U.S., China firms scramble as new tariffs hurt business
By Brenda Goh and Lisa Baertlein, Reuters May 31, 2019
Employees work on a vinyl flooring production line in Zhangjiagang Yihua Rundong New Material Co., Ltd in Zhangjiagang
By Brenda Goh and Lisa Baertlein
SHANGHAI/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Shanghai wine importer Alex Chen has spent the last 10 days moving all his American wines – from chardonnays to zinfandels – out of warehouses in the city’s free trade zone before they are hit with an extra tariff that kicks in on Saturday.
On both sides of the Pacific, importers and exporters are scrambling as further tariffs of 15% come into effect, on top of the 10% duties imposed last September. The new tariffs will force them to raise prices, take a further hit on margins, or, if they can, find alternatives.
Chen figures he has stock to last three months, after which – barring an easing in the increasingly bitter U.S.-China trade war – he plans to focus on partnerships with wine suppliers from places such as Chile or Australia.
China’s added tariffs on American wines would leave no margin for importers like his firm, Alexander Wine Co., he said.
“This will collapse the market for U.S. wines.”
The 10-month-old trade war between the world’s two largest economies escalated early this month, with U.S. President Donald Trump imposing a new round of tariffs, prompting China to respond and forcing companies in the cross-fire into a scramble to raise prices or shift strategy.
Harlan Stone, chief executive of Connecticut-based Metroflor, said he sent e-mails to his distributors to inform them of his plans to raise prices on his China-made vinyl flooring by 13.5% after Trump hiked tariffs on Chinese goods on May 9.
Stone said he and his distributors had shouldered the initial 10% tariff last year.
“Over the long term, we believe the market can absorb the 10%, but we know the marketplace can’t absorb the additional 15,” said Stone, who sources the luxury vinyl tile he sells in the United States from factories on China’s eastern coast.
“This will go straight to the consumer and no one knows whether their buying habits will stay the same. There is risk.”
FINDING ALTERNATIVES
The trade war is changing the flow of global goods, with U.S. companies shifting purchases of affected products including furniture, refrigerators and car tires to countries such as Vietnam and South Korea, analysis by S&P Global Market Intelligence’s trade data firm Panjiva showed last month.
Trump, incensed by a surge of illegal immigrants across the southern border, vowed on Thursday to impose a tariff on all goods coming from Mexico, threatening to further disrupt global trade flows.
Chinese purchases of U.S. products have also suffered. Total U.S. agriculture product shipments to China dropped 44%, or $2.1 billion, in the first quarter of 2019 versus the same period in 2018, according to United States Department of Agriculture data.
Those figures include a 45% drop in U.S. breakfast cereal shipments, and a 34% decline beef imports, and a 20% cut in U.S. pork purchases. Imports of pet food dropped 35%, wine and beer fell 20%, and Chinese purchases of U.S. tree nuts such as almonds dropped 47%.
(GRAPHIC: China’s purchases of U.S. products drop as trade war intensifies – https://tmsnrt.rs/2WAebBk)
Some importers in China told Reuters they were opting to source more pork and beef from countries including Argentina or Spain, as selling U.S. products grew less competitive.
Shanghai-based wholesaler Gusto Fine Foods scrapped plans to put Berkshire pork from the United States on the list of produce it offers to high-end restaurants and hotels in China last year after the tariffs hit.
“The importer told us right away that due to tariffs, the next time you buy it from me, my cost is going to go up 30-40%,” said Dmytro Soroka, Gusto’s operations manager.
“And we were like, forget about that one, there are other pork suppliers out there. There’s Spain, there’s South America … The price going up will only make other products that we carry from different origins more interesting to our customers.”
MARKET SLUMP
Others, such as U.S. wine distributors with a focus on China, said they were finding it tough to be optimistic in the current climate.
Michael Honig, president of Napa Valley’s Honig Vineyard & Winery, said prior tariff increases undid 10 years of investment in China. In 2016, his small family winery sold about 1,000 cases in China. That dropped to zero last year.
“We had this wonderful trajectory up, now it’s down in the basement,” said Honig, who worries U.S. producers could be locked out of the competitive Chinese market for years.
U.S. wine exports to China were $59 million in 2018. That was down 13% in volume and off almost 25% in value compared to 2017, according to the Wine Institute.
David Amadia, president of Ridge Vineyards, which sells about 2% of its 90,000-case production to China, said the suddenness of the latest round of retaliatory tariffs left him no time to send shipments ahead of the deadline.
Instead, he may work with his importer to shift supplies to Hong Kong, where wine is duty free and 2018 U.S. exports totaled $130 million. “That’s become the fall-back for wineries,” Amadia said.
Additional reporting by Gavin Maguire in Singapore, Hallie Gu in Beijing and Beijing Newsroom, and Shanghai Newsroom.; Editing by Lincoln Feast.
Robert Mueller’s Speech Was a Repeat of His Appeal to Congress: Initiate Impeachment Proceedings
The special counsel could not charge Donald Trump with obstruction of justice. The legislature must wield its power to hold him accountable for what he’s done.
By Jack Holmes May 29, 2019
MANDEL NGANGETTY IMAGES
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is an “institutionalist” at a time when the institutions of our republic are crumbling, undermined by the most powerful people in our society and, in some cases, the very people who run them. This is a perilous position when democracy is sliding into autocracy, a big-money bet that relentlessly observing institutional norms is the best defense against those hell-bent on destroying them. It requires the supreme conviction of a devout acolyte of The Order of Things—the kind of person who would privately write a letter to Attorney General William Barr complaining about how he rolled out The Mueller Report, then state publicly that he has no doubt Barr conducted that rollout in good faith.
That’s what Mueller said at a press conference Wednesday—that he doesn’t think Barr conducted himself in bad faith. It was a stunning piece of counter-evidence against the claim Mueller is some kind of Honest Abe character. He might be squeaky clean, but it seems he’ll take on a smudge if it means protecting the institution of the Department of Justice—and, with it, the fading notion of the rule of law. Mueller spoke on Department property, symbolizing his commitment to Order, and largely refused throughout to speak about anything beyond the text of the Mueller Report. But there was one moment that stood out.
CNN Politics: Mueller: “If we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the President did commit a crime”
Overall, this is an extension of the Mueller Report’s appeal to Congress, which goes something like this:
1) Justice Department regulations hold a sitting president cannot be indicted.
2) As a result, my team could not file charges against the president.
3) We did not accuse him of a crime without charging him, because then he would have no chance to defend himself in a court of law. It would be unfair.
4) Here is evidence of up to 10 incidents in which the president meddled in the investigation, many of which could rise to the level of obstruction of justice.
5) Congress has broad powers to investigate the president and hold him accountable for unacceptable or criminal conduct in office.
6) It is up to Congress to use the vast body of evidence laid out here to hold the president accountable by initiating impeachment proceedings.
In the time since, more than 450 former federal prosecutors have signed a letter attesting to the fact that if Donald Trump were not the president, he would be charged with obstruction. Mueller could not charge him, so Congress must. It was not a Witch Hunt, the report is not a COMPLETE EXONERATION or NO COLLUSION or NO OBSTRUCTION. There was collusion, but that’s not a crime. There was evidence of conspiracy, but it did not rise to a level where the special counsel sought charges against members of Trump’s campaign. And there was a huge amount of evidence that the president obstructed justice, but Mueller felt he could not charge him according to institutional norms.
Typically, the president responded with a lie:
Donald Trump: Nothing changes from the Mueller Report. There was insufficient evidence and therefore, in our Country, a person is innocent. The case is closed! Thank you.
Remember when it was a Deep State Coup that ended with a COMPLETE EXONERATION? It never made any sense, and now he’s saying something entirely different. It is time for Congress to act.
Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire.com, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.
Infrastructure fix held hostage by president in effort to block oversight by Congress
By Neil Steinberg May 23, 2019
A rusty pillar on a boarding platform at Union Station. Deteriorating infrastructure is a national problem Donald Trump doesn’t want to address, not while he’s being investigated. Neil Steinberg/Chicago Sun-Times
Infrastructure is not sexy.
Roads and bridges, railroad tracks and tunnels. Nobody says, “You know what I love about Chicago? The electrical grid; it’s so robust!”
Though I admit I find infrastructure — well, if not quite a turn-on, than at least interesting. I’ve watched roads built, cement poured, tunnels dug, bridges installed. It’s not boring.
And it’s important. A nation’s infrastructure is like a body’s veins and arteries, bone and sinew. You might not take pride in your Achilles tendon, but if something goes wrong with it, you try to walk and instead pitch forward on your face.
You probably noticed infrastructure in the news this week. The president stormed out of a meeting with Democrats Wednesday; they were supposed to talk about long-delayed infrastructure repairs. But Donald Trump vowed not to address this urgent, bipartisan problem while the Democrats are plumbing the depths of his administration’s corruption and criminality.
On one hand, it is not the biggest setback. Just as the environmental standards being scrapped tend, upon closer examination, to have been implemented by Barack Obama in 2014, so nobody was rushing to fix our national infrastructure before Trump brought his circus to Washington. Obama’s 2009 American Recovery & Reinvestment Act grew construction efforts by only 1% in 2009 and 2010. (I like to point out where Obama fell short, just to mess with Republicans’ heads, showing it is possible to view your own side critically. I sincerely believe Republicans don’t know it can be done, beyond occasionally muttering, “I wish he didn’t tweet so much” which is like pointing out Satan has a loose button on his coat).
The last two report cards from the American Society for Civil Engineers gave U.S. public infrastructure a D+ and urged $2 trillion be spent over the next 10 years.
The details are alarming and could fill five columns. One example: There are more than 90,000 dams in the United States. By 2025 — six years from now, for Trump supporters struggling to keep up — 70% will be more than half a century old, which is beyond their intended life span. Nothing is easier to ignore than a dam, quietly holding back water. Until it fails. Then people notice.
After Trump stormed out of his meeting, he went to the Rose Garden, where he delivered a surreal diatribe — Nancy Pelosi called it a “temper tantrum” — declaring that the Democrats must “Get these phony investigations over with.” Until then, he said, he would consider no legislation, no matter how crucial.
“We’re going to go down one track at a time,” the president said.
President Donald Trump tells reporters in the Rose Garden Wednesday he will consider no infrastructure proposals until Democrats cease investigating his administration. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it a “temper tantrum.” Getty
That is his style, and as well as that of his supporters, where two thoughts — the nation is crumbling to ruin AND the stock market is surging — make for very cramped quarters.
Well, if it must be one track at a time, then let’s prioritize. If the choice is getting to the bottom of the sewer of corruption, lies and quasi-treason that is the Trump administration, or building a high speed rail line to St. Louis, I’d say the prospect of zipping down to the Gateway to the West will have to wait a little longer. The roads can be rebuilt, eventually. I’m not so sure about the American Experiment.
Though there is risk. The longer we ignore overdue repairs, the more we sink into a false estimation of our economic position. “Make America Great Again” is not about making American great by, oh for instance, having great roads and trains and airports. It’s about declaring oneself great and brooking no dissent. The stock market of course will rejoice if you give big tax breaks to corporations and scuttle environmental standards. But those lost taxes mean there isn’t money to repair roads and bridges, and the environment curdles and deteriorates, a hidden cost not reflected in the Dow Jones.
With an unfit driver taking his hands off the wheel, trying to terrify and silence his passengers, we are careening down an un-maintained highway, with no idea what yawning pothole will send us flipping off the road. But the potholes are there, and we will hit one. Soon. When our nation is upside down in a ditch, wheels spinning, the smell of gasoline heavy around us, I wonder: Will Trump supporters begin to suspect something is wrong? Nah.
John McCain Recited Names Of Dictators During Trump Inaugural, Senator Says
Kevin Robillard, HuffPost May 26, 2019
DES MOINES, Iowa – Sen. John McCain repeatedly compared President Donald Trump to a dictator during Trump’s inaugural address, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic White House contender and friend of the late Arizonan, told a crowd of voters here.
Klobuchar, speaking to a crowd of more than 200 at Jasper’s Winery, said she sat next to McCain, one of Trump’s most outspoken Republican critics, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) during the inaugural address, which became known for its blunt expression of Trump’s authoritarian populism and invocations of “American carnage.”
“I sat on that stage between Bernie and John McCain, and John McCain kept reciting to me names of dictators during that speech because he knew more than any of us what we were facing as a nation,” Klobuchar said. “He understood it. He knew because he knew this man more than any of us did.”
McCain and Trump feuded frequently during the president’s first 18 months in office, and the president has continued to attack McCain since the senator’s death last August. McCain refused to endorse Trump during the 2016 campaign, and later attacked his approach to politics as a “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.”
Trump, for his part, attacked McCain for his vote to kill an Obamacare repeal bill in the Senate and famously criticized him for being captured while serving as a fighter pilot in Vietnam. “I like people who weren’t captured,” he said in the early stages of his presidential bid.
McCain faced criticism from Democrats for not doing more to oppose the policies and appointments of a president he frequently lambasted, but Klobuchar and other Democratic senators frequently praise him as a Republican they were able to work with during increasingly partisan times. Klobuchar regularly mentions her friendship with McCain during her stump speech.
40% of Americans don’t have $400 in the bank for emergency expenses: Federal Reserve
SOO YOUN, ABC News May 24, 2019
Almost 40% of American adults wouldn’t be able to cover a $400 emergency with cash, savings or a credit-card charge that they could quickly pay off, a Federal Reserve survey finds.
In addition, 12% of adults said they wouldn’t be able to pay their current monthly bills if faced with the unexpected $400 expense, the survey found.
The 2018 results are very similar to those from the Federal Reserve’s 2017 survey.
Overall, the number of people who said they are able to handle unexpected expenses is on the rise since the Federal Reserve began the survey in 2013.
However, 17% of adults in the U.S. said they are not able to fully pay off all of their current month’s bills.
Meanwhile, medical costs yielded other hurdles.
One in five adults had major, unexpected medical bills to pay last year, and one in four skipped necessary medical care in 2018 because they couldn’t afford it, the survey revealed.
Related:
The Independent
Almost half of American adults do not have $400 to spare, study reveals
Stephanie Fillion, The Independent May 23, 2019
Repairing your car, replacing a broken appliance or making an emergency visit to the dentist can be bothersome for some – for many Americans, it is impossible.
Four in 10 American adults would struggle to handle an emergency expense as small as $400, a new Federal Reserve survey reveals.
Currently, about 27 percent of the people surveyed would have to borrow money or sell something to cover the bill, while 12 percent could not pay for the expense at all.
Still, overall, Americans are better off financially than they were five years ago, when about half of the population could not handle such a bill.
Unsurprisingly, health-related out-of-pocket spending is often the thing that is costly for Americans. The most frequently skipped treatments are dental care appointments, at 17 per cent, visiting a doctor, 12 per cent, and prescription medicine, 10 per cent.
Demographic disparities persist: people living in rural areas, as well as black and Hispanic adults are more widely represented in the category of people who would struggle to meet ends in such a situation. Those with bachelor degrees or more education are also more likely to be able to pay for these bills. “Racial and ethnic minorities of each education level are even less able to handle a financial setback,” the study finds.
What the study does not reveal, however, is how the situation breaks by ages: so it is unclear whether millennials inflate the emergency expense unreadiness or not.
Related:
Bloomberg
Almost 40% of Americans Would Struggle to Cover a $400 Emergency.
Matthew Boesler, Bloomberg May 24, 2019
Almost 40% of Americans Would Struggle to Cover a $400 Emergency
(Bloomberg) — Many U.S. households find themselves in a fragile position financially, even in an economy with an unemployment rate near a 50-year low, according to a Federal Reserve survey.
The Fed’s 2018 report on the economic well-being of households, published Thursday, indicated “most measures” of well-being and financial resilience “were similar to, or slightly better than, those in 2017.” The slight improvement coincided with a decline in the average unemployment rate to 3.9% last year, from 4.3% in 2017.
But despite the advance, the results of the 2018 survey indicated that almost 40% of Americans would still struggle in the face of a $400 financial emergency. The statistic, which was a bit better than in the 2017 report, has become a favorite rejoinder to U.S. President Donald Trump’s boasts about a strong economy among Democratic politicians, including 2020 presidential candidate Kamala Harris, the U.S. senator from California.
“Relatively small, unexpected expenses, such as a car repair or replacing a broken appliance, can be a hardship for many families without adequate savings,” the report said. “When faced with a hypothetical expense of $400, 61% of adults in 2018 say they would cover it, using cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement,” it added.
“Among the remaining 4 in 10 adults who would have more difficulty covering such an expense, the most common approaches include carrying a balance on credit cards and borrowing from friends or family,” according to the report.
Based on a survey of 11,000 people in October and November 2018, the report showed a quarter of Americans don’t feel like they are doing “at least OK” financially. That number was higher for black and Hispanic Americans, at roughly one third for both. For those making less than $40,000 a year, the share who felt they weren’t doing well was 44%.
“We continue to see the growing U.S. economy supporting most American families,” Fed Governor Michelle Bowman said in a press release accompanying the report.
“At the same time, the survey does find differences across communities, with just over half of those living in rural areas describing their local economy as good or excellent compared to two-thirds of those living in cities,” Bowman said. “Across the country, many families continue to experience financial distress and struggle to save for retirement and unexpected expenses.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Matthew Boesler in New York at mboesler1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Margaret Collins at mcollins45@bloomberg.net, Alister Bull
For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com
(Bloomberg Opinion) — It looks like all you have to do these days to dominate a news cycle and force the president of the United States to tee up a predictably bonkers press conference in the Rose Garden is to accuse him of engaging in a “cover-up.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi uttered the magic words on Wednesday and, presto, President Donald Trump later stepped in front of a White House lectern adorned with a placard that offered a numerical tour of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation: “$35+ MILLION Spent; 2,800+ Subpoenas; 675 Days; 500+ Witnesses; 18 Angry Democrats.” Two other little signs abutted the Mueller tutorial, both displaying classic bits of Trump propaganda: “NO Collusion” and “NO Obstruction.”
Topping off the theatrics was POTUS himself, the most vaudevillian of Oval Office inhabitants. “I think most of you would agree to this, I’m the most transparent president probably in the history of this country,” Trump said to a Rose Garden audience unlikely to agree. “I don’t do cover-ups.”
But of course he does. The president has spent much of his adulthood drawing a veil over his failures and shortcomings, maneuvering to keep things hidden and enlisting the help of others along the way. He has visited repeated cover-ups upon his presidency too.
Even Trump’s Rose Garden performance was just one act in a show that turned out to be “Cover-Up Wednesday.” Across town in Washington, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin played his part by keeping Trump’s tax returns under wraps. He told the House Financial Services Committee that it would be “unlawful as advised by the Department of Justice” for him to comply with a Congressional subpoena requesting him to direct the Internal Revenue Service to hand over the returns. He said he didn’t believe he was breaking the law by ignoring the subpoena.
“I have been advised I am not violating the law. I never would have done anything that violated the law,” Mnuchin said. “Quite the contrary, I’ve been advised that had I turned them over I would be violating the law.”
We’re still waiting to see the legal basis for Mnuchin’s position, though. The Justice Department (overseen by the most transparent president in history and run by his appointee, William Barr) didn’t go as far as warning the Treasury Secretary that he would break the law by releasing the tax returns, at least according to a minimalist letter on the matter that Mnuchin has made public. Instead, that May 6 letter to the House Ways and Means Committee said he wouldn’t provide Trump’s returns because the committee’s request, per Justice Department guidance, didn’t “reasonably serve a legitimate legislative purpose.” Mnuchin said the Justice Department’s reasoning would be memorialized in a published legal opinion “as soon as practicable.”
More than two weeks have passed and that legal opinion has yet to arrive. If and when it does, it may contain language noting that Mnuchin would be violating the law by releasing the returns (especially now that he has testified to that effect). Still, Mnuchin’s primary argument for keeping the taxes covered up has been what he describes as a Congress hobbled by a lack of legislative purpose.
“Legislative purpose” is an argument that has circulated widely among Trump attorneys trying to keep his financial records hidden in what the most transparent president in history would never call a cover-up. Trump’s lawyers deployed that reasoning to try blocking Deutsche Bank AG and Capital One Financial Corp. from turning over his banking records. But on Wednesday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos shot that thinking down, saying in his Manhattan courtroom that “the power of Congress to conduct investigations is inherent in the legislative process.”
Ramos’s argument matched a similar line of reasoning that U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta offered on Monday in Washington, when he ruled that Congress was within its rights as a coequal branch of the federal government to secure records from Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA. That ruling is being appealed and it’s likely that Ramos’s will as well, but in the annals of courts ensuring that presidents can’t engage in financial cover-ups – and must embrace authentic transparency – both rulings are significant.
The Ramos and Mehta rulings will probably help inform any legal challenges to Mnuchin’s stance on Trump’s taxes. In the meantime, the New York State Assembly – also on Wednesday – passed a bill allowing Trump’s state income tax returns to be shared with Congress. The state returns track the federal returns partially but significantly. If all of this comes together, Trump’s accounting records, banking documents, and income tax returns will wind up in Congress’s hands, leaving the president exposed to legal and financial scrutiny in ways he has never experienced in decades as a businessman and public figure.
Over the years, Trump has managed to keep his health and academic records under cover and his ties to organized crime largely out of public view as well. He has used a dizzying number of lies and exaggerations to mask his poor track record as a businessman, hide financial problems and inflate his wealth.
It’s doubtful, however, that Pelosi was thinking of those things when she talked on Wednesday about Trump’s cover-ups. Perhaps front and center in her mind was the recently released Mueller report – a large part of which details the epic efforts of Trump and his team to obscure a number of their questionable activities before, during and after the 2016 campaign. Trump’s efforts crossed so deeply into possibly illegal acts that Mueller weighed charging the president with obstruction of justice.
Attorney General William Barr came to Trump’s rescue in the early days of the Mueller report’s public release, mis-characterizing what the report actually said as well as the gravity of some of the wrongdoing uncovered. He now occupies a special perch in the White House, as one of the legal advisers the president is most likely to turn to as pressures mount, as problems need to be covered up, and as he gets rattled enough to begin free associating about transparency and cover-ups in front of the Rose Garden cameras.
To contact the author of this story: Timothy L. O’Brien at tobrien46@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Boxell at jboxell@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Timothy L. O’Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. He has been an editor and writer for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, HuffPost and Talk magazine. His books include “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald.”
For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion
Trump’s Golf Costs: $102 Million And Counting, With Taxpayers Picking Up The Tab
Trump promised never to golf. Instead, he’s spent more than twice as many days golfing as Obama at the same point, costing taxpayers over three times as much.
By S.V. Date May 22, 2019
Donald Trump’s golf habit has already cost taxpayers at least $102 million in extra travel and security expenses, and next month will achieve a new milestone: a seven-figure presidential visit to another country so he can play at his own course.
U.S. taxpayers have spent $81 million for the president’s two dozen trips to Florida, according to a HuffPost analysis. They spent $17 million for his 15 trips to New Jersey, another $1 million so he could visit his resort in Los Angeles and at least $3 million for his two days in Scotland last summer ― $1.3 million of which went just for rental cars for the massive entourage that accompanies a president abroad.
And, notwithstanding Trump’s campaign promise that if elected he would not play golf at all, the White House has done preliminary work for Trump’s visit to his resort on the west coast of Ireland next month, according to Irish media and government sources, even though no official meeting with Irish leaders is planned in the capital, Dublin.
ANDREW MILLIGAN – PA IMAGES VIA GETTY IMAGES
Late Tuesday afternoon, the White House announced that Trump would meet with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in Shannon, just 30 miles by air from Trump’s golf resort in Doonbeg. It will be the first time Trump will visit a foreign country — with the staggering footprint of personnel and equipment that entails — for the main purpose of playing golf, though an official purpose was layered on after the fact.
“It’s obviously an incredible waste of money,” said Robert Weissman, president of the group Public Citizen. He then quipped: “Of course, the more time he spends golfing, the less time he spends governing, the better.”
The $102 million total to date spent on Trump’s presidential golfing represents 255 times the annual presidential salary he volunteered not to take. It is more than three times the cost of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that Trump continually complains about. It would fund for six years the Special Olympics program that Trump’s proposed budget had originally cut to save money.
While Republicans and Trump himself frequently criticized former President Barack Obama for his golf outings, Trump has spent more than twice as many days on the links, to date, as Obama did at the same point in his first term. And because Trump has insisted on dozens of trips to New Jersey and Florida to play at his resorts there, taxpayers are spending more than three times as much as they did for golf by the same point in Obama’s term.
The White House did not respond to numerous queries regarding this story. North Carolina Republican congressman Mark Meadows, a close Trump ally, dismissed the $102 million figure as insignificant.
“There’s a lot more important things to worry about than the rounding errors that we sometimes have on these things,” he said Tuesday.
Just as troubling as the amount Trump has spent so far on golf trips is the fact that his visits have been to his own properties — for-profit businesses that put money in his own pocket and that Trump routinely praises during his visits.
During his trip to Scotland last year, for example, Trump wrote: “I have arrived in Scotland and will be at Trump Turnberry for two days of meetings, calls and hopefully, some golf – my primary form of exercise! The weather is beautiful, and this place is incredible!”
“His top priority with these trips is not the business of the American people, it’s the business of the Trump Organization,” said Jordan Libowitz of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The American presidency has become another tool to advertise his golf properties.”
I just want to stay in the White House and work my ass off.Candidate Donald Trump in 2016
The vast majority of Trump’s golf costs result from his insistence on playing at his Florida courses in West Palm Beach and Jupiter, where he has spent 61 days while staying at his resort in the nearby town of Palm Beach. A weekend trip to Mar-a-Lago averages $3.4 million, with most of that resulting from the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs each hour to fly both the modified Boeing 747 that serves as the primary Air Force One, as well as the C-17 cargo planes required to move all the support vehicles in Trump’s motorcade.
Determining the cost of Trump’s golf visits is not easy. The White House is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, and Trump’s press office does not answer most questions about his golf visits — even refusing to confirm whether he is, in fact, playing golf when he is physically at his golf courses.
But a recent Government Accountability Office report regarding Trump’s four early 2017 visits to Mar-a-Lago has provided hard data and a methodology that HuffPost followed in its own analysis.
The HuffPost analysis took a conservative approach to determining costs. For example, it used a per-hour rate of $15,994 for Trump’s use of the smaller Air Force One that he takes to Bedminster, New Jersey, even though that figure accounts only for fuel and maintenance, not the additional factors that GAO used when it determined the $273,000-per-hour cost of operating the larger plane.
Any presidential outing requires coordination of multiple offices and agencies and incurs additional costs compared to staying in the White House. Even one of Trump’s day trips to his course across the Potomac River in northern Virginia — there have been 52 to date — requires fuel for all the motorcade vehicles and some personnel costs if overtime is necessary for Secret Service agents and others. (Those expenses, however, are minimal compared to flight costs, and HuffPost did not include them in its $102 million total.)
And the price increases exponentially the farther Trump travels.
Flying the Marine Corps helicopters — three of them are used each time ― from the White House to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, where Air Force One is based, costs $57,000 for the round trip, according to the GAO report. Flying the massive C-17 transports loaded with Trump’s 7-ton armored limousines and other specialized support vehicles costs $800,500 per Mar-a-Lago trip.
And for each of those trips, the Coast Guard winds up spending an extra $855,500 to patrol the Atlantic Ocean to the east of Mar-a-Lago and the Intracoastal Waterway to the west. That figure includes the expense of getting necessary ships, boats and crews to South Florida from stations as far away as Boston and Houston, the GAO reported.
When Trump travels overseas, the costs rise even higher, as yet more agencies become involved. Dozens of White House staff members may travel with Trump during a weekend to Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster, but that number swells to several hundred on an overseas trip. The administration avoids lengthy motorcades on foreign soil, so Marine helicopters and V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft must be pre-positioned. A backup Air Force One is sent along as the support plane.
According to a Scottish newspaper last summer, the U.S. State Department paid a local car rental agency $1.2 million for vehicles for all the staff who relocated from London, where Trump had met with Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Theresa May, to Scotland, where Trump wanted to play golf at his Turnberry resort before heading to Finland to meet Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
Between that expense and the costs of moving equipment from London to Glasgow and then 55 miles southwest to Turnberry, those two golf days cost taxpayers at least $3 million beyond what they would have spent if Trump had simply stayed in London, according to HuffPost’s analysis.
LEON NEAL VIA GETTY IMAGES
President Donald Trump has spent a total of 61 days on his Florida courses, 58 at Bedminster in New Jersey, one at Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles and two at Trump Turnberry.
One of Trump’s favorite lines of attack against Obama was to point out his frequent golf outings during his presidency.
“I play golf to relax. My company is in great shape. Barack Obama plays golf to escape work while America goes down the drain,” Trump tweeted in December 2011.
“Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf. Worse than Carter,” he wrote three years later.
As he began his own run for the White House, candidate Trump repeatedly promised that golf would never make it onto a President Trump schedule. “I love golf, but if I were in the White House, I don’t think I’d ever see Turnberry again. I don’t think I’d ever see Doral again,” he told a rally audience in February 2016, referring to his course near the Miami airport. “I don’t ever think I’d see anything. I just want to stay in the White House and work my ass off.”
Trump reneged on that pledge within two weeks, when he took his first of 24 trips to date to Mar-a-Lago. He has, according to HuffPost’s analysis, spent a total of 61 days on his Florida courses, 58 at Bedminster in New Jersey, one at Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles and two at Trump Turnberry.
Wednesday is the 853rd day of his presidency, and Trump has spent 174 of them at one of his own golf courses. He spent one additional day golfing: Nov. 5, 2017, at the Kasumigaseki Country Club outside Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. It is the only time thus far that he has played golf at a course he does not own.
That insistence of frequenting his own properties, in fact, has driven his total golf expenses disproportionately higher than Obama’s at the same point in his presidency.
By Obama’s 853rd day in office, he had spent 70 days at a golf course. But 48 of those golf days were at courses on military bases: Joint Base Andrews or Fort Belvoir, both in suburban Washington a short motorcade ride from the White House. All but two of the others were on family vacations to Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard.
And although Hawaii is four times as far from Washington, D.C., as Palm Beach, Obama only went there twice in his first 28 months. In that same time span, Trump has gone to Mar-a-Lago 24 times. While Obama made two trips to Martha’s Vineyard through May of 2011, Trump has already gone to Bedminster 15 times.
The result: Obama racked up out-of-town golf expenses of approximately $30 million compared to Trump’s $102 million.
And Trump’s tab will grow by several million dollars more if he follows through with a golf outing at his resort at Doonbeg, Ireland, before or after his coming trip to London and Normandy in early June. An Ireland stop means travel on Air Force One, C-17s to ferry vehicles and helicopters as well as hundreds of White House, Pentagon and State Department staff that make up the entourage of a foreign visit.
Cognizant of how a foreign visit solely for a golf vacation might look, the White House tried to arrange some type of official meeting with Irish leaders for weeks after it began planning the Doonbeg trip.
But Prime Minister Leo Varadkar’s government, cognizant of Trump’s deep unpopularity in Ireland, was reluctant to agree to the White House request that Varadkar travel to Trump’s private resort on the opposite side of the country from Dublin, said an Irish government source who spoke on condition of anonymity. Tuesday’s announcement of a meeting in Shannon, possibly at Shannon airport — where Air Force One will land — appears to be the compromise location.
“We welcome the announcement of the visit by the U.S. president,” the Irish Embassy said in a statement Tuesday. “Detailed arrangements around the visit will be made public in due course.”
Just as troubling as the amount Trump has spent so far on golf trips is the fact that his visits have been to his own properties — for-profit businesses that put money in his own pocket.
The White House press staff, meanwhile, did not respond to repeated queries about various aspects of this report over a period of weeks.
It is the same strategy that Trump has used throughout his two and a half years in office when it comes to his golfing. While the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama White Houses usually released the names of the president’s golf partners after any given outing, the Trump White House has almost always refused to confirm that Trump even golfed — including on occasions when he has shown up wearing a golf shirt, trousers and ball cap. (The only exceptions have been when Trump has played with a famous person or a member of Congress.)
On March 3, 2018, HuffPost filed a White House pool report from Mar-a-Lago stating: “Pool did ask the White House what the president was doing at his golf course and with whom he was doing it but received no reply.”
This past Sunday, four hours after arriving at Trump’s golf course in Sterling, Virginia, the Washington Blade reporter serving as pool wrote: “No word from the White House on POTUS’ golf partners, nor even confirmation POTUS was, in fact, golfing.”
On some golf days, Trump or his White House have claimed — dubiously — that he is involved in “meetings,” when, in fact, social media posts later show he had been out on the course.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Republican supporters who, like Trump, spent years attacking Obama for his golf outings have suddenly gone silent.
During Obama’s second term, Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso asked the GAO to look at a trip he took that combined a speech in Illinois with a golf weekend in Palm Beach. When the GAO released a report in 2016, Barrasso said in a statement: “President Obama had such little disregard for the taxpayer that he spent millions of dollars to play golf with Tiger Woods. This arrogance is par for the course for the Obama administration.”
Asked about Trump’s far higher golf spending, Barrasso told HuffPost Tuesday: “I haven’t followed that at all.”
Michael Steel, once a top aide to former Republican House Speaker John Boehner, acknowledged that Republicans’ views on presidential golf may not be consistent in recent years. “There’s no question that people’s concerns and criticisms often come with a partisan lens,” he said. “At the same time, I don’t think anyone prefers the president be watching television and tweeting than playing golf … I think it’s healthy for people to relax.”
More troubling to watchdog groups than Trump’s hypocrisy, though, is the self-dealing that occurs whenever Trump travels to his own resorts. On top of the publicity value of a presidential visit, each trip also results in many thousands of taxpayer dollars flowing to Trump resorts for hotel rooms, golf carts and food and drink for Secret Service agents.
Because Trump continues to profit from these businesses — despite a promise he made during the campaign that he would not — a portion of that taxpayer money ends up in Trump’s own pocket. The GAO report found that Mar-a-Lago received approximately $60,000 in just the four visits it studied.
“As Trump promotes his golf courses through taxpayer-financed visits to his clubs, it’s an extra benefit for him that his properties are able to scoop up some taxpayer money directly,” said Public Citizen’s Weissman.
“It’s clear that to Donald Trump, the presidency is just another way to benefit his businesses,” CREW’s Libowitz added. “Because of his refusal to divest from his business empire, Americans must always ask whether his decisions are made primarily with his bank account in mind.”
Igor Bobic and Arthur Delaney contributed reporting.
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