Alert – Revealed: The last time Trump was in the White House he made millions by charging Secret Service astronomical fees to stay in his hotels

One night in 2017, the year Donald Trump began his first White House term, his eldest son stayed at the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC.

Donald Trump Junior is one of 14 members of the president-elect’s family who then, as now, is given Secret Service protection, so two more rooms were booked for his bodyguards.

Trump Organisation hotel rooms cost as little as $125 to $175 a night, but the five-star Trump International was no ordinary lodging house. 

The $200 million hotel, described by one critic as ‘a delicious carnival of absurdly over-sized chandeliers and gold-encrusted tat’, had only opened the previous year and Trump wanted a return on his investment.

So the Secret Service had to stump up $1,185 for each room, nearly six times the maximum daily rate of $201 then allowed for government staff.

Fortunately for the Trumps, the Secret Service has the power to ignore this financial restriction to carry out its protective missions.

Donald Trump made millions by charging the Secret Service high fees to stay in his hotels

Rooms were also booked for the bodyguards of Donald Trump Junior, one of the 14 members of Trump’s family given Secret Service protection

The Secret Service had to stump up $1,185 for rooms at the Trump International 

With his second presidency, we can expect a rerun of practices that generated Trump’s web of 500 companies $2.4 billion in revenue in his first four years in the Oval Office

This exercise was conducted on an industrial scale. According to a 2020 budget document, the Trump family took an average of 1,625 trips annually, more than 12 times as many as the Obamas, who took ‘133.3 protected trips per year’.

The report added, tellingly: ‘Much of the Trump family’s known travel [had] been to promote Trump Organisation businesses.’ A Congressional probe later accused Trump of turning his presidency into ‘the world’s greatest get-rich-quick scheme’.

Now, with his second presidency, we can expect a rerun of practices that generated Trump’s web of 500 companies $2.4 billion in revenue in his first four years in the Oval Office – much of it courtesy of taxpayers.

Trump’s return offers a golden opportunity to resume using his hospitality venues to ring up a fortune from taxpayers, lobbyists and foreign emissaries.

As someone who’s spent 36 years exposing Trump’s financial schemes – cheating investors, suppliers, workers, governments and filing false financial statements – I know exactly how he operates.

The big cash prize in a second Trump administration will be filling his hotels, golf resorts and other properties with an amalgam of favour-seekers and government employees, charging astronomical prices for rooms and meals – and even golf cart rentals for security men who follow him on his links.

Last time round, Trump started as he meant to go on. Only minutes after being sworn in, he stopped his motorcade to the White House five blocks short. Along with wife Melania and the rest of the family, he got out of ‘The Beast’, as the presidential limousine is known, and took a turn on the asphalt.

The stopping-off point was the Trump Hotel. While media coverage of this break with tradition failed to explain the significance, every lobbyist, foreign emissary and government contractor got the message: if you’re paying court to The Donald at the White House, make sure you check in to one Pennsylvania Avenue hotel.

The Saudi royal family took the hint and rented two floors, paying the top rate instead of arranging a group booking discount.

The Al Sabah family, who rule Kuwait, moved their annual celebration of the country’s independence from the Four Seasons Hotel to Trump’s new outlet. Supplicants of every stripe, from ambassadors to public servants seeking lifetime sinecures as federal judges and the like, stayed there.

So did five people who were later granted presidential pardons for crimes against the US. One of them, private equity investor Elliott Broidy – convicted of being an unregistered foreign agent after lobbying for the deportation of a Chinese dissident – ran up a bill of more than $15,000. He presumably considered it money well spent.

A US Secret Service agent guards Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida

It was the same story with trade groups looking to curry favour – bodies representing private prisons, payday lenders and energy companies moved their annual conferences to Trump resorts from New York to Florida.

Trump campaign donors were encouraged to hold fundraisers at their hero’s properties, another canny way of funnelling cash into his personal coffers. But few clients have proved a more reliable cash cow than the Secret Service.

USA Today reported in 2017 that Trump’s trips to his Florida members’ club-cum-residence Mar-a-Lago – visits so regular it became known as ‘the southern White House’ – cost the Secret Service $3 million a time.

Prices charged to government employees were so far above federal rules that special credit cards with bumper spending limits were issued. It was a similar story at other Trump Organisation properties. In February 2018 when Eric Trump visited the Trump Hotel Washington (which his father sold four years later after leaving office), he stayed free but his Secret Service detail was charged $895 each for a pair of rooms.

The scale of Trump’s utilisation of the bodyguard expense account led House Democrats, in a report last month, to argue that he ‘turned the US Secret Service into a cash machine for his personal enrichment’. Many felt such transactions violated a Constitutional prohibition on presidents receiving emoluments from certain people, governments and foreign interests.

But when citizens and interest groups tried to bring civil actions, courts ruled they lacked the authority to pursue their claims.

Finding loopholes he can push fortunes through has been a Trump specialty since long before 1988, when I became one of the first to write that he might one day become president.

The $2.4 billion Trump collected at his businesses between 2017 and 2020 is only part of his haul.

Even after Joe Biden became president, the federal government resisted making Trump-era records available.

For two years, the Biden White House refused my requests for records of whether Trump reimbursed the government for personal expenses, such as groceries, initially paid for by taxpayers. 

Biden’s administration still won’t say why it shields Trump from accountability – a strange stance for an outgoing oppositional administration.

Sailing close to the limits of the law has got Trump into trouble in the past. He is currently at the wrong end of four criminal lawsuits. He has repeatedly said his first act when he takes power in January will be to sack his bete noir, Special Counsel Jack Smith, whose office began winding down the day after Tuesday’s election.

Smith is at the helm of Trump’s two federal criminal cases, one alleging he tried to overthrow the government when he sent a violent mob to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and the other that he stole thousands of pages of secret documents, some of which prosecutors have shown he improperly shared.

The fate of two state-level prosecutions – for financial fraud in New York and election fraud in Georgia – is less certain. 

In his New York case, in which a jury found him guilty on all 34 counts, any other defendant would be sure to get a jail sentence, especially for attacking the proceedings as rigged and making threats that forced the judge to need round-the-clock protection.

But because he is now president-elect, a planned November 26 sentencing hearing may not even take place, or – if it does – sentencing may be delayed until 2029 when he leaves office. His trial in Georgia for election fraud, where some of the 19 defendants have confessed guilt, may be postponed or dismissed.

Trump could issue a self-pardon for his federal offences, but most legal scholars believe that would be invalid and seen as a test of integrity for the Supreme Court, three of whose nine members he appointed. But he has no pardon power in the state cases, only the hope that the Supreme Court will block the prosecutions.

Trump’s trips to his Florida members’ club-cum-residence Mar-a-Lago – visits so regular it became known as ‘the southern White House’ – reportedly cost the Secret Service $3 million a time

The fate of Trump’s two state-level prosecutions – for financial fraud in New York and election fraud in Georgia – is uncertain

Meanwhile, Trump will seek to dismiss his civil cases for sexual harassment, slander, non-payment and other issues, or to put them on hold until he leaves office.

Trump presents himself as a modern Midas. But as I detailed in my 2016 book, The Making Of Donald Trump, he’s merely a cash extractor. He borrows money to get control of enterprises, shaves multi-million-dollar fees off the top for himself, then drains businesses of cash until they collapse.

His casino company went through four bankruptcies when he was in charge, and two more after he was paid to go away. He departed with at least $83 million, while others collected just pennies on what they were owed.

Money flows through his small hands like water, which explains why he is always hunting for the next grift. The Art Of The Deal, the 1987 book that created his mogul image, is the tale of one fraud after another. His second term will add even more to his riches – but at whose expense?

• David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is a Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches law, journalism and public policy.