May 03, 2019
Donald Trump has made a big show of saying that because he is such a rich guy, he will donate back his presidential salary of $400,000 a year to the government. He regularly tells us which department or agency is the lucky beneficiary of his quarterly compensation.
Unfortunately, he feels no compunction about imposing extraordinary travel and security costs on the government by spending frequent weekends at his Mar-a-Lago resort or other Trump properties. This expense substantially exceeds the $400,000 that the government gets from him donating his salary, as shown in the figure below.
Source: Government Accountability Office and author’s calculations.
The chart relies on a GAO study that calculated that four Trump visits cost the government $13.6 million in extra expenses, or $3.4 million per weekend. The calculation in the graph assumes that he makes 26 trips a year, one every other week.
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