Discount for diplomats
God damn. Worse again. The State Department was advertising Mar-a-Lago. Yes that’s right: the State Department was advertising Mar-a-Lago.
The State Department has removed a blog post that touted President Donald Trump’s personally owned private Florida club, Mar-a-Lago. The post was available to all embassies through Share America, a State Department program for US embassies.
“The intention of the article was to inform the public about where the President has been hosting world leaders,” a small message reads on the Share America website. “We regret any misperception and have removed the post”
The story is still up on the US Embassy in London’s website, but officials say the post is expected to be removed.
Yes it is. I clicked on that link in a hurry before they took it down, and there it is. Note the url: https://uk.usembassy.gov/mar-lago-winter-white-house/
Embassy DOTGOV slash MAR-LAGO-WINTER-WHITE-HOUSE.
Here’s what the STATE DEPARTMENT’S EMBASSY WEBSITE says about Trump’s expensive golf resort:
Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s Florida estate, has become well known as the president frequently travels there to work or host foreign leaders.
The first meeting between Trump and President Xi Jinping of China will take place April 6–7 at Mar-a-Lago, which is located at the heart of Florida’s Palm Beach community.
Trump is not the first president to have access to Mar-a-Lago as a Florida retreat, but he is the first one to use it. By visiting this “winter White House,” Trump is belatedly fulfilling the dream of Mar-a-Lago’s original owner and designer.
When socialite and cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post built Mar-a-Lago — Spanish for “Sea to Lake” — in 1927, she spared no expense. The 114-room mansion sits on 8 hectares of land, with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and an inland waterway on the other.
Upon her death in 1973, she willed the estate to the U.S. government, intending it to be used as a winter White House for the U.S. president to entertain visiting foreign dignitaries.
Read the full story at ShareAmerica !
Ethics watchdogs and Democratic groups have been closely eyeing Trump’s ability to benefit his bottom line through the presidency and this blog post has some questioning whether the government is now helping publicize the property.
Questioning? I think they can skip the questioning. Of course it damn well is. This isn’t like writing a little piece about Hyannisport or the Crawford ranch, this is a very expensive for profit resort hotel open to the public. It’s disgusting that the State Department is promoting it.
Both Norm Eisen, former President Barack Obama’s ethics czar, and Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, said the blog post was a violation of federal law that restricts aspects of the government promoting a private business that benefits their superior, the president.
“This is outrageous, more exploitation of public office for Trump’s personal gain,” Eisen said. “Using the government’s megaphone to promote Mar-a-Lago” is like when Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump aide, urged people during a television interview to buy Ivanka Trump’s clothing line.
The man is scum.
And it keeps going on and on and on. The president is responsible for enforcing the laws of the country; instead, he insists on breaking them over and over again.
Can you imagine the outrage, the horror, the righteous indignation if this had been Hillary? The special prosecutor would already be at work, the impeachment papers would already be prepped and ready, the press would be drooling and sharpening their swords, and Fox News would be calling for blood…and getting it.
How many times does he have to violate ethics laws before someone acts on it? (Rhetorical question – no reason to speculate. The Republican Congress will build a dossier, and when they get tired of him, they’ll bring it out into open view. That will be when they begin to perceive him as a threat to their own political futures, and not one minute before, I’m sure).
So if we get out of this alive is there any possibility that we can get the feds to make sure ethics law violations are enforced by someone other than Congress/POTUS?
iknklast: I’m not so sure about your conclusion any longer; I was similarly worried about such Machiavellian machinations as soon as the man was elected, of course, but it presupposes a unified Republican congress that is using the White House as both cover and foil to push through their agenda. What we’ve seen thus far, however, is a splintered Republican party that can’t pass bills they were able to pass just six months ago, themselves being used as cover and foil for a White House that’s more comfortable issuing executive orders than signing bills into law.
In short, I’m not convinced the Republicans *could* impeach Trump—they’re too split between careerists, dyed-in-the-wool Libertarian dumbasses, Christian fundamentalists, and science-denying oilmen. That coalition is effective in opposition, but is proving unworkable in government. About the only thing they did, and barely at that, was successfully steal Obama’s final supreme court nomination…and that was a plan enacted and largely carried out before the election, and it took a party-line vote in the Senate to get it done. The House is a very different beast.
More and more, I’m convinced the only thing that will roust both Trump and the Republicans in Congress is the voters. And that is not nearly as comforting a thought as it should be for a democracy.
Seth, I agree that Republicans do much better when they have a common enemy (a Democratic president) they can unite behind. The question is, will there come a point where Trump will become that common enemy? I don’t know, since my crystal ball has never worked right, but if not, it could result in a turn around in the fortunes of the Republicans, at least temporarily.
The trouble is, when that happens (for instance, after Dubya Bush), Democrats aren’t able to put through the positive strong policies that might allow them to hold on because no one wants to lose them. And they don’t work to get rid of the horrible policies (such as partisan redistricting and the electoral college) that allow the rural, white minority to dictate to everyone else in the country how things are to be. Democrats are too hung up in neo-liberal thought to move far enough to the left; they are afraid of moving left for fear the people would hate them. But if they did, and brought about greater economic equality and improved the life situation for everyone, it might eventually make a difference in how people sneer at the “L word”. People might realize that things are better when everyone is better off, not just when a few billionaires are better off.