President Donald Trump’s reluctance to tweet from anything but a gold-plated toilet, as well as First Lady Melania Trump’s reluctance to be in the same room as him, have already left the Secret Service struggling to pay its agents, according to an exclusive report in USA Today. The “expanded protective mission” of not only following Trump around on the golf course, but of following his family around on their many trips and guarding their many gaudy residences, is reportedly depleting the agency’s coffers, with more than 1,000 agents reaching their overtime allowance caps seven months into Trump’s administration. (Under Trump, 42 people receive Secret Service protection, up from 31 under former President Obama.)
“The president has a large family, and our responsibility is required in law,’’ Secret Service Director Randolph “Tex” Alles tells USA Today. “I can’t change that. I have no flexibility.’’ Alles is reportedly petitioning lawmakers to raise the salary and overtime caps for agents from $160,000 a year to $187,000 a year, but even that won’t fully pay for the mountain of overtime agents have already amassed. Concerns about the cost of protecting the Trumps began almost immediately, with a New York Times article from April saying that the agency’s New York office has been especially hard hit. It’s not just the Secret Service that’s driving itself to bankruptcy saving Trump money on private security, either: The sheriff’s department in Palm Beach County, Florida, home of Mar-A-Lago, says it spends $60,000 a day in overtime when Trump comes to town, according to the NYT. But it’s all worth it, we guess, knowing that Trump isn’t smearing self-tanner all over the “real dump” that has served as home to 44 Presidents of the United States of America before him.
Trump most recently took at 17-day golf vacation, twice as long as the vacation Obama took in his first year of office that Trump just couldn’t help whining about on Twitter. The Nectarine Nostradamus complained frequently about Obama taking vacations and working trips with his family during Obama’s presidency, and promised that ”I don’t think we’ll be very big on vacations” on the campaign trail. He, of course, broke this promise immediately, and by The Washington Post’s calculations will have taken 53 leisure days by the end of August 2017, compared to 15 for Obama through August 2009.