The airport packed them a lunch
The count is now up to four times military personnel have stayed at Trump’s golf dump 50 miles south of Prestwick Airport.
The four trips — uncovered through interviews with people present, records of expenditures and social media postings — date back to at least September 2018 and continued through at least this past June. They include at least one instance in which a crew member said a nearby airport arranged for rides and lunches to and from the luxury waterside retreat. All the flights were shuttling crews between the United States and the Middle East, and at least three of them of them were divisions of the Air National Guard. In total, over 60 service members stayed at the posh property on these stopovers.
Democrats are trying to get a bill passed to prevent any more of this corruption. A normal president wouldn’t need a law forcing him to stop making the military stay at his hotels so that he can pocket more cash, but Child Trump isn’t a normal anything, let alone president.
The push to outlaw the practice will join a growing list of conflict-of-interest concerns that Democrats want to highlight in the coming months as House leaders decide whether to begin formal impeachment proceedings against the president. The overnight stops at Turnberry have already sparked a broader House Oversight Committee investigation of military spending at and around Trump properties. The Air Force over the weekend also launched a worldwide review of how it chooses lodging on overnight layovers. A legislative battle could be next.
There shouldn’t be any battle. Nobody should be defending this bullshit.
You have to feel sorry for the service members in this story. Stuffed into one of Trump’s godawful hotel cum golf courses, completely out of place and forced to eat what I will bet is overpriced and crappy food. I heard they couldn’t afford the food there which made me wonder if service members even carry money/credit cards when on deployment? Either way, you know that every penny they spend over their per diem is not reimbursed. Why this is not a bigger scandal, I can’t understand.
There are many things the Trump administration has done that are so terrible, some days I can barely believe it; kids in cages, hurricane refugees turned away at ports and called gang members, US citizens abandoned to their fate because the moron-in-chief doesn’t recognize them as Americans to name but a few. But this story is truly mind-boggling in its utter disregard for even the appearance of propriety.
When I was a fed, they used to regularly impose new rules on travel, each more intrusive and stupid than the last. It was frustrating, often inane and sometimes left me out of pocket. But I understood at least that no matter how silly the rules were, the intent behind them was that Government travel not be a free vacation or provide some other material benefit to employees not related to their official duties. This kind of blatant disregard for any of the rules, and the Republicans’ failure to notice should make my blood boil but these days it just leads to a kind of despair, because there’s nothing I can do about it.
And there’s the pointless 50 mile drive just to get there, too, passing countless perfectly suitable hotels along the way, and then the one to get back the next day.
If that one you put up as a picture on the other post is along the way, I think I would call it more than just perfectly suitable, from the look of it, anyway. It looked like a wonderful place to stay.