? A new book cites some disturbing figures.
In Carol Leonnig's book, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, the investigative journalist pulls back the curtain on the exorbitant security costs spent for the Trump family during their time in the presidency.
Yet, it is not just Donald Trump himself who is responsible for the spending – his wife Melania Trump has also allegedly reaped the benefits.
The former first lady insisted that the couple's 15-year-old son Barron finish his schooling in New York during the first year of Trump's term, and only afterwards move with her to the White House in Washington, according to reports by The Mercury News. That meant that the three-story New York City penthouse apartment in Trump Tower had to be guarded around the clock for months.
For both presidential households in New York and Washington, security costs added up to an absurd total of over $500,000 – per day.
By March 2017, the personal protection budget of the Secret Service was already exhausted, so an additional $28 million had to be added to the government expense, which is contributed to with taxpayer money.
Leonnig calculates that security costs for the entire Trump era totaled about $600 million, compared with just under $98 million for the eight years of his predecessor Barack Obama – who was in office for twice as long and received four times the number of threats of any previous president.
Security detail for Trump was extended to children and staff members
Leonning goes on to say that Trump extended the privileges of his presidential security detail to his adult children, three of his aids, and three more of his top staff members.
"It is unprecedented for the Secret Service to continue protecting, you know, adult children of a president, who are, you know, in their 30s and 40s," she told The Washington Post.
The newspaper calls the extremely high security costs for the Trump family a "financial super disaster," and the findings in Leonnig's book could now be grounds for further investigations into the former president.
And the scandal extends beyond Trump's time in office. Since he ended his term on January 20, he has charged Secret Service members over $40,000 to use space at his permanent residence of Mar-a-Lago, according to federal spending records.
Protections for all of Trump's camp are scheduled to end six-months after Biden's inauguration – which is later this month.
Cover photo: IMAGO / ZUMA Wire