Donald Trump’s fixation on his White House ballroom project is infamous for many reasons, but one of the most prominent is the president’s broken promise: He repeatedly bragged that the public would not have to pay for the vanity project, and there is ample evidence that these assurances were untrue.
Unfortunately, this is apparently not the only example of this kind. The Atlantic reported:
The path connecting the White House Residence to the Oval Office has long been paved with Tennessee flagstone. Every president since Harry Truman has made the 45-second commute without complaint, all the way up to Donald Trump. The brown stone wouldn’t be enough. Instead, Trump wanted polished African granite, carved in Italy, with a flamed stripe – slightly raised to prevent slipping – in the center. As workers tore up the flagstone in March, a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the improvements. “Paid by me,” he replied.
But that wasn’t true.
The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer obtained budget documents from the National Park Service (which were not independently verified by MS NOW) that reportedly show that replacing the walkway cost taxpayers nearly $700,000. The same report added that this is now also “part of a $1.3 million project that includes repairing adjacent stone and masonry and providing new hardware for nearby doors.”
This comes as the park service spends nearly $350,000 to, as The Atlantic put it, “remove and replace the stucco on the colonnade wall, a project that paved the way for Trump to install gold frames and plaques that mock some of his predecessors.”
Broadly speaking, this story consists of two main elements. The first is obviously the significance of the gap between Trump’s claims and the truth: the more the Republican assures the public that they will not be held responsible for his various fixations, the more we learn that Americans are actually paying for many of his projects.
The second notable aspect is the extent to which the White House is virtually looting the National Park Service.
About a month ago, the New York Times reported, citing a federal contract database, that the government had diverted at least $67 million in park entrance fees to fund Trump’s renovation projects in and around the nation’s capital. A Washington Post report published two weeks later put the total at nearly $78 million.
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Steve Benen
Steve Benen is producer of “The Rachel Maddow Show,” editor of MaddowBlog and political contributor to MS NOW. He is also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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