House GOP holds retreat at a Trump property, a windfall to president’s resort

Rule of Law

House GOP holds retreat at a Trump property, a windfall to president’s resort

Holding the retreat at a Trump property threatens to ignite the same kind of criticism that dogged Trump’s first term: that he has sought to personally profit from his public position.

Congressional Republicans are hashing out President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda this week at the Miami-area golf resort that bears his name, offering a windfall for the once-underperforming property owned by a president who spent his first term battling criticism that he used his political position to enrich himself.

House GOP leaders are working on a plan that Speaker Mike Johnson (Louisiana) has said he hopes will result in the passage of Trump’s agenda by Memorial Day. Trump spoke with attendees there Monday evening before returning to Washington.

But regardless of how the budget talks go, the biggest immediate beneficiary of the discussion will probably be Trump National Doral Golf Club, which faced steep declines in revenue six years ago. This year marks the first time that House Republicans have spent money directly on a venue owned by the president. The vast majority of the 218-member GOP conference is attending the three-day event, along with a smattering of senior staff members, spouses and children.

Holding the congressional retreat at a Trump property threatens to ignite the same kind of criticism that dogged Trump’s first term: that he has sought to personally profit from his public position in part by maneuvering elected officials, Secret Service agents and others in his orbit to stay at his properties, at times on the taxpayers’ dime. Trump’s critics have long said doing so is a violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which aims to ensure that the public interest overrides personal gain.

“Even if the emoluments clauses, domestic and foreign, are not formally implicated, it doesn’t mean that the animating concerns that the framers [of the Constitution] had aren’t there,” said Praveen Fernandes, a vice president at the Constitutional Accountability Center. “The framers in this provision were primarily concerned about corruption. It’s one of the Constitution’s most important anti-corruption provisions.”

Fernandes said it was also worrisome that a larger swath of government officials was wading onto constitutionally shaky ground.

“I think anytime we have large institutions, whether it’s a political party, whether it’s one body of Congress, that doesn’t take anti-corruption seriously, I think it’s always concerning,” he added.

Full financial records for the trip were not immediately available. The annual GOP retreat averaged a cost of about $1 million every year it was held between 2017 and 2023, according to tax filings by the Congressional Institute, the corporate-backed nonprofit that has organized the event for decades. The 2023 event hosted at the Greenbrier luxury resort in West Virginia, the most recent for which finances have been publicly disclosed, cost almost $1.3 million.

Not every dollar goes toward the host site, as the group pays for travel costs and other incidental fees for lawmakers getting to and from the event. The three-day event used to be held at sites relatively close to D.C., such as Baltimore or Maryland’s Eastern Shore, but the focus in recent years has been Florida, notably resorts outside Jacksonville and Orlando.

The White House declined to comment for this story. A White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss planning said organizers worked to limit the number of staff members who stayed on Trump’s property to essential personnel, though the White House doesn’t dictate travel arrangements for the U.S. Secret Service. The rates paid for rooms are within the bounds of federal travel per diem rates, the official said.

The gathering of House Republicans who arrived over the weekend made no public gripes about staying at the president’s hotel.

On Monday, with temperatures in Doral, Florida, in the mid-70s, House Republicans wearing golf polos milled about Trump’s property, a sprawling campus of villas studded with palm trees, yellow-striped umbrellas and fountains with statues of Roman guards. Staff members distributed water bottles and coffee cups with “Trump” logos. Country music hits such as “Chicken Fried” blared while Republicans including Johnson, Rep. Tim Burchett (Tennessee) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia) mingled in a large ballroom.

“Tell me that being here in Doral doesn’t beat the heck out of being in Washington, D.C., in January,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (Florida) said, opening the Monday event with the president.

Presidential travel under any administration can be a temporary bubble of an economic stimulus, bolstering wherever the leader of the free world happens to be. A small army of Secret Service agents, government officials and media members travels wherever the president goes. For security purposes, Secret Service agents must stay within quick reach of the president, and they and other staff members routinely travel to sites in advance to identify and mitigate threats or just iron out logistics.

In his first term, Trump stayed at his properties more than 500 times, according to the House Oversight Committee, a practice that routinely drew the rebuke of agencies and government watchdogs.

For example, his former D.C. hotel charged the Secret Service 300 percent or more above standard government rates on several occasions, according to an Oversight Committee report released in 2022. The Trump campaign then derided the move as an effort by Democrats to dredge up a long-dead issue for political expediency.

“The exorbitant rates charged to the Secret Service and agents’ frequent stays at Trump-owned properties raise significant concerns about the former president’s self-dealing and may have resulted in a taxpayer-funded windfall for former president Trump’s struggling businesses,” then-Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-New York) wrote to the Secret Service director in 2022.

Critics also grew concerned that foreign interests tried to curry favor with Trump via his hotels. Lobbyists representing the Saudi government reserved an estimated 500 nights’ worth of rooms at a hotel in Washington that Trump owned at the time, shortly after his first inauguration. During that period, the average nightly rate at the hotel was $768.

So far in Trump’s second term, he spent most of inauguration week in Washington, then stayed at his Las Vegas property on Friday and at the resort in Doral on Saturday and Sunday nights. He spent much of the transition period at his private Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, which has been dubbed “the Winter White House.”

Conservative critics have questioned the propriety of official funds going to Democratic retreats, setting up an almost regular debate over the ethics of lobbyists or taxpayers funding these off-campus outings.

Democrats have continued holding retreats in relatively nearby locations such as Philadelphia and Baltimore, eschewing the GOP’s preferred practice of pricey airfare to warm-weather destinations in winter. The Democrats will decamp in mid-March to a Northern Virginia resort 35 miles west of the Capitol, the same destination as last year’s gathering.

For their 2024 retreat, the official Democratic caucus organ shelled out almost $140,000 to cover the cost of food, beverages and technology equipment rentals for the event, according to congressional records. Lawmakers paid out of their individual accounts to cover travel and lodging.