Corrupt at every opportunity, that’s Trump’s motto. He’s so corrupt he has Mike Pence staying at his Irish golf hotel on the far side of Ireland from where Pence needs to be to do the job he’s supposed to be doing. All to put more $$$$$ in Donnie Two-Scoops’s pocket.

Pence spent both Monday and Tuesday nights at Trump International Golf Links & Hotel in Doonbeg, in a small town on Ireland’s southwest coast, returning to the village after meetings with Ireland’s top elected officials.

Southwest coast. Dublin is on the east coast. Yes Ireland is a small country but it’s not so small that that’s a sensible way to do things.

Pence defended that decision — which required him to fly to Dublin and back on Air Force Two — by saying that he wanted to visit Doonbeg so that he could have dinner with his family at Morrissey’s, a pub here owned by a distant cousin.

At our expense. No, that’s not how that’s supposed to work, even if it were true, which it isn’t.

For Pence, the choice to stay in Doonbeg meant about four hours in transit. On Tuesday, he spent one hour in a motorcade from the golf resort to Shannon Airport, then another hour or so on the 140-mile flight to Dublin, then took another motorcade to his meetings. Then he did it all over again, in reverse, that evening.

When he could have stayed at a hotel in Dublin, as a normal person would have.

For Trump, however, that itinerary meant more revenue, as U.S. taxpayers paid for rooms for Pence and his traveling party.

Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, said that Trump himself had suggested that Pence stay at the Trump hotel, after hearing about Pence’s trip.

“It’s like when we went through the trip, it’s like, ‘Well, he’s going to Doonbeg because that’s where the Pence family is from,’ ” Short said Tuesday. “It’s like, ‘Well, you should stay at my place.’ ”

“It wasn’t like a, ‘You must.’ It wasn’t like, ‘You have to,’ ” Short said. He added that the government had negotiated room rates with Trump’s hotel.

It’s still grotesquely corrupt and not how they are supposed to do things. It’s indefensible! “It’s like, ‘Well, you should stay at my place’ ” and spend lots and lots of money at my shitty golf resort hours away from where you’ll be conducting government business. Or, actually, not.

Trump himself visited the Doonbeg golf course earlier this year, during a trip to Europe to commemorate the anniversary of the D-Day landings. Trump skipped Dublin altogether and instead met with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar at an airport close to Doonbeg.

That means twice in one year, American leaders have now visited a quiet village in County Clare and stayed at a once-obscure golf resort that Irish business filings show has not turned a profit in years.

Because Trump is that greedy and that indifferent to the rules.

Representative Ted Lieu:

Hey @VP @mike_pence: You took an oath to the Constitution, not to
@realDonaldTrump. Funneling taxpayer money to @POTUS by staying at this Trump resort is sooooooo corrupt.

Also, I hope you don’t encounter bedbugs. Many people say there are lots of bedbugs at Trump properties.

This isn’t even one of those tacit norms, it’s written down.

The Constitution bars presidents from taking “any other Emolument from the United States” beyond the presidential salary. Trump’s critics have charged that he is violating that provision when his hotels take payments from the federal government.

…

The last vice president to visit Dublin was Joe Biden, in 2016: He stayed at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, according to news coverage.

Considerably cheaper, and didn’t enrich his boss.