House GOP Uses Retreat as Opportunity to Funnel Money to Trump: Report
Donald Trump won’t be back in the White House until January, but his allies are already reviving their first-term practice of hosting expensive events at Trump-owned properties.
According to Punchbowl News, this year’s House Republican retreat will take place at the president-elect’s Doral golf resort in Miami. Prices for rooms at the hotel range from several hundred dollars a night, to over $8,000 a night to book the Presidential Suite. There are currently 220 Republican representatives in the GOP caucus, and while not all of them will attend, Trump’s hotel can expect to charge a hefty price tag to keep them housed, fed, and entertained for the multi-day retreat.
It’s not the first time a major GOP retreat has been held at Trump Doral. A 2018 GOP meeting brought in $630,000 in revenue for Trump’s company, according to a review of financial records by The Washington Post. In 2019, the Republican National Committee held its winter meetings at Doral. According to an analysis of campaign finance disclosures by CREW, the RNC and 13 state Republican committees involved in the event spent over $500,000 on the event, with the largest sum being $491,000 paid by the RNC for rental of the property and catering.
During Trump’s first term, the money Republican groups and even foreign nations poured into his business ventures as a private citizen — from which he’s theoretically supposed to be divested during his time in office — became a central point of ethics scrutiny.
In January of this year, House Democrats released evidence showing that 20 foreign governments spent over $7.8 million at Trump’s various properties, one of the most prominent being the former Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C.
A separate 2020 analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics found that various conservative political groups and PACs spent over $22 million at Trump’s properties between 2015 and 2020. This includes more than 14.8 million spent by Trump’s Political Action Committee “Donald J. Trump for President,” and $2.6 million by the RNC.
The lucrative deals essentially funneled money from various political entities — including Trump’s own campaign apparatus — into the president-elect’s private coffers. While his properties remained popular venues during his hiatus from elected office, his return to power will likely reopen the floodgates of interested parties looking to ingratiate themselves to the president by patronizing his properties.
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