BREAKING: Trump CAUGHT pressuring Secret Service agents to eat his golf club’s HOT DOGS – then sticking TAXPAYERS with the bill!
Donald Trump apparently loves the hot dogs at his Virginia golf club so much that he insists the Secret Service agents protecting him get them too. And then his own golf club charges the Secret Service for the food.
That’s the bizarre picture painted by a new Forbes investigation into Trump’s golfing habits – including his peculiar obsession with the hot dogs served at the snack stand beside the 11th hole at Trump National Golf Club outside Washington.
“He has this weird, very odd pride about how good the hot dogs are,” a former club employee told Forbes.
According to the employee, Trump will summon the chef and order hot dogs for everybody around him – including the Secret Service agents assigned to protect him. And we’re not talking about an agent or two.
There can be as many as 30 (!) golf carts carrying Secret Service personnel following Trump around the course, with the kitchen sometimes preparing as many as 50 hot dogs.
But Trump doesn’t just want to hand them out. According to the former employee, he actually wants to see the agents getting them. “It got to the point where we had to start a Secret Service account at the club so that he could see them getting the hot dogs,” the employee said.
Why an account? Because federal ethics rules restrict Secret Service agents from simply accepting gifts from the people they protect. So Trump’s club is obliged to charge the agency for the food, whether the agents want it or not.
This means Trump gets to play the generous host dispensing his idea of haute cuisine, while the bill ultimately goes to – you guessed it – the American taxpayer. Us.
And remember this is all happening at Trump’s own golf clubs, where he spends, er, quite a bit of time. Statistics reveal that Trump has spent time at one of his golf properties on roughly 165 of the approximately 600 days since he returned to the White House, totaling more than 1,400 hours at properties he owns.
The White House argues that the visits aren’t vacations, per se, noting that Trump also holds meetings and attends political events at his clubs. But wherever the president goes, the Secret Service has to go too – and protecting him costs money. A lot.
The hot dogs themselves probably aren’t going to break the federal budget. But there’s something almost comically ironic about a billionaire president standing on his own golf course, ordering the government employees protecting him to try his favorite hot dogs – and then having his own business send their employer the check.
Apparently the only thing Trump likes more than his golf club’s hot dogs is not paying for them himself.