Thanks to Donald Trump, the Secret Service is bankrupt
Thanks to Donald Trump’s pilfering and pocketing, the United States Secret Service is already bankrupt. One would think Trump, despite being a career criminal, would least avoid stealing from the people who are there to protect him. But he’s already bilked so much money from the agency, charging it exorbitant monthly rental fees for its command post space and even overcharging it for golf cart rental, that it’s no longer in a position to pay its agents.
That’s the story according to USA Today, which has posted a lengthy expose into just how thoroughly and brazenly Donald Trump has been ripping off the Secret Service since taking office (link). Palmer Report and others have previously postulated that Trump was purposely visiting his own properties nearly every weekend, and purposely splitting his own family across multiple residences, in order to maximize the amount of money he could embezzle from the Secret Service and stick in his own pocket. And now this more or less proves that’s what Trump has been doing.
Although Donald Trump’s family and inner circle is incrementally larger than that of former President Barack Obama, that alone doesn’t come close to explaining why the Secret Service has quickly gone broke under Trump. The agency has forty-two of Trump’s people under protection, which sounds like a lot until you consider that it had thirty-one of Obama’s people under protection, nearly three-quarters as many. This is only happening because Trump is using every method he can think of to bilk the agency. And now the government is trying to figure out how to keep the Secret Service in business.
The situation is already so out of control that, without an act of Congress, more than a hundred Secret Service agents will fail to get paid for the overtime hours that they’ve already put in. Meanwhile we’re still waiting for the Republican Congress to lift a finger to stop Donald Trump from stealing the Secret Service’s money and sticking it in his own pocket.
