Day 666: Report: Melania spent the equivalent of a congressman’s annual salary on hotels during a non-overnight trip to Toronto

“Drain the swamp!” Donald Trump constantly yells at rallies. In theory, that would include the cessation of wasteful spending, but it hasn’t worked out that way. As Trump’s cabinet has been constantly dinged for outlandish spending on everything from their office furniture to flying private planes around the world, it appears his wife is apt to waste taxpayer money too.

The average congressman makes $174,000 annually. That happens to be the exact figure that Melania Trump incurred in hotel bills during a non-overnight trip to Toronto in September 2017.

How Trump and her staff ran up nearly $200,000 in hotel bills for a 12-hour trip is unclear (the total was nearly double the $95,050 bill for a hotel in Cairo, Egypt, where she stopped for a day last month during a trip to Africa). All six charges for the first lady’s Toronto hotel bills were paid to “miscellaneous foreign awardees” rather than a specific hotel. These links will take you to the documents for each amount, rounded here to the nearest thousand:

Hotel rooms: $35,000

Hotel rooms: $12,000

Hotel rooms: $19,000

Hotel rooms: $49,000

Hotel rooms: $43,000

Hotel rooms: $16,000

In addition, Melania exorbitantly spent more taxpayer dollars on travel expenses in Toronto.

Three separate transportation charges for the same trip came to $21,000: one for $13,000, one for $5,000 and one for $3,000.

By way of comparison, that’s more than Michelle Obama spent on transportation costs over a 10-day period during a 2009 trip to Copenhagen.

Apparently “drain the swamp” doesn’t apply to anyone in the Trump family, and it is more theoretical than anything else.

666 days in, 796 to go

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